The Presence of One’s Own Smartphone Reduces Available Cognitive Capacity

Bards pre-literate-times in Greece purportedly could recite Homer&#x27;s Odyssey themselves after one hearing. Writing destroyed that all. (Maybe I don&#x27;t have a citation right off, but I&#x27;ve read that on the web or heard it in some college class years ago ... in any case, ability to retain heard information has likely declined since then). But ... few people complain about how books corrupt our memory.<p>So we&#x27;re the first generation shifting cognitive burden of some kinds of memory (all those phone numbers) elsewhere. I welcome it. My wife hates it, but she likes the books. In a couple of generations it all will be irrelevant.

I want to learn Japanese.<p>3 months ago I changed my phone&#x27;s language to Japanese. Everything is Japanese - maps, services, apps that read from the default phone language.<p>Oddly enough, instead of learning Japanese, I just use my phone less.

I lost mine about six months ago and I haven&#x27;t replaced it. First couple months I noticed I got VERY irritable when I got a momentary flash of boredom, especially waiting in line in stores, etc. Figured that might&#x27;ve been a budding mental issue, and decided to work on my patience and expectation-setting as a result.<p>This has been part of a larger life exercise in practicing general moment-to-moment mindfullness, and I think I&#x27;m going to keep this up for a while and see how long I can go without a smartphone before people start asking me questions at work. So far, so good.<p>It&#x27;s like I&#x27;ve withdrawn from a drug and some of my attention is back under my control, where my mind can better keep its peace. I guess I didn&#x27;t exercise proper discipline when I had the phone.

I am quite skeptical of the results of this paper. The claims are very strong, but the paper was published in &quot;Journal of the Association for Consumer Research&quot;. I would AT LEAST expect it to be published in a journal related to cognitive sciences (even low-impact cognitive science journals would be fine), this seems like a safety net journal that is not really related to any of that..<p>Anyway, reading through the paper, there are a few methodological issues that I believe severely weaken the claims made by the authors.<p>1. Even though the claims made specifically towards phones, there was no &quot;control&quot; item situation.<p>2. Participants were explicitly drawn to the item in 2 out of 3 conditions right before the task.<p>3. Experiment 1 does not randomize on task (OSpan and RSPM) order.<p>4. Item (phone) dependency tests were based on self-reporting. Why not some more objective measure like in a neutral situation, how many times does the participant take the phone out of their pockets to check it?<p>5. As far as I can tell, there is no control for differences in their population &amp; their measure of phone dependency (ie, is phone dependency uncorrelated to factors like age?)<p>but really, the killer finding is: there is a (non-linear) interaction effect between phone dependence and phone location. In the phone on desk condition, there is a negative correlation between phone dependence and performance on the OSpan (working memory) task (which is the result the abstract talks about), but in the phone&#x2F;bag AND other room condition, there is a POSITIVE correlation between phone dependence and performance on the OSpan test.<p>So based on these results, I can make the claim that we should use our phone MORE to increase our cognitive capacity. We should become more dependent on them. We just need to remember to put them away, out of sight, rather than leave them on the table nearby.<p>I would put as much trust in the claim above as the original claim by the paper&#x27;s authors.<p>EDIT: continuous grammar improvements

I know that I&#x27;m guilty of this - just voluntarily putting my phone in the other room causes withdrawal-like anxiety, followed by a greater sense of awareness.<p>Maybe future generations will see our management of information devices as backwards and unhealthy once we learn more about the human brain, the same way we treat smoking, child-rearing, and daily routines of yesterday as horrifyingly detrimental.

A simple demonstration of the inefficiency of task switching. Time yourself writing the letters of the alphabet in order from a to z followed by the numbers 1-26. Then try the same task only instead switching from numbers to letters, like this a,1,b,2,c,3, etc. Compare the two times. They should be the same, but the second version takes much more time for most people. It seems that whether you sit next to a giant bookshelf or put your phone in your pocket and occasionally think of the information either contains the effect on the efficiency of whatever you were trying to process would be the same.

Mine broke last week. I haven&#x27;t replaced it and almost don&#x27;t intend to because I do feel more alert now. Though the feeling is subsiding, so perhaps it&#x27;s a temporary thing.<p>I wonder in the study, is the control group smartphone users temporarily deprived of the phones, or non-smartphone users. Could make a big difference.

Mental exercise:<p>Does smartphone deprivation return cognitive capacity to baseline or cause people to exceed it? Phone deprivation may induce a higher state of attention than before a person had a phone if they associate phone deprivation with focus situations such as exams or crises.<p>Having a phone around may train the brain to relax and offload tasks, leaving it more fresh to focus when required.

So true. And in-car GPS keeps your sense of direction from developing.<p>I&#x27;ve seen people stymied as to how they could possibly make a phone call without their phones. Payphone. Borrow someone else&#x27;s. Not that hard.<p>I used to think this would only ever happen to geeks like me. Boy, was I wrong.

The proliferation of video currently gets my goat. I like to read news, not watch it.

I predict someone will invent a smart utensil. It will be a smartphone-like device that has a curated app store which only includes utilitarian apps. It&#x27;ll contain all of the apps people think &quot;I&#x27;d love to ditch my smart phone, but I&#x27;d really miss &lt;utility apps&gt;&quot;.<p>Apps I really want AND never waste time on:<p>- ride sharing (Lyft, Uber)<p>- calendar<p>- calculator<p>- mobile banking<p>- movie times &amp; reviews<p>- booking a place to stay (CounchSurfing, Airbnb)<p>- public transit schedules<p>- camera (only pictures, not picture sharing)<p>- identity verification (RSA, Okta Verify)<p>- alarm clock

Like most commenters here, I&#x27;ve found a happy medium (when I activate it). I&#x27;m no good at cold turkey and being without this amazing device is just impractical, but airplaning the phone routinely throughout the day really helps to cut down on &quot;notification checking&quot; and that constant background mental polling that this article talks about. I still like to have music (audiobooks actually) and navigation on hand, but knowing I have no notifications and knowing that there is just a <i>tiny</i> bit of effort involved in getting them seems to be my effective compromise.

Has anyone here tried asking everyone to not look at or fiddle with their phones at a meeting they&#x27;ve called or a social event they&#x27;ve organized? How did it work out?<p>What about going the extra step of collecting the phones to be returned when the meeting or event is over?<p>Is there any way to do either of these without coming off as a jerk?

My family calls this the &quot;Crimson Tide Effect&quot;.<p>It was named thus because we were once eating in a bar&#x2F;restaurant situated below ground level, with no mobile phone reception whatsoever. At one point, someone mentioned &quot;that submarine movie with Denzel Washington and Gene Hackman in it.&quot; We couldn&#x27;t remember the name of the movie. We could almost recite the entire script, but couldn&#x27;t say the <i>name of the danged movie</i>.<p>We tried (in vain) all the way through lunch. We managed the name of the submarine, the Alabama, but not the name of the movie. So the instant we left, off to the Internet movie database. Crimson Tide! Ah, because it was the Alabama! It makes sense now!<p>Most recent occurrence was two days ago, when we couldn&#x27;t remember the name of the band that sang &quot;Cult of Personality&quot; for over 15 minutes. We could remember that they were a rare instance of a rock band with black people in it. We could remember that they were not a one-hit wonder, because they had one other hit.<p>I can only hope that memory storage has been repurposed for more useful data rather than simply lost.

What has worked out well for me is a flip phone. The modern ones have all the offline smartphone features you need to get by. Call, text, alarms, calculator, camera. I have found it to be rugged, inexpensive, and one week battery life is a great selling point.<p>And when I get home to my computer, the refreshing relaxation of the internet is great.<p>Smartphones making people dumb, dumb phones making people sane.

I wonder if there is a effective way to counter this without giving up on the phone completely. Discipline is of course the main thing but let&#x27;s be honest, that&#x27;s like telling an opiod addict to &#x27;just use it less&#x27;.<p>I tried meditating in the train instead of fiddling with my phone. I can definitely feel the urge to read up on something despite knowing that there&#x27;s not really anything that currently needs my attention on the phone anyway.<p>Also I replaced my digital calendar and task list with a bullet journal that I&#x27;m carrying around. I was surprisingly more successful with keeping task load under control. As a test, I bought the new Things 3 and used it with Fantastical for a month instead of my journal. I was able to add things faster but actually getting things done has become slower. Though the Calendar reminders are definitely super helpful.<p>Maybe a detox in a country where you don&#x27;t have mobile data or wifi might be nice.

This worked for me:<p>DND on for priority only, forever. Star my wife.<p>Then I can check my phone at my leisure time for everything else.

The statistically significant result is that scores on this test : &quot;in each trial set, participants complete a series of math problems (information processing) while simultaneously updating and remembering a randomly generated letter sequence (information maintenance)&quot; were significantly different for those with their phone silenced, face down on the desk next to them than for those with their phones in another room.<p>Given that this test essentially measures attention and distractions would seem to affect performance, I wonder what the results would be for some other object on the desk in the field of view - a book or a photo say - rather than just a phone.

An effortless hack which I&#x27;ve gotten a lot of utility out of: put your phone behind your laptop.<p>Out of sight, out of mind (and you can&#x27;t feel it in your pocket either!)

This is indeed a good study. I recently experienced one such thing. I bought fitness tracker which I used to monitor my sleep quality. I paired it to smartphone and kept phone aside and slept wearing the tracker. This activity I repeated for entire week and I found that my sleep quality over the week exacerbated compared to time when there was no tracker. When I thought over this, I found out that when I was sleeping wearing the tracker, I was subconsciously thinking continuously about how my sleep quality will be, how will be my heart-rate during sleep, it should always be in resting zone, etc... I had all sorts of kinda unnecessary apprehensions&#x2F; worries. This was OK for a day or two... then I got used to the tracker, still my quality of sleep was poor for remaining week. When I further thought over this, it appeared to me that I had setup a goal for daily 6 hour sound sleep and I have to achieve that. I had subconscious pressure to achieve that goal which is making me restless frequently. Atlast I gave up experiment of sleep monitoring and now I can sleep peacefully without tracker. :-)

Funny timing, I almost got hit yesterday (at a speed that could have been fatal) by a driver who most likely was either checking notifications or actively texting, while I was biking right on the UC campus. Immediately jerked my handlebar to the right and dumped myself into the grass and escaped with a huge gash above my left eye. Our self-driving overlords can&#x27;t take over soon enough.

I&#x27;ve come to hate notifications, alerts, and digital nags of all kinds. I disable practically all of them on every device I own, the only unsolicited notifications I want are from rare legitimate emergencies.<p>But yea, simply having a smartphone around makes you want to fiddle with it. I would guess there is some addictive component there, as it impacts nearly everyone.

How does one manage a strong appetite to learn new things and the compulsion to look at their smartphone all the time?<p>I recently started getting into photography and I&#x27;m finding it very hard not to look at different lenses and Lightroom tips etc etc on my phone.<p>Combine that with a desire to learn about new tech and program and I end up spending a lot of time looking at it.

Wake me up after the registered replication.

Why do I need to enable cookies to see any content here?<p>I&#x27;m genuinely asking, because there&#x27;s an informative error message, so it&#x27;s clearly deliberate; I just can&#x27;t understand the motivation.<p>Edit: the only human-readable cookie is &#x27;machine_last_seen&#x27;, perhaps that&#x27;s just considered a really important statistic...

Just finished reading &quot;The Distracted Mind&quot;. Highly recommend it if you&#x27;re interested in a broad summary of all the research out there on the effects of technology on our cognitive control - executive function, attention, working memory, ability to get things done, etc.

We just need better integration with our exocortex.

Thanks for all the rationalization I could ever want for keeping my phone on DND 24&#x2F;7

I&#x27;m somewhat surprised they didn&#x27;t have a group in their studies with some other irrelevant object (say, the person&#x27;s wallet) on their desk. I know that having anything in my personal space disrupts my ability to think.

Sounds about right, also for productivity. I began having a strict &quot;no cell phones&quot; rule after school and on weekends and found as a family we were much more productive plus had much more enjoyable conversations.

&quot;This discovery of yours [writing] will create forgetfulness in the learners&#x27; souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing&quot;<p>- &quot;The dialogue of Phaedrus, Plato

I&#x27;m an observant Jew, so I keep Shabbat every Saturday. Among our creative restrictions is the prohibition of using electronic devices. I&#x27;ve always had this feeling of mindfulness and focus on Shabbat that ends when I&#x27;m free to pick up my phone. Against my will, pretty much, I&#x27;m drawn to it, and like the authors say, I check it randomly at inopportune times.<p>These authors expressed scientifically what I&#x27;ve been feeling for years.

I haven&#x27;t gone quite so far as to ditch my smartphone yet, but I now leave it on silent, no vibrations or LED notifications or anything. Whenever I check my phone maybe once an hour at work I see anything that requires my attention, otherwise I put it away. It&#x27;s made me more sane, but I&#x27;ve often thought about ditching it entirely. It&#x27;s sad that I feel like I might not be able to function entirely without it.

Oddly enough, the presence of my wife reduces my cognitive abilities due to me instinctively offloading most of my responsibilities to her.

Results of this kind, which attract &quot;aren&#x27;t people on their phones a lot these days, and also millennials should stop buying avocado toast&quot;-level Huffington Post columnists, have consistently failed to replicate: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;dl.acm.org&#x2F;citation.cfm?id=3048418" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;dl.acm.org&#x2F;citation.cfm?id=3048418</a>

This isn&#x27;t profound because a phone is made to distract you, or from a business view, get your attention

I deleted reddit, instagram and quora and have deactivated facebook for over a year now!! I only have HN and the NYtimes and I get sparse notifications from the latter. I don&#x27;t care much about my phone as I spend most of my day glued to my laptop.

Decided to keep my phone out of my pocket while at home. Just put it on a shelf. I was really surprised at how often my hand just reflexively goes to my pocket for the phone. I only noticed it happening because my phone was not there.

Perfect time to recommend a book: The Shallows. Digital information overload not only makes us less attentive, it also makes us shallow. We are exposed to so much information, that we have little time to think deeply about something.

Is this similar to a man&#x27;s IQ dropping when there is a beautiful woman nearby?

What I really want: an ultra high-end cell phone that has a camera built in. Phone calls, SMS, photos, and that&#x27;s it. Differentiate on build quality, great design, and minimal features.

Would putting the smartphone away, out of sight (in a drawer or the pocket of a bag) and on do-not-disturb alleviate the symptoms ? I myself find my mind quieter when I do that.

I recently removed all notifications from my phone (except calls) and it has drastically improved my life. I felt like a slave to a fucking device. It was ridiculous.

20 years ago I knew all the phone numbers of all my friends.<p>Today I barely remember my own phone number.<p>I have outsourced the cognitive load to my phone.<p>I&#x27;m still not sure if that&#x27;s better or worse.

Now I know why I had trouble reading the heading...

Perhaps the most conclusive study to prove that mobile learning (on a smartphone) is a myth and at most a vanity.

Misleading y axes strike again...

Smartphones should be banned in all meetings.

it is rather that wikipedia and google, parts of my weltbild (brain), get totally damaged in the wake of the adpocalypse

All of those &quot;ditch the smartphone&quot; comments are so cute.<p>I&#x27;m on devops. Can&#x27;t ditch the smartphone.

Looks like nothing to me

I&#x27;ve been trying to stay on top of my technology usage. I&#x27;d like to move all my electronics out of my bedroom and buy an old fashioned alarm clock. I&#x27;ve heard this is good for sleep and healthy habits and what not<p>I&#x27;ve been trying to stay off my phone when I&#x27;m bored and clean&#x2F;read&#x2F;do something productive without technology. I&#x27;m glad I had a chance to grow up in the 90&#x27;s before tech was involved from every waking moment.<p>It doesn&#x27;t help that I&#x27;m a network admin and I work on my computer all day