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

• daxfohl 9y ago
  Mine broke last week. I haven't replaced it and almost don't intend to because I do feel more alert now. Though the feeling is subsiding, so perhaps it's a temporary thing. 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.
  • Phemist 9y ago
    The control group were smart phone users and high smart phone dependence was in fact positively correlated with performance on the cognitive tests, on the condition that the smart phone was not on the desk in front of them. However, I wouldn't put too much faith in either results.
• nwatson 9y ago
  Bards pre-literate-times in Greece purportedly could recite Homer's Odyssey themselves after one hearing. Writing destroyed that all. (Maybe I don't have a citation right off, but I'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. So we'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.
  • jff 9y ago
    You seem to be defending against a claim the study does not make. They're not saying "smartphones make us stupid because Google's in your pocket!" Rather, the study is saying that by having your phone on the desk or even in your pocket, you will exhibit decreased mental capacity because your brain is using some cognitive resources to monitor for notifications etc. This may be over-simplified but appears to be backed up by the general discussion on pages 10-11.
    • sillysaurus3 9y ago
      I keep my phone on silent and turn off all vibrations. There's no way to notify me of anything until I look at it, but that's a feature.
      • ckosidow 9y ago
        I do the same, though I wonder if a part of my brain is still itching to check if I have any notifications.
      • ue_ 9y ago
        Perhaps there is a second side to it in that you'll be thinking about what the best time is to next check your phone. Granted it's a little far removed, but it's plausible. It stands for other commitments that run all the time too, though.
      • mi100hael 9y ago
        I think there's a subtle difference between "monitoring for notifications" and actual notifications. Your phone might be on do-not-disturb mode, but that doesn't mean your brain isn't distracted wondering whether someone replied to your last message or returned your call from yesterday. Taking it out of your pocket and leaving it in another room or your car or wherever lessens the compulsion to frequently pull it out and check.
        • majewsky 9y ago
          I noticed something similar during meditation: I had set up the stopwatch on my phone so that I did not have to wonder how many time had passed. It would just ring when 30 minutes had passed. However, when the phone was just lying next to me, I would compulsively check the time on the phone every few minutes. Only when I moved the phone to the other side of the room did I stop caring about the time passed (at least for the most part).
      • jff 9y ago
        I do the same, although I spend far too much time on it despite such efforts. Totally blocking notifications from 90% of applications helps too.
  • weberc2 9y ago
    Books serve the same function as memory, but they did it better. Smart phones don't serve (much less improve on) the function of "attention", so I'm confused by your analogy.
    • shoshone 9y ago
      Its still about memory. Attention span is a measure of memory. Writing stands for the absence of something (a voice or community). Smartphones compensate for so many kinds of absence at once.
      • watwut 9y ago
        You can have good memory and low attention span. Other way round too.
      • bigbugbag 9y ago
        Attention is not a measure of memory, on the contrary. Memories are a a measure of attention as if you don't pay attention you will hardly form a memory. smartphones are not what you say they are, without internet smartphones are close to tracking, privacy invasive, useless bricks. Something like computers with no arms and both knees broken.
      • weberc2 9y ago
        Seems like you're mixing very-short-term memory (moment to moment) with very long-term memory. I'm not a neuroscientist, but my experience as a human suggests these are very different capabilities.
  • avar 9y ago
    The Greeks would make performances designed to be performed in front of a live audience. The comparison to today is not whether you can find someone who can recite a book on first reading, but someone who can recite a song the first time they hear it, or parts of a stand-up routine.
  • pavel_lishin 9y ago
    Those bards trained to do that, though, right? You couldn't pull a random Greek in off the agora and have him memorize an epic poem at will.
  • kellyjprice 9y ago
    I had heard that recitations of the Odyssey were more improvisational. If I remember the gist correctly, someone proposed that adjectives, for instance, were chosen to match the meter of a particular line. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oral-formulaic_composition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oral-formulaic_composition
  • wdewind 9y ago
    > But ... few people complain about how books corrupt our memory. Socrates absolutely did. > for this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners’ 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; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality. https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Phaedrus#On_the_decline_of_Greek_Literature https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Phaedrus#On_the_decline_of_Gr....
    • pm90 9y ago
      Right but there is so much more information of every kind today than what used to exist at the time of Socrates. Attempting to remember all that information would probably be infeasible.
      • kornish 9y ago
        In the same way that reciting Homer's Odyssey themselves after one hearing is infeasible, right? (poking fun, but only a bit)
        • AnimalMuppet 9y ago
          That's feasible. Barely, but feasible. Now try reciting the Library of Congress after one hearing. Or Wikipedia. That's a whole nother level of problem.
          • copperx 9y ago
            I really doubt it's feasible to memorize it in a single hearing without paraphrasing. The human brain couldn't have been different a few millennia ago, and we know that the greeks used the same memorization techniques we use today (e.g., the memory palace, chunking, ...).
  • diogenescynic 9y ago
    I seem to recall someone referring to this as "transactional memory" in that now more focus is spent on teaching ourselves the process to learn something, rather than memorizing the information itself. For example, I can Google a complex formula or obscure fact, rather than commit it to memory. Arguably this allows us to focus on other things, but I do agree it seems like it has dumbed down the average level of discourse.
  • Sir_Cmpwn 9y ago
    You can still train yourself to be better at remembering things today, and supplement your digital memory (in your phone or online or whatnot) with better meat memory. It just comes down to recognizing how your brain works and applying that understanding to specific memorization tasks. Apply stories and mnomics to information you want to remember. Leverage your spatial memory by associating particular locations in a familiar place with a memory. Get into the habit of reviewing your situation at opportune times, i.e. when you get home or enter your car, and remember things you wanted to do there. A good approach to this makes it a lot easier to effectively apply your digital memory, and is also useful in situations where electronics are inappropriate (i.e. recognizing someone IRL).
  • jorgenev 9y ago
    > Bards pre-literate-times in Greece purportedly could recite Homer's Odyssey themselves after one hearing Is this a true fact, or just a story people keep repeating because it sounds interesting? If it were true... how would we know? Presumably you would cite sources from Ancient Greece where people reported that they knew bards who could memorize a whole story with one listen, but like, there are sources from Ancient Greece claiming to know of a woman who was so ugly that looking at her could turn a man to stone. We can kind of sanity check the claim by looking at modern peoples. Anthropologists have extensive experience with pre-literate peoples, and they do have fine memories --but not magical ones [1]. 1. http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/allinthemind/indigenous-memory-code/7553976 http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/allinthemind/in...
    • knodi123 9y ago
      > If it were true... how would we know? If it were true, how would they know?!? It's like if my nephew came to my house and saw Star Wars, and then on the drive home with his mom, he told her the story and she (who never saw the movie) said "He recited the entire movie after one hearing!" No, what he did was remember most of the plot outline (imperfectly), and describe several scenes (imperfectly), and reproduce the gist, more or less, of some of the dialogue... He's not some incredible savant, he's just a normal person who paid attention to a story. I mean, sure, he "can recite the whole thing after one hearing", but in a pre-literate society, how would you even double-check? It would take someone else with total recall to verify that the bard had total recall. So you have to assume storytellers have perfect memory in order to demonstrate that a storyteller has perfect memory.
      • lazyasciiart 9y ago
        No. It would take one person who had memorized the story, over however much repetition, to tell the story and then listen to the other person repeat it back. It's more like, if your nephew came to your house and saw Star Wars and then told you the story, and you, having seen the movie multiple times, said "well, that's actually not a perfect retelling".
  • theboywho 9y ago
    You probably did not read the article, as it does not talk about smartphones being a substitute tool for some tasks we used to do using our brains. The study is about the attention efforts required by our need to always check our phones for new information, you can view it like our attention being prisonnier of our phones with no extra resources left for other activities.
  • sxates 9y ago
    Without any sort of recording or script, how would one verify that the retelling was accurate to the original?
    • deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
  • vanderZwan 9y ago
    I'm kind of curious how one would measure whether you recited the odyssey in it's entirety after one hearing if you don't have a written reference and only have fallible human memory to rely on...
  • jxramos 9y ago
    > shifting cognitive burden of some kinds of memory (all those phone numbers) elsewhere I recognized that my mind started to become a mental index of information at some point. This is to say that I hold memories of compressed information that I can expand with key search terms to hook onto the information I am actually seeking. One recent example was searching for "Milton Friedman Thalidamide FDA" because I knew it would snag an Uncommon Knowledge discussion I shared with a developers group recently.
  • scriptkiddy 9y ago
    To be fair, if you remember only the main events of any story, it's not difficult to recite it from memory. For instance, I've read the Lord of the Rings trilogy many times. I had no problem reciting the entirety of it to my grandmother after my first read through. You may think that a story recited this way would be shorter, but it's not difficult to improvise or embellish. The Odyssey has an extremely simple plot by today's standards. It's been quite a while since I've read the book, but I'm pretty sure I could skim through the cliff notes and tell a pretty compelling version of it.
  • etherdeath 9y ago
    I agree, however, the introspection may be useful. Knowing about this effect may help those who have had a nagging suspicion this was the case.
  • andrewl 9y ago
    I can't find the quote, but I remember Mark Twain describing his training as a Mississippi River pilot. The master pilot training him said something like "What was the water depth at So and So crossing at mid day three trips back?" When Twain said he didn't remember, the master said "You would, if you didn't read all the time."
  • JoshMnem 9y ago
    > Bards pre-literate-times in Greece purportedly could recite Homer's Odyssey themselves after one hearing. Writing destroyed that all. They had amazing memories, but they couldn't memorize large works like that after just one hearing. There are techniques that allow one to remember information like that, but it still requires effort. Here are two great books on that subject: - The Art of Memory by Frances Yates (covers Greece, Rome, and Europe) - The Memory Code by Lynne Kelly (goes back further into prehistory) And two quick articles about memory feats in ancient Greece[1] and Rome[2]. [1] http://blog.artofmemory.com/simonides-of-ceos-81.html http://blog.artofmemory.com/simonides-of-ceos-81.html [2] http://blog.artofmemory.com/pliny-the-elder-on-memory-5824.html http://blog.artofmemory.com/pliny-the-elder-on-memory-5824.h...
    • ninly 9y ago
      Haven't read the other one, but the Yates is great. Another indispensable book for historical context about the Classical transition from oral to literate culture (and its implications for memory, education, and Greek thought) is: - Preface to Plato, by Eric Havelock
      • JoshMnem 9y ago
        Thanks, I'll check that one out. The Memory Code is one of the best books I've read. Highly recommended.
  • trentmb 9y ago
    The podcast "Stuff To Blow Your Mind" just had an episode about "Extended Cognition" http://www.stufftoblowyourmind.com/podcasts/extended-cognition.htm http://www.stufftoblowyourmind.com/podcasts/extended-cogniti...
  • afleck 9y ago
    > Bards pre-literate-times in Greece purportedly could recite Homer's Odyssey themselves after one hearing. Epic recitation was probably not fixed until someone wrote it down. Different recitations of the same plot varied (and were expected to).
  • andrepd 9y ago
    > Bards pre-literate-times in Greece purportedly could recite Homer's Odyssey themselves after one hearing. [citation needed]
  • ssttoo 9y ago
    "[Mozart] heard Gregorio Allegri's Miserere twice in performance, in the Sistine Chapel, and wrote it out from memory, thus producing the first unauthorized copy of this closely guarded property of the Vatican" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miserere_(Allegri) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miserere_(Allegri) How can anyone remember 10+ mins music piece for 9 voices is beyond me. Granted, Mozart had some music superpowers, but still...
    • Splines 9y ago
      I would guess that if you're world class at some creative process you massively compress the amount of "raw" data you need to recreate something, just due to the sheer number of patterns you are aware of. For example, if I asked an advanced programmer to read a professional implementation of some basic data structures and algorithms, they could likely later recreate the exact same thing. Obviously they didn't memorize the file character by character, but a sensibly written implementation is going to have the same shape and form as something the expert has done hundreds of times.
  • ssttoo 9y ago
    "[Mozart] heard Gregorio Allegri's Miserere twice in performance, in the Sistine Chapel, and wrote it out from memory, thus producing the first unauthorized copy of this closely guarded property of the Vatican" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miserere_(Allegri) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miserere_(Allegri) How can anyone remember 10+ mins music piece for 9 voices is beyond me. Granted, Mozart had some music superpowers, but still...
  • jlos 9y ago
    The medium of communication profoundly shapes our minds and thought patterns: - Oral communication priorotizes memory (as mentioned) but also personal trust, since knowledge is always obtained directly from another person. Hence oral cultures tend to place high value on communal social structures. - written communication priorotizes rationality since all communication can be scrutinzed before and during reading. It also prioritizes individual assessment and independence. You could argue that the broad adoption of print as a medium of communication lead to individualism, the scientific revolution, the Renaissance, and the Reformation (i.e. the fundamental contributors to modern Western Civilization). There are obvious merits to digit communication, but the full effects on our minds and culture are not known. A blind belief in some salvific and inevitable march of progress is unwise. We may be trading immediacy, emotivism, and impulsivity for rationality and that should give us pause.
  • holri 9y ago
    I just experienced a great boost in capacity for remembering because of massive piano playing / practicing by heart. It is a massive improvement of quality of live to remember things easily without dependency of external tools. I was surprised to remember the train, wagon and seat number by looking on the reservation just once without the training for example. This was never possible in the past, and I hated it.
  • laurieg 9y ago
    Maybe I'm being simple but, if it's in pre-literate times, how do you know someone is telling exactly the same story? Couldn't they just tell a story with the same major plot points and fill in the details as they go?
  • bogomipz 9y ago
    >"Bards pre-literate-times in Greece purportedly could recite Homer's Odyssey themselves after one hearing." This is extremely unlikely. What the Bards could do was improvise on themes. And often that theme was ancient Troy. They would actually improvise to music in a well-known meter, not unlike a Jazz musician would. "Yet if Homer was strictly an oral poet, how could he keep such long works as the Iliad in his head? It would take days to recite all of the Iliad or the Odyssey! It is now thought that Homer worked some time between 725 and 675 B.C., when the alphabet borrowed from the Phoenicians was just coming into use among the Greeks. It seems likely that writing helped Homer in collecting and composing."[1] [1] http://cerhas.uc.edu/troy/q402.html http://cerhas.uc.edu/troy/q402.html
  • sametmax 9y ago
    I think knowledge you delegate is not as much important as the attention the device is stealing from you. Attention is precious, and our society gives it away like free candy. Anything with a screen magnify this, and this has important consequence on learning, social interactions, self growth, mood, hapiness and health.
  • olavk 9y ago
    > Bards pre-literate-times in Greece purportedly could recite Homer's Odyssey themselves after one hearing That sounds highly unlikely. Do you have a legitimate sources to back this up? Certainly bards had great memory and were able to recite whole epics (perhaps with a level of improvisation akin to "freestyling" in rap), but under what circumstances would they only hear an epic once?
  • ihaveahadron 9y ago
    Yea smartphones are the new books etc etc. Get over jt
  • wodenokoto 9y ago
    Writing made it possible to check if somebody recited something accurately. Reciting a story accurately pre writing had a different meaning (not word for word)
  • pnathan 9y ago
    The bulk of the Old Testament was transmitted orally prior to being written down. It was a time of oral literature. https://www.amazon.com/Lost-World-Scripture-Literary-Authority/dp/083084032X/ https://www.amazon.com/Lost-World-Scripture-Literary-Authori... If one is up for reading a book written by a Christian, this book describes the world well.
  • LostWanderer 9y ago
    I wonder if there is a link between life originating from the sea and the ability of using our hearing as the main sensory organ to detect other objects. And maybe we over relied on some senses and made an education system which relied on certain sense organs more than other senses. But talking about Smartphones,we may be coming to a full circle with Voice assisted AI is gaining ground. ----------------- I would suggest you to read The book 'A brave new world' By Aldous Huxley which predicted how the information overloaded numbness works in a beautiful way
  • tbihl 9y ago
    People (mostly) don't complain about books because we fail to recognize the trade off, or else we accept it, but there are certainly useful places for memorization of large amounts of information. Not only is it more easily summoned when you need it, but it's more fully internalized. By comparison, I know almost nothing about the books on my bookshelf, despite having spent significant amounts of time reading each of them.
• isaaaaah 9y ago
  it is rather that wikipedia and google, parts of my weltbild (brain), get totally damaged in the wake of the adpocalypse
  • bigbugbag 9y ago
    Google got really bad at providing relevant search results, wikipedia did a terrific job of providing URL to official websites and killing many of the relevant and interesting websites that I used to find left and right, they gone now.
• slowmovintarget 9y ago
  We just need better integration with our exocortex.
  • dmurawsky 9y ago
    Please explain...
    • stretchwithme 9y ago
      I think he's referring to efforts like this one: https://www.theverge.com/2017/3/27/15077864/elon-musk-neuralink-brain-computer-interface-ai-cyborgs https://www.theverge.com/2017/3/27/15077864/elon-musk-neural...
• ihaveahadron 9y ago
  Because in order to have a smartphone, you have to keep track of it on your person. To do this, while it is in your presence, you have to keep track of it. This takes up brain power, leaving less of it for you to have, while a smartphone is in your presence. The fucking fuck.
• schnevets 9y ago
  I know that I'm guilty of this - just voluntarily putting my phone in the other room causes withdrawal-like anxiety, followed by a greater sense of awareness. 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.
  • Apocryphon 9y ago
    In the near future we're going to see even more "information diets", "digital cleanses", meditative go-to-nature sort of breaks integrated into lifestyle routines.
    • ashark 9y ago
      My wife and I recently spent a few nights at an Airbnb in the mountains where we couldn't get cell reception and the wifi had a crappy satellite Internet connection we'd been asked to avoid using as much as possible. Also none of our digital crap was there, just a few physical books we brought and some card games the hosts provided. It felt great. It's had me thinking more and more or the digital things and the hyper-available entertainment and information (and, maybe importantly, hyper-available choice of which to indulge in, at a moment's notice) as kind of junk-food like. Yeah it's cool to be able to watch all this crap from my childhood, and a thousand great tv shows or movies, or hundreds of the best video games yet made, or browse endlessly for new music tailored to my tastes, or whatever, totally on demand—but maybe that kind of thing's just not healthy to have around.
      • jff 9y ago
        > Yeah it's cool to be able to watch all this crap from my childhood, and a thousand great tv shows or movies, or hundreds of the best video games yet made, or browse endlessly for new music tailored to my tastes, or whatever, totally on demand—but maybe that kind of thing's just not healthy to have around. I feel the same, although I have a hard time articulating it well. I think I'm slightly better at not watching hour after hour of utter garbage than I used to be, though.
• dmurawsky 9y ago
  Thanks for all the rationalization I could ever want for keeping my phone on DND 24/7
  • notadoc 9y ago
    That is an excellent choice, based on personal experience I would highly recommend it. I put 3-4 important people on the exception list and ignore everything else. You will find 99.9% of alerts and digital nags are adding zero value to your life and require no action at all, let alone immediate action warranting your attention and a big buzz and chime.
• laretluval 9y ago
  Wake me up after the registered replication.
  • obstinate 9y ago
    Yours seems like a flippant response, but I don't think that it is. We have to be wary of confirmation bias here on HN. Would someone even think to publish a study where no effect was found? And then would someone post that link to HN? And then would it get upvoted? It's important to remember that we are not seeing a uniform sample of news stories here. We are seeing a highly biased selection, and it's important to appropriately discount things appropriately.
• jshelly 9y ago
  The proliferation of video currently gets my goat. I like to read news, not watch it.
  • pavel_lishin 9y ago
    I agree. Aside from the egregiously asshole move of auto-playing video (sometimes related, sometimes not), I can typically read an article much faster than an anchor can narrate it.
  • vinchuco 9y ago
    I wonder: would people watch a "HN Review" channel? (Podcast?)
• stretchwithme 9y ago
  So true. And in-car GPS keeps your sense of direction from developing. I've seen people stymied as to how they could possibly make a phone call without their phones. Payphone. Borrow someone else's. Not that hard. I used to think this would only ever happen to geeks like me. Boy, was I wrong.
  • djsumdog 9y ago
    But you won't know the number. You'd need to go to as library first, log into whatever service you keep your contacts on (I run my own radicalie carddav, but most people use Google or Apple's services) and find their number. I use to have most of my friend's phone numbers memorized by the shape they made on the keypad. Today we stay in contact with a lot more people, or at least I do, and it helps to no need to memorize numbers.
    • bigbugbag 9y ago
      > it helps to no need to memorize numbers. actually it does not. if you had to memorize numbers you would have better memory and would have little to no issue remembering them.
      • booleandilemma 9y ago
        What other numbers would you like the parent to memorize, besides those of his friends? Numbers to local restaurants, car services? Why should he have to?
      • Matumio 9y ago
        You would be better at memorizing numbers but worse at something else. Maybe you'd remember fewer contacts. Also, we have become worse at adding big numbers in our head, but we actually make fewer mistakes and are faster with big numbers since we have started using tools for that.
  • _puk 9y ago
    Reminds me of the first time i got the "no cars in your area" message on Uber. Mild panic, how do I get home?!
• thesagan 9y ago
  I lost mine about six months ago and I haven'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've been a budding mental issue, and decided to work on my patience and expectation-setting as a result. This has been part of a larger life exercise in practicing general moment-to-moment mindfullness, and I think I'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. It's like I'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't exercise proper discipline when I had the phone.
  • throwawaycopy 9y ago
    Try keeping a sketch pad for quick illustrations or perhaps a notebook for poems. The world is filled with inspiration! Not only will you be more present, but you'll be turning your seemingly humdrum life into a work of art!
    • thesagan 9y ago
      I did – I love it!!!! And a great suggestion. I already have three pocket-sized notebooks filled up already with tons of art and ideas from my fountain pen! (Love that pen. Now I write in a crude Spencerian script for extra fun points.)
    • movedx 9y ago
      What a beautiful attitude :)
    • jxramos 9y ago
      I love that interpretation of jotting down information as creating a mindfulness work of art. What a thought! I used to do the cliche "note to self" with a voice recorder, that I've recently been desiring again. My cell phone is too slow to respond to my inspirations having to log in past the keycode, launch the app, dump mental information. Stepping through those hoops seems to decay my inspiration. You make me think about reverting back to old technology like the pen and paper. Come to think of it I get the sense that the mental decay from fishing for those materials in my pocket is less than futzing with a cell phone.
• clw8 9y ago
  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't take over soon enough.
  • notadoc 9y ago
    The next time you're driving around on a street or highway, look around at your fellow drivers. It is absolutely shocking the number of people who are staring down at their phones.
    • tim333 9y ago
      They recently jacked up the penalties in the UK (six points on the licence and £200 spot fine). Maybe it'll help.
• cdkee 9y ago
  I haven'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's made me more sane, but I've often thought about ditching it entirely. It's sad that I feel like I might not be able to function entirely without it.
  • bigbugbag 9y ago
    Replace it with a regular phone, it will make a significant difference.
• tristanho 9y ago
  An effortless hack which I've gotten a lot of utility out of: put your phone behind your laptop. Out of sight, out of mind (and you can't feel it in your pocket either!)
  • preek 9y ago
    In hindsight, this seems so obvious! Thank you for sharing this hack. I think I will employ it regularly in the future.
  • vlasev 9y ago
    A related hack if you don't want to put your phone behind your laptop - put the phone screen-side down. This way the changing states of the screen (when you get a notification) won't distract you.
    • daniel_rh 9y ago
      The researchers specifically tested phone face up vs phone face down and noticed no statistical difference, I believe.
      • lucaspiller 9y ago
        I guess it depends on if you have (and are used to having) you phone make a noise when you receive notifications. I have most notifications set to silent, and some I let vibrate. The only thing that makes a sound is my alarm and calls. Since smart phones became a thing I've always had them set to vibrate, I don't really see why you need your phone to make a sound (and disturb other people) when you get such things as an Instagram like or a game wanting you to play more. Biggest quality of life improvement was disabling vibrate (so it's silent) for instant messages and SMS (which my phone always notifies me twice about?) - they can wait a few minutes to hours and don't need instant replies.
      • Phemist 9y ago
        They tested power-off vs power-on. No results on face-up vs face-down, but they probably didn't record it.
• zachd1_618 9y ago
  Like most commenters here, I've found a happy medium (when I activate it). I'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 "notification checking" 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 tiny bit of effort involved in getting them seems to be my effective compromise.
  • danso 9y ago
    When I need a break from social networks, I just log out of the app/sites on my phone. Since most of my passwords are unmemorizable (and stored in a password manager), it's quite a bit of work to get logged in again. It's enough work that I'll put it off for a week at least. *typo
    • bigbugbag 9y ago
      social networks ? like playing sports with friends, visiting family, job events ?
      • danso 9y ago
        Twitter and Facebook mostly
  • moduspwnens14 9y ago
    I don't know if you'd be interested, but I used to have exactly that kind of behavior--almost reflexively checking my phone at the first sense of downtime. I got an Apple Watch when it first came out and it has helped curb that behavior dramatically. I can see at a glance of my wrist that I have no notifications, and it'll tap my wrist if I do, so I almost never need to pull out my phone. I'm still just as "connected," but it really did cut down use of my phone to clear tasks and extended boredom. For me, airplaning would add stress in that I'd have that nagging feeling that I'm missing something important.
  • 9y ago
• buf 9y ago
  I want to learn Japanese. 3 months ago I changed my phone's language to Japanese. Everything is Japanese - maps, services, apps that read from the default phone language. Oddly enough, instead of learning Japanese, I just use my phone less.
  • notadoc 9y ago
    That's kind of funny. Similarly, I stopped listening to any music on my iPhone once I got an iPhone 7. Unexpected side effect of having no headphone jack, but I always forget the dongle somewhere. So, no more music from the iPhone. I listen to old am/fm talk radio again instead.
    • lathiat 9y ago
      Buy AirPods. Honestly.
      • mikestew 9y ago
        Parent forgets the dongle, but will somehow remember to pack the AirPods? I love mine, but I don't think they'll solve the problem described.
      • notadoc 9y ago
        I considered it but I'm not a big fan of headphones, I usually listen to music at home or in a car. One of the most annoying situations was when I had a great podcast I wanted to share with someone on a long drive, pulled out the iPhone 7 to plug into their car stereo and.... new-ish car.... but AUX only.... no dongle..... never mind! I believe Apple removed the headphone jack 5 or 10 years too early. Bluetooth is not that great, and it's also not that widespread. AUX is not a floppy or CD drive, it is everywhere and works great and allows for high quality audio, no troubleshooting, no compression, no hassle. The alternatives (dongle? Bluetooth?) is comparatively nowhere and does not work great.
        • anbende 9y ago
          Bluetooth radio transmitter for the car is like $100 (for a good one). Quality is only slightly worse than radio (for a good one). Problem solved. Enjoy
• notadoc 9y ago
  I'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. 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.
  • Florin_Andrei 9y ago
    > there is some addictive component there That's by design. There's a whole science of making the customer come back over and over again.
    • notadoc 9y ago
      Right, and you can feel it, though I'm not sure if most people are aware of it. The smartphone and social media often feels like a glorified Skinner box. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operant_conditioning_chamber https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operant_conditioning_chamber
    • pas 9y ago
      Uh, access to new information? Geeks are especially vulnerable. Or not, because just think about how many people just constantly scroll Facebook, instagram, twitter and whatever. Humans like to feel connected, like to know interesting things, and like to feel engaged, and so on. And this little magic box pumps a lot of reward for just a few tiny taps. Just a swipe, and new shiny spectacle things happen, woo! One more swipe! And you see other humans on Facebook. For some people that's addictive. For others learning about new gadgets, for some simply learning (duolingo, coursera, audiobooks), or checking the news, or reading a book, just one more page while I wait for someone to go back for something in the shop/car, etc.
  • chiefofgxbxl 9y ago
    Windows 10 that came on my laptop kept displaying a notification every day in the bottom right of the screen, notifying me that the security scan found no issues. It seems like that's a regression in design. Only notify me if something goes wrong, don't notify me if things are as they are supposed to be. Now I've set the "Quiet Hours" setting to permanently on so no notifications are permitted.
• OJFord 9y ago
  Why do I need to enable cookies to see any content here? I'm genuinely asking, because there's an informative error message, so it's clearly deliberate; I just can't understand the motivation. Edit: the only human-readable cookie is 'machine_last_seen', perhaps that's just considered a really important statistic...
  • inetknght 9y ago
    I ask the same thing any time a site doesn't work without javascript
    • OJFord 9y ago
      That annoys me, but I understand (from a 'how they built the site' perspective) why it happens.
• gdubs 9y ago
  Just finished reading "The Distracted Mind". Highly recommend it if you'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.
• quickben 9y ago
  This worked for me: DND on for priority only, forever. Star my wife. Then I can check my phone at my leisure time for everything else.
  • tomfitz 9y ago
    I do this, which helps a lot. I still find myself mindlessly browsing during "downtime", however.
• jonbarker 9y ago
  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.
  • cracell 9y ago
    On the flip side my smart phone often allows me to look up needed information about something I'm currently thinking about or working on. So I can stay in the same task instead of noting it and having to come back to it later after I've looked it up from a laptop or in a library prior to the modern internet. I think the effects of a smart phone on someone varies greatly depending on how exactly the individual uses it.
    • jonbarker 9y ago
      How could one design a test for the last statement above (which resembles a hypothesis)? In practice it seems the statement "varies greatly depending on how the individual uses it" equates too easily with "varies greatly depending on the individual" (fundamental attribution error). Also, it may be that we believe we are very good at using something to our advantage when in fact we should not be using it at all (casinos exploit this problem). The reality is that it is impossible to split test oneself to discover whether in fact there was a benefit, although I wish this were possible. Maybe try something very difficult in two scenarios: play a game of skill which may benefit from looking something up (like chess openers) several times without a phone and several times with access to the phone to see whether there is a difference in performance against a continuously adaptive algorithmic opponent.
• basicplus2 9y ago
  Now I know why I had trouble reading the heading...
• outworlder 9y ago
  All of those "ditch the smartphone" comments are so cute. I'm on devops. Can't ditch the smartphone.
  • moxious 9y ago
    People want to want to ditch the smartphone. Very few actually want to. Proof: sales in the hundreds of millions. It sucks when capitalism shows people what they really want because sometimes it pierces people's bubbles of who they think they are and they find out who they actually are.
    • swiley 9y ago
      Having a two way internet pager (being able to read and send email) is good. Almost everything else about smartphones is really not that good but worth tolerating for email.
  • mobilethrow 9y ago
    While I think you are missing the point, I'm baited by the proposition that devops requires paying constant attention to smartphones. I use "Tasker" on Android to check for my name in the on-call calendar and change notification settings accordingly. Otherwise it's dead silent when at work and very low volume when connected to a wifi.
• m3kw9 9y ago
  This isn't profound because a phone is made to distract you, or from a business view, get your attention
  • pas 9y ago
    That's not really a good model of phones. Our phones are so powerfully captivating because of the high-speed Internet connection it hides. New information at the tips of your fingers, just a swipe and even more things! Facebook, Instagram, messaging apps, HN, Reddit, news, and so on. Sure, there are addictive offline things (games mostly), but that's not the things people usually complain about. Phones are made to be efficient magic boxes of interesting things. It can load anyone's poison in just a few blinks.
• abandonliberty 9y ago
  Mental exercise: 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. Having a phone around may train the brain to relax and offload tasks, leaving it more fresh to focus when required.
• amorphid 9y ago
  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'll contain all of the apps people think "I'd love to ditch my smart phone, but I'd really miss <utility apps>". Apps I really want AND never waste time on: - ride sharing (Lyft, Uber) - calendar - calculator - mobile banking - movie times & reviews - booking a place to stay (CounchSurfing, Airbnb) - public transit schedules - camera (only pictures, not picture sharing) - identity verification (RSA, Okta Verify) - alarm clock
  • stormbeard 9y ago
    The types of people that would want this can already do it with their smart phones. What's gained by crippling a device to only support certain classes of apps?
    • whitepoplar 9y ago
      It's like comparing Advil to Heroin. Heroin is better at numbing pain, but people prefer to take Advil as it's not addictive and won't damage us.
    • amorphid 9y ago
      Someone cripples the device for me in a user friendly manner that doesn't require me to think about which apps I should avoid whenever I visit the app store.
  • sturmen 9y ago
    You can take this today by enabling corporate lockdown modes of your smartphone and trusting someone else with the key.
    • amorphid 9y ago
      That's kind of my point. Trusting someone else with the key works for as long as they want to be your app babysitter. The smart utensil plays that role in perpetuity, as being the babysitter is basically the business model.
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• whitepoplar 9y ago
  What I really want: an ultra high-end cell phone that has a camera built in. Phone calls, SMS, photos, and that's it. Differentiate on build quality, great design, and minimal features.
  • carlob 9y ago
    Nokia 515, I'm sure you can still find it on ebay
  • MengerSponge 9y ago
    https://lifehacker.com/how-i-turned-my-iphone-into-a-simple-distraction-free-1175739059 https://lifehacker.com/how-i-turned-my-iphone-into-a-simple-... The iPhone has the best build quality (come at me), and you can easily make it do what you're looking for here. A device that doesn't give you the option of extra features won't sell enough to get the scale you need for really high build quality.
• BelleMe 9y ago
  https://pitbullandgoldfishes.wordpress.com https://pitbullandgoldfishes.wordpress.com
• mysterypie 9y ago
  Has anyone here tried asking everyone to not look at or fiddle with their phones at a meeting they've called or a social event they've organized? How did it work out? What about going the extra step of collecting the phones to be returned when the meeting or event is over? Is there any way to do either of these without coming off as a jerk?
  • infectoid 9y ago
    Ever tried the Phone Stacking game with friends? In short: You all stack your phones on each other after ordering food. First person to crack pays the bill. https://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/the-hot-button/you-have-2-new-text-messages-also-youre-paying-for-dinner/article2296118/ https://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/the-hot-button/you-have...
  • hawaiianbrah 9y ago
    I do this as a coach of a teenage volleyball team. Love the effect it has.
• holografix 9y ago
  How does one manage a strong appetite to learn new things and the compulsion to look at their smartphone all the time? I recently started getting into photography and I'm finding it very hard not to look at different lenses and Lightroom tips etc etc on my phone. Combine that with a desire to learn about new tech and program and I end up spending a lot of time looking at it.
  • gukov 9y ago
    You're not actually learning but feeding your novelty-seeking brain. The best way to learn is to actually take photos, not research lenses. Being in motion vs action: http://jamesclear.com/taking-action http://jamesclear.com/taking-action
• shakil 9y ago
  Looks like nothing to me
• jutanium 9y ago
  I'm an observant Jew, so I keep Shabbat every Saturday. Among our creative restrictions is the prohibition of using electronic devices. I've always had this feeling of mindfulness and focus on Shabbat that ends when I'm free to pick up my phone. Against my will, pretty much, I'm drawn to it, and like the authors say, I check it randomly at inopportune times. These authors expressed scientifically what I've been feeling for years.
• imron 9y ago
  20 years ago I knew all the phone numbers of all my friends. Today I barely remember my own phone number. I have outsourced the cognitive load to my phone. I'm still not sure if that's better or worse.
• dvcrn 9y ago
  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's be honest, that's like telling an opiod addict to 'just use it less'. 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's not really anything that currently needs my attention on the phone anyway. Also I replaced my digital calendar and task list with a bullet journal that I'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. Maybe a detox in a country where you don't have mobile data or wifi might be nice.
• mezuzi 9y ago
  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't care much about my phone as I spend most of my day glued to my laptop.
• TheRealmccoy 9y ago
  Perhaps the most conclusive study to prove that mobile learning (on a smartphone) is a myth and at most a vanity.
• KamiCrit 9y ago
  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. And when I get home to my computer, the refreshing relaxation of the internet is great. Smartphones making people dumb, dumb phones making people sane.
• ramijames 9y ago
  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.
• LeicaLatte 9y ago
  Smartphones should be banned in all meetings.
• foota 9y ago
  I'm somewhat surprised they didn't have a group in their studies with some other irrelevant object (say, the person's wallet) on their desk. I know that having anything in my personal space disrupts my ability to think.
• kulu2002 9y ago
  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/ 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. :-)
• real-hacker 9y ago
  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.
• anc84 9y ago
  Misleading y axes strike again...
• deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
• nurettin 9y ago
  Oddly enough, the presence of my wife reduces my cognitive abilities due to me instinctively offloading most of my responsibilities to her.
• JoeDaDude 9y ago
  "This discovery of yours [writing] will create forgetfulness in the learners' 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" - "The dialogue of Phaedrus, Plato
• Phemist 9y ago
  I am quite skeptical of the results of this paper. The claims are very strong, but the paper was published in "Journal of the Association for Consumer Research". 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.. Anyway, reading through the paper, there are a few methodological issues that I believe severely weaken the claims made by the authors. 1. Even though the claims made specifically towards phones, there was no "control" item situation. 2. Participants were explicitly drawn to the item in 2 out of 3 conditions right before the task. 3. Experiment 1 does not randomize on task (OSpan and RSPM) order. 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? 5. As far as I can tell, there is no control for differences in their population & their measure of phone dependency (ie, is phone dependency uncorrelated to factors like age?) 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/bag AND other room condition, there is a POSITIVE correlation between phone dependence and performance on the OSpan test. 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. I would put as much trust in the claim above as the original claim by the paper's authors. EDIT: continuous grammar improvements
  • Phemist 9y ago
    To clarify a bit further as I can no longer edit my post: The points about the methodology stand, and I don't believe one should update ones beliefs in either way based on this paper. The "killer" finding is not necessarily a killer towards the reported results (which are dubious anyway), but towards the way the paper is presenting these results. The missing discussion of this interaction effect between phone dependence and phone location is what makes me very much doubt the quality of the paper.
• amelius 9y ago
  Is this similar to a man's IQ dropping when there is a beautiful woman nearby?
• damontal 9y ago
  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.
• logfromblammo 9y ago
  My family calls this the "Crimson Tide Effect". It was named thus because we were once eating in a bar/restaurant situated below ground level, with no mobile phone reception whatsoever. At one point, someone mentioned "that submarine movie with Denzel Washington and Gene Hackman in it." We couldn't remember the name of the movie. We could almost recite the entire script, but couldn't say the name of the danged movie. 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! Most recent occurrence was two days ago, when we couldn't remember the name of the band that sang "Cult of Personality" 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. I can only hope that memory storage has been repurposed for more useful data rather than simply lost.
• jimmahoney 9y ago
  The statistically significant result is that scores on this test : "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)" 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. 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.
• carrja99 9y ago
  Sounds about right, also for productivity. I began having a strict "no cell phones" rule after school and on weekends and found as a family we were much more productive plus had much more enjoyable conversations.
• Principe 9y ago
  I've been trying to stay on top of my technology usage. I'd like to move all my electronics out of my bedroom and buy an old fashioned alarm clock. I've heard this is good for sleep and healthy habits and what not I've been trying to stay off my phone when I'm bored and clean/read/do something productive without technology. I'm glad I had a chance to grow up in the 90's before tech was involved from every waking moment. It doesn't help that I'm a network admin and I work on my computer all day
• johnchristopher 9y ago
  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.
• williamsmj 9y ago
  Results of this kind, which attract "aren't people on their phones a lot these days, and also millennials should stop buying avocado toast"-level Huffington Post columnists, have consistently failed to replicate: http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=3048418 http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=3048418