If you always have your phone at hand and find it hard to put it down, you’re not alone. Surveys reveal that we interact with our phones an average of 85 times a day, even in the middle of the night when we wake up. Ninety-one percent of people admit they never leave home without their phone, and 46% say they couldn’t live without it.
However, a group of researchers from the University of Texas has bad news for all those people: simply having their smartphone nearby affects their intelligence.
The mere presence of the mobile phone affects our cognitive capacity
Psychologists recruited nearly 800 people, who completed a series of tasks designed to assess their cognitive ability. In one of these tasks, participants had to solve math problems while memorizing random letters, a test to assess their ability to keep track of relevant information while engaged in a complex cognitive task.
In another test, participants viewed a set of images that formed an incomplete pattern and had to choose the image that best completed the pattern. This task assessed “fluid intelligence” – that is, the ability to solve novel problems.
Is it possible that the mere presence of a smartphone can influence our cognitive abilities to the point of affecting our performance?
To answer this question, the researchers divided the subjects into three groups: one placed their smartphone directly in front of them on the table; others kept it in their pocket or purse; and a third left it in the adjacent room. However, in all cases, the smartphones had their alerts turned off so that notifications wouldn’t interrupt them while they were performing the tests.
The results were surprising: people who took the tests while their phones were in another room scored the highest, followed by those who kept their smartphones in their pockets or purses. The worst performers were those who had their phones in plain sight.
Psychologists explain that it involves a small but significant decline in cognitive ability that can be compared to the state we experience the day after a sleepless night.
The implications of this study are immense, as we constantly have our phones in our hands, which could negatively affect our ability to think clearly, solve problems creatively, and even capture details in our surroundings.
How does your smartphone affect your intelligence?
The cost of a mobile phone is linked to its benefits. The immense value a smartphone offers is that it allows us to connect with the world, storing information relevant to many aspects of our daily lives. That is precisely its main “problem.”
We’re hardwired to automatically pay attention to things that are important to us, even when we’re immersed in something else. That’s why, even if we’re deep in conversation at a party, if someone mentions our name across the room, we’ll listen and turn our heads. It’s also why we tend to glance at our cell phone every now and then to check for a message, even if it hasn’t rang or vibrated.
This research suggests that the presence of our phones constantly attracts our attention, exerting a kind of gravitational pull, as our brains have categorized it as something important that we should keep under our radar at all times. The problem is that blocking the temptation to check our phones or ignoring them comes at a high cognitive cost.
In practice, activating the brain’s inhibitory networks – those we need to avoid paying attention to our phone – means that we’re allocating part of our cognitive resources to a “background task.” To better understand what happens in our brain, we can imagine that a computer must run many tasks in the background and only one in the foreground, which is the program we’re using. These background tasks will ultimately impact the computer’s capacity, limit its speed, and may even cause it to crash.
Basically, activating the brain’s inhibition network to ignore the phone would be a background task that affects the cognitive tasks we perform in the foreground.
Is there a solution?
The good news is that the solution is very simple: just detach yourself from your phone for a bit to avoid fueling a dependency. If you train your brain to understand that your phone isn’t that important, it won’t pay obsessive attention to it.
How to do it?
Simply put it away when you don’t need it. It’s one thing to use your smartphone, and another to let it take over your life. There’s no need to carry your phone everywhere, always. Your brain will thank you if you let it rest in another room from time to time. And your IQ will increase a few points.
Reference:
Ward, A.F. et. Al. (2017) Brain Drain: The Mere Presence of One’s Own Smartphone Reduces Available Cognitive Capacity. Journal of the Association for Consumer Research; 2 (2): 140-156.
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