IIf you remember a time before you carried a tiny computer around in your pocket, you might be wondering what happened to the parts of your brain that once stored skills like reading cards or remembering phone numbers. Nowadays it is generally assumed that society’s collective dependence on technological “crutches” (eg the iPhone) makes people less intelligent than we were before smartphones – but do smartphones really make us dumber? Not so, say experts.

According to an article published in Nature human behavior, there is no evidence that smartphones and other digital technologies affect our cognitive abilities. On the contrary, it seems like they complement our thinking by allowing us to do more complex tasks and making room in our brains to store different types of information than we used to need to store in our minds.

“We basically looked at the data and came to the conclusion that it doesn’t really show that your smartphone is making you stupid,” said Anthony Chemero, PhD, behavioral expert at the University of Cincinnati and one of the three authors on the study. “Instead, it shows that people just think differently – they are intelligent in different ways.”

Previous research linking intelligent technology to decreased cognition has been flawed, explains Dr. Chemero. “There are some scientific studies of human performance with and without smartphones, and they show that people who have their smartphones on hand are less capable of cognitively demanding tasks,” he says. “And [my co-authors and I] argue that this doesn’t really show that your phone is making you less intelligent; Instead, it shows that you are more interested in your phone than in a difficult, annoying, and boring task. “

“[The data] doesn’t really show that your smartphone is making you stupid … it shows that people just think differently – they are intelligent in different ways. ”—Anthony Chemero, PhD

When you think about it, it makes a lot of sense. My smartphone doesn’t make me any less competent as an author; however, it does offer me something that is a lot more fun and easier to do with my time than to write. “It’s more of a motivation problem than an intelligence problem,” says Dr. Chemero. While smartphones could sabotage ours Desire Participating in activities that we find challenging, boring, or otherwise unattractive will hinder our ability to participate.

Sure, some skills that most people once possessed, such as reading cards, may now be lost. But it is not that we leave the space in our brain vacated by machines empty; Instead, we store information that is more relevant or interesting to us. Like Dr. Chemero points out, it doesn’t make much sense to lament the loss of our ability to navigate with a paper map instead of a GPS system. Your grandparents or great-grandparents may have learned to milk a cow, but just because you can’t now doesn’t mean you are less intelligent than previous generations; this ability is simply not universally necessary in 2021, as it was perhaps 100 years ago. “Given what people do with their lives today, their ability to remember things like the fifteen-digit division just isn’t very relevant,” he says. “And [smart technology] can enable us to do other things with this mental energy. “

In other words, technology allows us to outsource this long department (for example) so that the mental energy we would otherwise spend on it can solve even more complex problems. So if you feel guilty about using your calculator to properly split a restaurant check – don’t do it! As a result, your brain doesn’t atrophy; it’s just learning other, more relevant skills.

With this, Dr. Chemero make it clear that he and his co-authors are not arguing that smartphones and other modern technologies are good for health. People can become addicted to their phones and / or have difficulty regulating their use, and they can (and often are) used for negative purposes such as bullying. (There is also substantial evidence linking blue light from phone and television use to skin damage and disturbed sleep patterns.) Also, he says, there are ethical issues surrounding artificial intelligence. But while our addiction to smartphones can have psychological and social consequences, there are not necessarily cognitive ones. “Our phones don’t make us dumber,” he says.

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