15 ms·

Reading on smartphone affects sigh generation, brain activity, and comprehension

320 points by rzk 5y ago

pier25 5y ago
I'm wondering how dumb ebook readers would compare vs paper. I got a kindle last year. Since then I've been reading (mostly novels) for at least 45 mins every day. Some weekend days I read for like 2-3 hours. It's been wonderful. My iPad Pro has been collecting dust for months.
- ycombinete 5y ago
  My gut feel is that this effect on comprehension, and increased prefrontal cortex activation, both happen because phones have so many distractions. The whole time I'm reading something on a phone my brain is constantly pinging me about all the other things that I do on my phone: emails/WhatsApp/Google word I don't know. So our conscious control centres in the PFC are always firing to mediate these little temptations. There are less of these temptations on a e-reader.
  - pier25 5y ago
    Yeah that is my gut feeling too. So much stuff can happen on a phone that the brain can't relax and focus on a single task.
- sturza 5y ago
  I sold my iPad Pro for this exact reason and bought a 10" Pocketbook instead. I can confirm your ereader experience.
Syonyk 5y ago
I would be interested to see if an e-ink type reader is closer to paper or a smartphone in a test like this. I've generally let myself drift to them for long form reading, but do wonder if it's that much better than an LCD, in terms of how it's processed by the brain. I know it's better than being on a phone or tablet in terms of distractions, though.
- deleted 5y ago
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- zacharyz 5y ago
  I have been doing a lot of kindle reading lately and have noticed that I sleep easier when I transition to the actual e-ink device versus reading on my phone. I suspect it is due to the backlight (blue light, which has been shown to effect sleep and intensity).
- crdrost 5y ago
  One huge difference is that the low latency of E-ink means that we don't have scrolling yet. If you read articles on your phone you may notice that you read in a fundamentally different way then you read printed text. You generally keep your visual field located in exactly one place relative to the phone and then scroll content with your finger up into that space. It's as if you moved the book around while keeping your eyes in one place. On the printed medium your eye stays locked to the corners of the page, the page doesn't scroll out from underneath you. But of course you are also phrasing an interesting point, which is that screens are usually way brighter than ambient light. To this we can add that a mobile phone is so much smaller than a printed page, you think about the cognitive tasks involved in opening a paper where at first you would open it up wide and be surrounded by word and then you would fold it down to the part that you wanted to read and focus on... Hard to imagine a similar experience on a phone; a set of desktop screens has the right size, but maybe not the ability to effectively expand/condense...
  - andai 5y ago
    I wonder if the fixity of location provided by printed materials is a significant factor in increased retention. I noticed that I often remember what part of a page I read something on. With a web page, no such "information location structure" exists: the flow of the text changes based on the device and configuration, and instead of discrete pages there's just one big one. The act of turning a page may also serve some function: the visual content is "refreshed", the patterns on the page are brand new and stimulating. Perhaps the memory for each page is "chunked" in a way that a write to long term storage occurs on pageflip. If so, then infinite scrolling would lead to "buffer overflows". Another thought about scrolling: I also wonder if the movement of the eyes "across" a page is more stimulating and ergonomic than keeping them in one place, which in my experience gets rather tiring.
zitterbewegung 5y ago
Cool study that involves thirty four individuals and no underlying reason why this is occurring...
- betwixthewires 5y ago
  I don't really buy it and I'm willing to bet it cannot be reproduced.
  - zitterbewegung 5y ago
    That's the joke...
linspace 5y ago
As a frequent sigher I found most amusing the part about measuring the number of sighs. I had to dwelve deep in the article to find why it's significant: "Previous studies have indicated that the number of sighs increased with increased cognitive load[14,21]. In our study, the number of sighs increased during cognitive reading activity on a paper medium and decreased when reading on a smartphone." My anecdotal experience is that I sigh when tired, so the research passes my tests. Also, I love physical books. I love holding them, opening them, and of course, reading. If possible with a pencil in my hand.
- amelius 5y ago
  The smartphone equivalent of a "sigh" is the back-button/swipe.
jdofaz 5y ago
I recently discovered that it is very comfortable to read eBooks on my big screen tv (connected to a computer) from the couch. I like not having to hold anything and being able to sit in a comfortable position.
yehoshuapw 5y ago
a few key differences come to mind: * screen type vs paper * size * attention span reduction (even without notifications and so on, a phone automatically gets a negative amount of focus on a single thing) * "lost cost" to start using trying each of those specifically is possible - and will hint at much more.
- lysium 5y ago
  In the Materials they mention that screen and paper were of same size and (!) weight.
spicybright 5y ago
- deleted 5y ago
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- deleted 5y ago
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- ASalazarMX 5y ago
  What? Do old people sigh more/less than young people? I think the experiment measures respiration, oxygenation and sigh frequency to correlate it with brain activity, not as an age metric. Edit: OMG just understood it was a joke...
- moron4hire 5y ago
  Generating sighs from the respiratory system, not a generation of people known as "Sigh".
- chrischapman 5y ago
  Not sure if you're being humorous but just in case, it means the 'making of a sigh' as in 'generating something new' rather than a 'group of people'. As a joke, it works for my generation. The older I get the more I sigh and these days it has a lot to do with cookie banners. But that's another matter.
ASalazarMX 5y ago
It's nice to see the data gathered even if there's no hypothesis at the end. It could be that a paper book is a better learning medium than a screen, but I suspect that smartphones are very, very needy devices, and subconsciously we expect a notification to pop up sooner or later and derail our train of thought. Smartphones are made for quick reads and instant satisfactions, not prolonged lecture. Anecdata: I frequently read books on my smartphone, but I'll put it in airplane or focus mode to rest easy that there will be no interruptions in a while. I've tried to read on a tablet, but the smartphone pinging from the desktop across the room can be very distracting.
- Syonyk 5y ago
  There was a study [0] that demonstrated that even having your smartphone near you - shut off, on the desk - reduced your ability to focus and concentrate. That's one of the reasons I've moved as much as I can to an e-reader, I know it won't interrupt me with other stuff. [0]: https://news.utexas.edu/2017/06/26/the-mere-presence-of-your-smartphone-reduces-brain-power/ https://news.utexas.edu/2017/06/26/the-mere-presence-of-your...
  - iamcurious 5y ago
    It says that groups with the phone in their pocket focused better than those with phone face down on the table. Having something that can not be lost, forgotten or misplaced, in a place you are not used too have it could reduce focus too. Maybe the same lost of focus would happen with keys, or credit cards.
agumonkey 5y ago
Something that I've felt and heard some people on youtube verbalize: we miss side channel stimulation. Holding a book, folding pages, the texture, the smell. I wanted pdf to improve my reading but very very often is stalls, even on networkless tablets.
- brimble 5y ago
  > Holding a book, folding pages, the texture, the smell. This is the reason I can only tolerate reading ebooks in iBooks. If they ever remove the ability to idly mess with page corners in a way that feels almost like a physical object, I guess I'm just done with ebooks. Other readers I've seen with faux-page-turning don't do it right. They don't allow partial turns (just a page-turning animation—not the same thing, and always hideous), only allow a tiny amount of partial turn before the whole page flips over, or it doesn't feel closely-enough connected to your input. Even iBooks could be a lot better, but it's good enough. [EDIT] Apple Books, rather. Was it ever iBooks, or did I invent that? Either way, that's the program I'm talking about.
  - jeromegv 5y ago
    It was iBooks! Was launched alongside the iPad https://www.macrumors.com/2010/05/07/apple-to-begin-international-roll-out-of-ibooks-and-ibookstore-alongside-ipad-launch/ https://www.macrumors.com/2010/05/07/apple-to-begin-internat...
Weryj 5y ago
I wonder if this is due to the attention economy with mobile devices. Pure speculation, but since we already associate a lot of other activities with a mobile devices, we may have a hard time isolating the activity and focus.
polskibus 5y ago
I wonder whether forcing yourself to breath a bit deeper during reading would increase comprehension. Or stopping after page or two for a couple of deep breaths. Most importantly, perhaps one can focus better when programming by controling own breath ?
- openknot 5y ago
  This is interesting. Perhaps if the breath reminds you to relax and stay on your chosen focus, though I would be doubtful that increased oxygen intake is directly a cause. I'm not sure about increased comprehension directly, because I've heard that the best way is to more actively engage with the material (e.g. by asking yourself questions about what you read), but there may be a link to mindfulness.
ortusdux 5y ago
I'm a big fan of waldenpond.press, a service that pulls articles from your pocket reading list, binds them into a book, and mails them to you once a month.
- Syonyk 5y ago
  That sounds both amazing and a bit wasteful of paper, though if it's more of a magazine than a newspaper, I might have to try that out! I definitely don't need a permanent bound copy of some random Atlantic or Vox article.
- mab122 5y ago
  Thats brilliant, something like that but weekly and pushed to my ereader would be great.
marto1 5y ago
Steam rolling children's dopamine receptors since birth doesn't have a positive effect on their long-term development ? Who would have known /s
hammock 5y ago
For those clueless as to the importance of "sigh generation" (as I was), here is a paper that goes into it: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4427060/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4427060/
- deleted 5y ago
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- tra3 5y ago
  I was curious too, this is right in the article: > A path analysis suggests that the interactive relationship between sigh inhibition and overactivity in the prefrontal cortex causes comprehension decline.
- sundvor 5y ago
  Thanks, I was going to post "sigh what?" I can't ever remember sighing, but I guess I'll be paying attention to it now. I like reading on my Kindle, fwiw.
matco11 5y ago
I am not sure this study is definitely convincing… …but I wonder if the extra amount of scrolling one has to do on smartphones compared to printed books could be distracting and lowering comprehension. Also, when I try to remember something I have red on a printed book, - sometimes - I can remember where on the page it was written, what else was on the page, or even what the page looked like. I experience none of that when reading on my smartphone.
- kbenson 5y ago
  I also feel like my comprehension of physical reading material was better, but it's been a while sine I actually used physical material for learning, so it could also just be my brain is worse at retaining information in my old age. Definitely something I think I'll experiment with though.
- vagabund 5y ago
  I don't know if it's the scrolling per se, so much as the more general psychological relationship we have with phones whose hardware and OS are designed to tantalize and distract. The majority of our prior experiences on the device will have primed our brain for something antithetical to the long-term concentrative state that's necessary for deep comprehension. By the same token of the advice for insomniacs to reserve your bed strictly for sleep, there's value in having purpose-built objects instead of just a singular omnipotent slab of glass.
- johnchristopher 5y ago
  > Also, when I try to remember something I have red on a printed book, - sometimes - I can remember where on the page it was written, what else was on the page, or even what the page looked like. I experience none of that when reading on my smartphone. This is so obvious to me but more than once I have hit the typical robot HN user on this topic for whom it doesn't matter the medium because he's an eidetic machine. So I'll just post this: > Beyond treating individual letters as physical objects, the human brain may also perceive a text in its entirety as a kind of physical landscape. When we read, we construct a mental representation of the text in which meaning is anchored to structure. The exact nature of such representations remains unclear, but they are likely similar to the mental maps we create of terrain—such as mountains and trails—and of man-made physical spaces, such as apartments and offices. Both anecdotally and in published studies, people report that when trying to locate a particular piece of written information they often remember where in the text it appeared. We might recall that we passed the red farmhouse near the start of the trail before we started climbing uphill through the forest; in a similar way, we remember that we read about Mr. Darcy rebuffing Elizabeth Bennett on the bottom of the left-hand page in one of the earlier chapters. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/reading-paper-screens/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/reading-paper-scr... And repost my comment from one of those times: >> The value provided by a physical map of a book is knowing how far along you are in the book, yet that's also available in a visual form in an ebook as well. You can even riffle through pages on most e-readers as well, seeing a preview of the page as you move quickly forward or backwards. >> Aside from weight, what value is the physical map really providing? > No, it provides more. > Actually your brain maps physical properties of the book to actual content, creating an overlay map over the story or the content (and our brain is really good at mentally mapping things). This is that map that is being used to know where in the book a particular piece of information is. > Reading on e-reader is more linear than reading a paper book. See: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/reading-paper-screens/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/reading-paper-scr... https://insights.uksg.org/articles/10.1629/uksg.236/ https://insights.uksg.org/articles/10.1629/uksg.236/ and https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/aug/19/readers-absorb-less-kindles-paper-study-plot-ereader-digitisation https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/aug/19/readers-absorb... > Besides, no e-reader today can let your riffle through pages as fast as paper book. > When you are in a novel, or in a manual, you have some kinetic and touch feedback to build memories of where's what. The book becomes an extension (à la proprioception) with much less friction than an e-read for which you have to wait for visual feedback (screen refreshing). > With paper books things are at the tip of your fingers. > E-reader have more friction. > That's a reason why I only read novels on e-reader and jot notes in a notepad for non-fiction books. > If I had the budget I'd only have physical books.
jdrc 5y ago
It will be a very good thing if phones start being treated as dumbing-down addictive habits as bad as smoking used to be.
- iamcurious 5y ago
  Thinking about it, a lot of people stopped smoking right when smartphones became a thing. Smoking was not just about the smoke, but about the social circle it created. I wonder how deep the analogy goes.
deleted 5y ago
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omarhaneef 5y ago
Hypothesis: we are primed to expect ads to pop up, or some other interruption, when we read on phones, and even when those intrusions are held at bay, we have retain the expectation that they will emerge.
- idatum 5y ago
  +1 on this. I expect some kind of flashing ad or pop up, where that expectation itself is a distraction. It's rare that it's not a website I'm reading on mobile. The state of the internet. Sigh.
- ravenstine 5y ago
  And just a quick reminder for anyone reading this, disabling scripting by default for sites mostly solves the issue of delayed popup modals. The uBlock Origin element blocker can take care of anything that makes it through if JavaScript must be enabled. This is what I've been doing for the last few years and I haven't looked back. If a blog or article can't be viewed without JavaScript, then it probably wasn't worth reading. Likewise, I keep my phone on Do Not Disturb at all times, and have it configured to allow numbers in my contacts to ring through in case of emergencies. Everything else is silent. These things have significantly decreased the activity in the part of my brain that expects distractions and adverse UI patterns at any moment.
awinter-py 5y ago
scrolling, or generally anything that mutates the viewport, vastly reduces my reading speed maybe this is just my training and gen Z can handle it fine? but scrolling feels like mandatory vertical layout jank to get to page 2 enlightened UX archaeologists from the future will look back with humane pity on a web with increasingly prevalent sticky headers that destroy keyboard-based paging
- MSKJ 5y ago
  Perhaps, I read a lot on my phone (usually web novels). I keep my eyes fixed on a spot on my screen, usually reading 2 lines, and scroll to bring the next lines into my line of sight. This is very comfortable for me as I don't have to move my eyes around. I also think this increases my reading efficiency, although I haven't really done an A/B test to verify this
- zajio1am 5y ago
  Well, scrolling by fingers on screen is inconvenient, but e.g. FBReader app allows switching pages using volume up/down buttons.
_uoud 5y ago
It's not only comprehension decline, it's a combination of decreasing attention spans and the substitution of your memory by an electronic device (calendar, notes, etc.). I've been writing about what's happened to me during the COVID lockdowns, and I think quite a few of HN people share the feeling that one can barely even read a normal book at length these days... Here's my actual writeup from back in early 2021: https://www.lostbookofsales.com/age-of-distractions/ https://www.lostbookofsales.com/age-of-distractions/
- monkeybutton 5y ago
  I've started leaving my phone on silent and sitting on my kitchen table while I'm working. Just having it within arms reach at my desk has become too much at times. The lack of focus wasn't nearly this bad at the beginning of the pandemic for me.
  - dylan604 5y ago
    I leave mine on silent, however, my 2FA app is on the phone. Getting up to retrieve from another room at each auth request would be tiresome. Maybe time to get a Yubikey like device instead???
    - Geezus-42 5y ago
      Bitwarden let's you use 2fa from your password vault if you pay $10/yr.
    - trevcanhuman 5y ago
      I’d advice setting up a password store[0] which does allow to get OTP codes right on the same device, but of course, it kinda defeats the purpose of 2FA but I still use it for not so important stuff. [0] https://passwordstore.org https://passwordstore.org
      - jackson1442 5y ago
        imo, as long as you combine "something you know" and "something you have," the effect is the same. So if you store your 2fa encrypted with a on your computer with a key only you know, it accomplishes the same thing.
webmobdev 5y ago
I don't think it reduces my comprehension, but I have noticed that it does have some effect on my memory - I have some trouble recollecting something I have read online. I don't know if this is because of over consumption (there's too much information and we want to consume it all) or if it's a learned behaviour of not making an effort to remember it since you can access the information again in the future easily through search or bookmarks.
rcarmo 5y ago
Well, I tend to sigh a lot when reading some sites on my phone…
_the_inflator 5y ago
For context, China banned phones in school due to this reason: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-55902778 https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-55902778
- 908B64B197 5y ago
  > due to this reason Keep in mind the internet is also one of the only places where young Chinese might get exposed to English and western content. Can you imagine a Chinese child having a conversation with a young American and learning that they have multiple parties? Checks and balances? Tiananmen Square?
nottorp 5y ago
Hmm but is it the screen, or the interruptions? Personally I don't feel like i have trouble reading on either epaper or a tablet, but in either case all the notifications are off.
- closetohome 5y ago
  Interruptions are a good theory, but it seems unlikely they would have people use their own phones for the experiment, as that would introduce as many variables as there are participants. I would think they just hand everyone a 'clean' phone with no apps on it. I'd love to see the difference between someone reading a phone-sized piece of paper, a phone, a non-touch LCD that only shows a block of text, and a similarly sized e-ink screen.
buzzwords 5y ago
I wonder if there is some sort of trade off (cognitively speaking).
aktuel 5y ago
What unbelievable rubbish. Sigh.
mancerayder 5y ago
I find I remember things better in a paper book than a phone (for sure!) and possibly even a Kindle. There's something about keeping my fingers in other page sections, folding over the corners of useful pages (even if I never revisit), and remembering the location of information on the page. In college I would often remember WHERE a detail was located, but I didn't know the detail itself. It's like my brain was creating an index to the data based on its approximate page location and the location within the page itself (and crucially whether it was on the left side or the right side of the book when open). Did anyone else experience something like this?
weq 5y ago
Youtube can be viewed as a micro-education platform and this seamless dissemination of information for those who seek it will start to balance out the loss of traditionally valued skills such as remmebering and regurertating tainted points of view pushed on the masses by whoever is connected enough to influence the countries politcal system. ie. It could be argued that some western nations feel dumbed down by mobile phones, while people in underdeveloped nations see it as a on-ramp to modernisation and a vector of information discovery instead of a vector of distraction.
- weq 5y ago
  ie. Right now i am learning to weld off an old Canandian body work man on the other side of the world, like taking an apprentiship with a master in the comfort of my home, on demand. Ive never enabled notifications on my phone, its always on silent, ive never installed a FAANG app on it, i use my phone as a tool. Im getting a education that would cost me time x dollars x effort if i was enroll in a traditional technical collage. Just because your have found yourself searching for meaning in your life through your phone distractions, doesnt mean its a bad thing. Its your body telling you that while you may be making some money right now, your actually not persuring a dream that is satisfying your inner yerning for a meaningful existance. I cant watch a movie at length anymore, but i can keep my phone next to me for an entire day and actually forget its there enough to go looking for it in other place when i actually need it. I love my work though, coding is a hobby turned passion turned career turned never worked a day in my life after quitting k-mart at 20 to live it. Yet im divorced from a doctor who spent every hour of every day she was not working, distracting herself with her phone, gaming, ignoring the world, obsessed with stalking people on facebook, getting despressed with her life, trying to bandaid it with InstaSatisfation, because of all the trauma she has suffered yet never dealt with. On the outside, she is a success of a women, and will save your life in the ER; but in every other situation, she is a complete mess on the verge of suicide due to unresolved PTSD. Your education, or your job does not define you. You are more then your successes (and your failures) and the WWW has allowed people to see this at scale more then anytime in history. its reshaping our society, and what we grew up with, what our parents valued, is slowly fading away for a new modern set of skills. Those modern skills dont resolve around books, or attention. But the ability to wade through through loads of crap to find the gems that add value to your existance. Not distract from it.
wolverine876 5y ago
I want to be careful about being a technology reactionary and just finding confirmation bias: e.g., I'm tired of change and find something that confirms my frustration. One trick I use to shake up my persective is to remember the other side of the equation: When change occurs, some things are lost, but also some are gained. In some ways, I expect we function better reading on screens. Or I try to look at it the other way, remembering that there is nothing more natural about the older technology (usually) - it's only what we are accustomed to - i.e., what if instead of moving from technology A to B, we were moving from B to A? And then remembering: A has matured (being older); B usually has not but, if adopted, will mature. One thing I would guess, if moving from screen to paper, is that the technology wouldn't keep up with our cognitive processing; I think we just accept that paper is that way, but personally, having switched to reading PDFs (with bookmarks, search, etc.), I find paper very slow for any sort of random access. Also, I expect that as screen reading tech matures, the level of stress distraction will become much less. As a simple example, look at the recent boom (afaict) of applications offering and people using dark mode and night color mode. Another trick I use is to remember the outcomes for past reactionaries: They are popular and self-justified in the moment, but in the end all they did was waste time and miss out.
- garrickvanburen 5y ago
  As part of some genealogy work, I’m reading documents 200 years old - but digitized as searchable PDFs. Without that, I can’t imagine how much slower it would have gone and how many more dead ends I would have got stuck in.
kmtrowbr 5y ago
The reason that comprehension is decreased, is that when using a smartphone, you are mentally in the "world" of the smart phone, no doubt different for each person, but for me involving a bunch of unconscious behaviors such as: swiping, changing from app to app, scrolling, etc. The phone is a focal point & battleground of the attention economy. So many forces attacking your attention, few of which are in your best interests or serve your goals. An iPhone can be configured to work in your interests, but it takes quite a bit of effort. Aggressively curate the notifications. Turn most of them off. Put the phone on silent. Turn on all the "humane" features Apple has developed: the focuses, "wind-down," the sleep aids, etc. At night, leave your phone on your desk. Do not take it into your bedroom. Read a book in the bedroom. Try to use the phone to achieve specific goals, which you pre-mediate. That's the goal. Paper books exist in a totally different and simpler economy. It's not that they're perfect, but they're simpler. They're more about authors genuinely communicating their thoughts directly to you. There's an innocence lacking from smartphones. You can feel this if you pay attention. A smartphone gives me a stimulated, "something cool around the next corner," "on the verge of fulfillment" kind of feeling. That's why it can suck you in for literal hours if you let it. The feeling in many cases is a lie. You'll find yourself just swiping and tapping for no reason at all, just automatically, unconsciously. That's the trick of "variable rewards" e.g. a phone is a slot machine. A book is a quieter more peaceful feeling. You're just reading the author's words, one after another. You have no option to switch to something else. The magic of books is created by your own active attention & focus. Some people can probably achieve this on a phone, but it's definitely harder.
- rattray 5y ago
  One thing I found really helpful on Android is using "Extreme Battery Saver Mode" basically all the time. It turns off ~all apps fully, and makes you click through a dialog to enter one - and then click again after 5 minutes or the app turns off again. The downside is that you don't get notifications from messaging apps, which can be a problem (or amazing) depending on your situation. Whitelisting messaging apps would defeat the battery-saving purpose, of course.
acd 5y ago
Lets please stop calling new phone devices smart if you have smarter reading comprehension on plain paper.
ntSean 5y ago
This has a fundamentally faulty premise that smartphones and paper are equals in delivering reading material, or that their format is preferable. Learning platforms such as Duolingo, Brilliant, or Khan Academy very infrequently give you a wall of text to parse. This suggests, that it isn’t a necessity or preferable for comprehension. So to me, this feels silly. As if someone is complaining that a bike hurts your ability to leisurely move at a walking pace through a park. Why was there an expectation that it would be more ideal? Use tools are that are appropriate for the context. For long form text, use a context that allows you to consume slowly, whether than be an e-book or hard copy.
- toyg 5y ago
  > a wall of text to parse. This suggests, that it isn’t a necessity or preferable for comprehension. No, that suggests that those platforms understand the limitations of the medium and try to work around them - with mixed results. They still have to use a modicum of text, they just build other stuff around it to reinforce meaning. Your critique would be valid if these platforms were not using any text whatsoever - which might well happen at some point, in the distant future, but definitely is not the case now.
  - ntSean 5y ago
    Ironically I don’t understand why my critique must be framed in an extreme context to be valid! Must have been because I read this comment from my mobile device. Time to get the printer going ;)
- dorchadas 5y ago
  > This suggests, that it isn’t a necessity or preferable for comprehension. Or, it shows that they're trying to get people to stay around and use them more. I actually really doubt Duolingo produces anyone who has true comprehension in reading a passage of text simply because it only ever asks you to translate one-off sentences (and rarely at that, it only has you click words if you're on the app!). I don't think they're optimizing for comprehension and understanding as much as they're optimizing for user engagement.
kettleballroll 5y ago
It's worth pointing out that this is "published" in Nature Scientific Reports, which has (by design!) A very low barrier for publishing/peer review. It's just a small step up from arxiv. This also means we shouldn't take this report too seriously until it's published in a serious journal
- kgarten 5y ago
  not really ... anybody with 3 people vetting them can upload to arxiv. Nature Scientific Reports have a decent review cycle. Yes, it's easier to get in than into Nature or other top level publications. Yet, it's still harder than some 2nd 3rd tier conferences (at least in computer science). However, I agree with your sentiment. Don't take it too serious
  - kettleballroll 5y ago
    Interesting to hear, i was not aware of that! In my subfield (Machine Learning) publishing in Scientific Reports would be considered 3rd tier at best (frankly, i don't know anyone who's ever done it, because the community would just ignore it)... What field are you in? still, I wasn't aware they had an impact factor of 4.x, that's way higher than i thought.
say_it_as_it_is 5y ago
The grant funding for the study came from the paper industry.
- ImaCake 5y ago
  Did it actually? They don’t report this in the ethics statement where you would expect such a thing. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-05605-0#ethics https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-05605-0#ethics
ImaCake 5y ago
Unfortunately the p-values that are significant are only nominally significant. If you do a null experiment enough times it will sometimes look significant - even a broken clock is wrong sometimes. This doesn’t mean the paper isn’t detecting a real effect, its just that the noise in these experiments is large and the techniques or sample size insufficient to confidently overcome that noise. It’s a great contribution to it’s field, but I won’t be changing my habits based off it.
eliah 5y ago
Misleading graphs: in the results section, figure 1, the y-axis for the first graph ("Score of reading test") starts at 6, which makes it look like the paper medium has double the comprehension score of the smartphone medium -- actually it's only about 9 vs 7.5. A difference for sure, but not nearly as big as it visually appears.
ne0flex 5y ago
I wonder if this has to do with how our brain associates the importance of us reading something on the smartphone vs. reading something on paper. We spend much of our developing years reading from paper and taking tests, which may be telling our brains that things we've read on paper are likely to be of importance and worth remembering. Whereas smartphone use is mostly to browse / pass time so how brain takes things we've read via smartphone to not be as important. Perhaps the study would show different results if there was a generation of children whose school textbooks were primarily digital and had little social media use.

320 points by rzk 5y ago

I'm wondering how dumb ebook readers would compare vs paper. I got a kindle last year. Since then I've been reading (mostly novels) for at least 45 mins every day. Some weekend days I read for like 2-3 hours. It's been wonderful. My iPad Pro has been collecting dust for months.

ycombinete 5y ago
My gut feel is that this effect on comprehension, and increased prefrontal cortex activation, both happen because phones have so many distractions. The whole time I'm reading something on a phone my brain is constantly pinging me about all the other things that I do on my phone: emails/WhatsApp/Google word I don't know. So our conscious control centres in the PFC are always firing to mediate these little temptations. There are less of these temptations on a e-reader.
- pier25 5y ago
  Yeah that is my gut feeling too. So much stuff can happen on a phone that the brain can't relax and focus on a single task.
sturza 5y ago
I sold my iPad Pro for this exact reason and bought a 10" Pocketbook instead. I can confirm your ereader experience.

Syonyk 5y ago

I would be interested to see if an e-ink type reader is closer to paper or a smartphone in a test like this. I've generally let myself drift to them for long form reading, but do wonder if it's that much better than an LCD, in terms of how it's processed by the brain. I know it's better than being on a phone or tablet in terms of distractions, though.

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zacharyz 5y ago
I have been doing a lot of kindle reading lately and have noticed that I sleep easier when I transition to the actual e-ink device versus reading on my phone. I suspect it is due to the backlight (blue light, which has been shown to effect sleep and intensity).
crdrost 5y ago
One huge difference is that the low latency of E-ink means that we don't have scrolling yet. If you read articles on your phone you may notice that you read in a fundamentally different way then you read printed text. You generally keep your visual field located in exactly one place relative to the phone and then scroll content with your finger up into that space. It's as if you moved the book around while keeping your eyes in one place. On the printed medium your eye stays locked to the corners of the page, the page doesn't scroll out from underneath you. But of course you are also phrasing an interesting point, which is that screens are usually way brighter than ambient light. To this we can add that a mobile phone is so much smaller than a printed page, you think about the cognitive tasks involved in opening a paper where at first you would open it up wide and be surrounded by word and then you would fold it down to the part that you wanted to read and focus on... Hard to imagine a similar experience on a phone; a set of desktop screens has the right size, but maybe not the ability to effectively expand/condense...
- andai 5y ago
  I wonder if the fixity of location provided by printed materials is a significant factor in increased retention. I noticed that I often remember what part of a page I read something on. With a web page, no such "information location structure" exists: the flow of the text changes based on the device and configuration, and instead of discrete pages there's just one big one. The act of turning a page may also serve some function: the visual content is "refreshed", the patterns on the page are brand new and stimulating. Perhaps the memory for each page is "chunked" in a way that a write to long term storage occurs on pageflip. If so, then infinite scrolling would lead to "buffer overflows". Another thought about scrolling: I also wonder if the movement of the eyes "across" a page is more stimulating and ergonomic than keeping them in one place, which in my experience gets rather tiring.

zitterbewegung 5y ago

Cool study that involves thirty four individuals and no underlying reason why this is occurring...

betwixthewires 5y ago
I don't really buy it and I'm willing to bet it cannot be reproduced.
- zitterbewegung 5y ago
  That's the joke...

linspace 5y ago

As a frequent sigher I found most amusing the part about measuring the number of sighs. I had to dwelve deep in the article to find why it's significant: "Previous studies have indicated that the number of sighs increased with increased cognitive load[14,21]. In our study, the number of sighs increased during cognitive reading activity on a paper medium and decreased when reading on a smartphone." My anecdotal experience is that I sigh when tired, so the research passes my tests. Also, I love physical books. I love holding them, opening them, and of course, reading. If possible with a pencil in my hand.

amelius 5y ago
The smartphone equivalent of a "sigh" is the back-button/swipe.

jdofaz 5y ago

I recently discovered that it is very comfortable to read eBooks on my big screen tv (connected to a computer) from the couch. I like not having to hold anything and being able to sit in a comfortable position.

yehoshuapw 5y ago

a few key differences come to mind: * screen type vs paper * size * attention span reduction (even without notifications and so on, a phone automatically gets a negative amount of focus on a single thing) * "lost cost" to start using trying each of those specifically is possible - and will hint at much more.

lysium 5y ago
In the Materials they mention that screen and paper were of same size and (!) weight.

spicybright 5y ago

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ASalazarMX 5y ago
What? Do old people sigh more/less than young people? I think the experiment measures respiration, oxygenation and sigh frequency to correlate it with brain activity, not as an age metric. Edit: OMG just understood it was a joke...
moron4hire 5y ago
Generating sighs from the respiratory system, not a generation of people known as "Sigh".
chrischapman 5y ago
Not sure if you're being humorous but just in case, it means the 'making of a sigh' as in 'generating something new' rather than a 'group of people'. As a joke, it works for my generation. The older I get the more I sigh and these days it has a lot to do with cookie banners. But that's another matter.

ASalazarMX 5y ago

It's nice to see the data gathered even if there's no hypothesis at the end. It could be that a paper book is a better learning medium than a screen, but I suspect that smartphones are very, very needy devices, and subconsciously we expect a notification to pop up sooner or later and derail our train of thought. Smartphones are made for quick reads and instant satisfactions, not prolonged lecture. Anecdata: I frequently read books on my smartphone, but I'll put it in airplane or focus mode to rest easy that there will be no interruptions in a while. I've tried to read on a tablet, but the smartphone pinging from the desktop across the room can be very distracting.

Syonyk 5y ago
There was a study [0] that demonstrated that even having your smartphone near you - shut off, on the desk - reduced your ability to focus and concentrate. That's one of the reasons I've moved as much as I can to an e-reader, I know it won't interrupt me with other stuff. [0]: https://news.utexas.edu/2017/06/26/the-mere-presence-of-your-smartphone-reduces-brain-power/ https://news.utexas.edu/2017/06/26/the-mere-presence-of-your...
- iamcurious 5y ago
  It says that groups with the phone in their pocket focused better than those with phone face down on the table. Having something that can not be lost, forgotten or misplaced, in a place you are not used too have it could reduce focus too. Maybe the same lost of focus would happen with keys, or credit cards.

agumonkey 5y ago

Something that I've felt and heard some people on youtube verbalize: we miss side channel stimulation. Holding a book, folding pages, the texture, the smell. I wanted pdf to improve my reading but very very often is stalls, even on networkless tablets.

brimble 5y ago
> Holding a book, folding pages, the texture, the smell. This is the reason I can only tolerate reading ebooks in iBooks. If they ever remove the ability to idly mess with page corners in a way that feels almost like a physical object, I guess I'm just done with ebooks. Other readers I've seen with faux-page-turning don't do it right. They don't allow partial turns (just a page-turning animation—not the same thing, and always hideous), only allow a tiny amount of partial turn before the whole page flips over, or it doesn't feel closely-enough connected to your input. Even iBooks could be a lot better, but it's good enough. [EDIT] Apple Books, rather. Was it ever iBooks, or did I invent that? Either way, that's the program I'm talking about.
- jeromegv 5y ago
  It was iBooks! Was launched alongside the iPad https://www.macrumors.com/2010/05/07/apple-to-begin-international-roll-out-of-ibooks-and-ibookstore-alongside-ipad-launch/ https://www.macrumors.com/2010/05/07/apple-to-begin-internat...

Weryj 5y ago

I wonder if this is due to the attention economy with mobile devices. Pure speculation, but since we already associate a lot of other activities with a mobile devices, we may have a hard time isolating the activity and focus.

polskibus 5y ago

I wonder whether forcing yourself to breath a bit deeper during reading would increase comprehension. Or stopping after page or two for a couple of deep breaths. Most importantly, perhaps one can focus better when programming by controling own breath ?

openknot 5y ago
This is interesting. Perhaps if the breath reminds you to relax and stay on your chosen focus, though I would be doubtful that increased oxygen intake is directly a cause. I'm not sure about increased comprehension directly, because I've heard that the best way is to more actively engage with the material (e.g. by asking yourself questions about what you read), but there may be a link to mindfulness.

ortusdux 5y ago

I'm a big fan of waldenpond.press, a service that pulls articles from your pocket reading list, binds them into a book, and mails them to you once a month.

Syonyk 5y ago
That sounds both amazing and a bit wasteful of paper, though if it's more of a magazine than a newspaper, I might have to try that out! I definitely don't need a permanent bound copy of some random Atlantic or Vox article.
mab122 5y ago
Thats brilliant, something like that but weekly and pushed to my ereader would be great.

marto1 5y ago

Steam rolling children's dopamine receptors since birth doesn't have a positive effect on their long-term development ? Who would have known /s

hammock 5y ago

For those clueless as to the importance of "sigh generation" (as I was), here is a paper that goes into it: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4427060/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4427060/

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tra3 5y ago
I was curious too, this is right in the article: > A path analysis suggests that the interactive relationship between sigh inhibition and overactivity in the prefrontal cortex causes comprehension decline.
sundvor 5y ago
Thanks, I was going to post "sigh what?" I can't ever remember sighing, but I guess I'll be paying attention to it now. I like reading on my Kindle, fwiw.

matco11 5y ago

I am not sure this study is definitely convincing… …but I wonder if the extra amount of scrolling one has to do on smartphones compared to printed books could be distracting and lowering comprehension. Also, when I try to remember something I have red on a printed book, - sometimes - I can remember where on the page it was written, what else was on the page, or even what the page looked like. I experience none of that when reading on my smartphone.

kbenson 5y ago
I also feel like my comprehension of physical reading material was better, but it's been a while sine I actually used physical material for learning, so it could also just be my brain is worse at retaining information in my old age. Definitely something I think I'll experiment with though.
vagabund 5y ago
I don't know if it's the scrolling per se, so much as the more general psychological relationship we have with phones whose hardware and OS are designed to tantalize and distract. The majority of our prior experiences on the device will have primed our brain for something antithetical to the long-term concentrative state that's necessary for deep comprehension. By the same token of the advice for insomniacs to reserve your bed strictly for sleep, there's value in having purpose-built objects instead of just a singular omnipotent slab of glass.
johnchristopher 5y ago
> Also, when I try to remember something I have red on a printed book, - sometimes - I can remember where on the page it was written, what else was on the page, or even what the page looked like. I experience none of that when reading on my smartphone. This is so obvious to me but more than once I have hit the typical robot HN user on this topic for whom it doesn't matter the medium because he's an eidetic machine. So I'll just post this: > Beyond treating individual letters as physical objects, the human brain may also perceive a text in its entirety as a kind of physical landscape. When we read, we construct a mental representation of the text in which meaning is anchored to structure. The exact nature of such representations remains unclear, but they are likely similar to the mental maps we create of terrain—such as mountains and trails—and of man-made physical spaces, such as apartments and offices. Both anecdotally and in published studies, people report that when trying to locate a particular piece of written information they often remember where in the text it appeared. We might recall that we passed the red farmhouse near the start of the trail before we started climbing uphill through the forest; in a similar way, we remember that we read about Mr. Darcy rebuffing Elizabeth Bennett on the bottom of the left-hand page in one of the earlier chapters. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/reading-paper-screens/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/reading-paper-scr... And repost my comment from one of those times: >> The value provided by a physical map of a book is knowing how far along you are in the book, yet that's also available in a visual form in an ebook as well. You can even riffle through pages on most e-readers as well, seeing a preview of the page as you move quickly forward or backwards. >> Aside from weight, what value is the physical map really providing? > No, it provides more. > Actually your brain maps physical properties of the book to actual content, creating an overlay map over the story or the content (and our brain is really good at mentally mapping things). This is that map that is being used to know where in the book a particular piece of information is. > Reading on e-reader is more linear than reading a paper book. See: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/reading-paper-screens/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/reading-paper-scr... https://insights.uksg.org/articles/10.1629/uksg.236/ https://insights.uksg.org/articles/10.1629/uksg.236/ and https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/aug/19/readers-absorb-less-kindles-paper-study-plot-ereader-digitisation https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/aug/19/readers-absorb... > Besides, no e-reader today can let your riffle through pages as fast as paper book. > When you are in a novel, or in a manual, you have some kinetic and touch feedback to build memories of where's what. The book becomes an extension (à la proprioception) with much less friction than an e-read for which you have to wait for visual feedback (screen refreshing). > With paper books things are at the tip of your fingers. > E-reader have more friction. > That's a reason why I only read novels on e-reader and jot notes in a notepad for non-fiction books. > If I had the budget I'd only have physical books.

jdrc 5y ago

It will be a very good thing if phones start being treated as dumbing-down addictive habits as bad as smoking used to be.

iamcurious 5y ago
Thinking about it, a lot of people stopped smoking right when smartphones became a thing. Smoking was not just about the smoke, but about the social circle it created. I wonder how deep the analogy goes.

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omarhaneef 5y ago

Hypothesis: we are primed to expect ads to pop up, or some other interruption, when we read on phones, and even when those intrusions are held at bay, we have retain the expectation that they will emerge.

idatum 5y ago
+1 on this. I expect some kind of flashing ad or pop up, where that expectation itself is a distraction. It's rare that it's not a website I'm reading on mobile. The state of the internet. Sigh.
ravenstine 5y ago
And just a quick reminder for anyone reading this, disabling scripting by default for sites mostly solves the issue of delayed popup modals. The uBlock Origin element blocker can take care of anything that makes it through if JavaScript must be enabled. This is what I've been doing for the last few years and I haven't looked back. If a blog or article can't be viewed without JavaScript, then it probably wasn't worth reading. Likewise, I keep my phone on Do Not Disturb at all times, and have it configured to allow numbers in my contacts to ring through in case of emergencies. Everything else is silent. These things have significantly decreased the activity in the part of my brain that expects distractions and adverse UI patterns at any moment.

awinter-py 5y ago

scrolling, or generally anything that mutates the viewport, vastly reduces my reading speed maybe this is just my training and gen Z can handle it fine? but scrolling feels like mandatory vertical layout jank to get to page 2 enlightened UX archaeologists from the future will look back with humane pity on a web with increasingly prevalent sticky headers that destroy keyboard-based paging

MSKJ 5y ago
Perhaps, I read a lot on my phone (usually web novels). I keep my eyes fixed on a spot on my screen, usually reading 2 lines, and scroll to bring the next lines into my line of sight. This is very comfortable for me as I don't have to move my eyes around. I also think this increases my reading efficiency, although I haven't really done an A/B test to verify this
zajio1am 5y ago
Well, scrolling by fingers on screen is inconvenient, but e.g. FBReader app allows switching pages using volume up/down buttons.

_uoud 5y ago

It's not only comprehension decline, it's a combination of decreasing attention spans and the substitution of your memory by an electronic device (calendar, notes, etc.). I've been writing about what's happened to me during the COVID lockdowns, and I think quite a few of HN people share the feeling that one can barely even read a normal book at length these days... Here's my actual writeup from back in early 2021: https://www.lostbookofsales.com/age-of-distractions/ https://www.lostbookofsales.com/age-of-distractions/

monkeybutton 5y ago
I've started leaving my phone on silent and sitting on my kitchen table while I'm working. Just having it within arms reach at my desk has become too much at times. The lack of focus wasn't nearly this bad at the beginning of the pandemic for me.
- dylan604 5y ago
  I leave mine on silent, however, my 2FA app is on the phone. Getting up to retrieve from another room at each auth request would be tiresome. Maybe time to get a Yubikey like device instead???
  - Geezus-42 5y ago
    Bitwarden let's you use 2fa from your password vault if you pay $10/yr.
  - trevcanhuman 5y ago
    I’d advice setting up a password store[0] which does allow to get OTP codes right on the same device, but of course, it kinda defeats the purpose of 2FA but I still use it for not so important stuff. [0] https://passwordstore.org https://passwordstore.org
    - jackson1442 5y ago
      imo, as long as you combine "something you know" and "something you have," the effect is the same. So if you store your 2fa encrypted with a on your computer with a key only you know, it accomplishes the same thing.

webmobdev 5y ago

I don't think it reduces my comprehension, but I have noticed that it does have some effect on my memory - I have some trouble recollecting something I have read online. I don't know if this is because of over consumption (there's too much information and we want to consume it all) or if it's a learned behaviour of not making an effort to remember it since you can access the information again in the future easily through search or bookmarks.

rcarmo 5y ago

Well, I tend to sigh a lot when reading some sites on my phone…

_the_inflator 5y ago

For context, China banned phones in school due to this reason: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-55902778 https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-55902778

908B64B197 5y ago
> due to this reason Keep in mind the internet is also one of the only places where young Chinese might get exposed to English and western content. Can you imagine a Chinese child having a conversation with a young American and learning that they have multiple parties? Checks and balances? Tiananmen Square?

nottorp 5y ago

Hmm but is it the screen, or the interruptions? Personally I don't feel like i have trouble reading on either epaper or a tablet, but in either case all the notifications are off.

closetohome 5y ago
Interruptions are a good theory, but it seems unlikely they would have people use their own phones for the experiment, as that would introduce as many variables as there are participants. I would think they just hand everyone a 'clean' phone with no apps on it. I'd love to see the difference between someone reading a phone-sized piece of paper, a phone, a non-touch LCD that only shows a block of text, and a similarly sized e-ink screen.

buzzwords 5y ago

I wonder if there is some sort of trade off (cognitively speaking).

aktuel 5y ago

What unbelievable rubbish. Sigh.

mancerayder 5y ago

I find I remember things better in a paper book than a phone (for sure!) and possibly even a Kindle. There's something about keeping my fingers in other page sections, folding over the corners of useful pages (even if I never revisit), and remembering the location of information on the page. In college I would often remember WHERE a detail was located, but I didn't know the detail itself. It's like my brain was creating an index to the data based on its approximate page location and the location within the page itself (and crucially whether it was on the left side or the right side of the book when open). Did anyone else experience something like this?

weq 5y ago

Youtube can be viewed as a micro-education platform and this seamless dissemination of information for those who seek it will start to balance out the loss of traditionally valued skills such as remmebering and regurertating tainted points of view pushed on the masses by whoever is connected enough to influence the countries politcal system. ie. It could be argued that some western nations feel dumbed down by mobile phones, while people in underdeveloped nations see it as a on-ramp to modernisation and a vector of information discovery instead of a vector of distraction.

weq 5y ago
ie. Right now i am learning to weld off an old Canandian body work man on the other side of the world, like taking an apprentiship with a master in the comfort of my home, on demand. Ive never enabled notifications on my phone, its always on silent, ive never installed a FAANG app on it, i use my phone as a tool. Im getting a education that would cost me time x dollars x effort if i was enroll in a traditional technical collage. Just because your have found yourself searching for meaning in your life through your phone distractions, doesnt mean its a bad thing. Its your body telling you that while you may be making some money right now, your actually not persuring a dream that is satisfying your inner yerning for a meaningful existance. I cant watch a movie at length anymore, but i can keep my phone next to me for an entire day and actually forget its there enough to go looking for it in other place when i actually need it. I love my work though, coding is a hobby turned passion turned career turned never worked a day in my life after quitting k-mart at 20 to live it. Yet im divorced from a doctor who spent every hour of every day she was not working, distracting herself with her phone, gaming, ignoring the world, obsessed with stalking people on facebook, getting despressed with her life, trying to bandaid it with InstaSatisfation, because of all the trauma she has suffered yet never dealt with. On the outside, she is a success of a women, and will save your life in the ER; but in every other situation, she is a complete mess on the verge of suicide due to unresolved PTSD. Your education, or your job does not define you. You are more then your successes (and your failures) and the WWW has allowed people to see this at scale more then anytime in history. its reshaping our society, and what we grew up with, what our parents valued, is slowly fading away for a new modern set of skills. Those modern skills dont resolve around books, or attention. But the ability to wade through through loads of crap to find the gems that add value to your existance. Not distract from it.

wolverine876 5y ago

I want to be careful about being a technology reactionary and just finding confirmation bias: e.g., I'm tired of change and find something that confirms my frustration. One trick I use to shake up my persective is to remember the other side of the equation: When change occurs, some things are lost, but also some are gained. In some ways, I expect we function better reading on screens. Or I try to look at it the other way, remembering that there is nothing more natural about the older technology (usually) - it's only what we are accustomed to - i.e., what if instead of moving from technology A to B, we were moving from B to A? And then remembering: A has matured (being older); B usually has not but, if adopted, will mature. One thing I would guess, if moving from screen to paper, is that the technology wouldn't keep up with our cognitive processing; I think we just accept that paper is that way, but personally, having switched to reading PDFs (with bookmarks, search, etc.), I find paper very slow for any sort of random access. Also, I expect that as screen reading tech matures, the level of stress distraction will become much less. As a simple example, look at the recent boom (afaict) of applications offering and people using dark mode and night color mode. Another trick I use is to remember the outcomes for past reactionaries: They are popular and self-justified in the moment, but in the end all they did was waste time and miss out.

garrickvanburen 5y ago
As part of some genealogy work, I’m reading documents 200 years old - but digitized as searchable PDFs. Without that, I can’t imagine how much slower it would have gone and how many more dead ends I would have got stuck in.

kmtrowbr 5y ago

The reason that comprehension is decreased, is that when using a smartphone, you are mentally in the "world" of the smart phone, no doubt different for each person, but for me involving a bunch of unconscious behaviors such as: swiping, changing from app to app, scrolling, etc. The phone is a focal point & battleground of the attention economy. So many forces attacking your attention, few of which are in your best interests or serve your goals. An iPhone can be configured to work in your interests, but it takes quite a bit of effort. Aggressively curate the notifications. Turn most of them off. Put the phone on silent. Turn on all the "humane" features Apple has developed: the focuses, "wind-down," the sleep aids, etc. At night, leave your phone on your desk. Do not take it into your bedroom. Read a book in the bedroom. Try to use the phone to achieve specific goals, which you pre-mediate. That's the goal. Paper books exist in a totally different and simpler economy. It's not that they're perfect, but they're simpler. They're more about authors genuinely communicating their thoughts directly to you. There's an innocence lacking from smartphones. You can feel this if you pay attention. A smartphone gives me a stimulated, "something cool around the next corner," "on the verge of fulfillment" kind of feeling. That's why it can suck you in for literal hours if you let it. The feeling in many cases is a lie. You'll find yourself just swiping and tapping for no reason at all, just automatically, unconsciously. That's the trick of "variable rewards" e.g. a phone is a slot machine. A book is a quieter more peaceful feeling. You're just reading the author's words, one after another. You have no option to switch to something else. The magic of books is created by your own active attention & focus. Some people can probably achieve this on a phone, but it's definitely harder.

rattray 5y ago
One thing I found really helpful on Android is using "Extreme Battery Saver Mode" basically all the time. It turns off ~all apps fully, and makes you click through a dialog to enter one - and then click again after 5 minutes or the app turns off again. The downside is that you don't get notifications from messaging apps, which can be a problem (or amazing) depending on your situation. Whitelisting messaging apps would defeat the battery-saving purpose, of course.

acd 5y ago

Lets please stop calling new phone devices smart if you have smarter reading comprehension on plain paper.

ntSean 5y ago

This has a fundamentally faulty premise that smartphones and paper are equals in delivering reading material, or that their format is preferable. Learning platforms such as Duolingo, Brilliant, or Khan Academy very infrequently give you a wall of text to parse. This suggests, that it isn’t a necessity or preferable for comprehension. So to me, this feels silly. As if someone is complaining that a bike hurts your ability to leisurely move at a walking pace through a park. Why was there an expectation that it would be more ideal? Use tools are that are appropriate for the context. For long form text, use a context that allows you to consume slowly, whether than be an e-book or hard copy.

toyg 5y ago
> a wall of text to parse. This suggests, that it isn’t a necessity or preferable for comprehension. No, that suggests that those platforms understand the limitations of the medium and try to work around them - with mixed results. They still have to use a modicum of text, they just build other stuff around it to reinforce meaning. Your critique would be valid if these platforms were not using any text whatsoever - which might well happen at some point, in the distant future, but definitely is not the case now.
- ntSean 5y ago
  Ironically I don’t understand why my critique must be framed in an extreme context to be valid! Must have been because I read this comment from my mobile device. Time to get the printer going ;)
dorchadas 5y ago
> This suggests, that it isn’t a necessity or preferable for comprehension. Or, it shows that they're trying to get people to stay around and use them more. I actually really doubt Duolingo produces anyone who has true comprehension in reading a passage of text simply because it only ever asks you to translate one-off sentences (and rarely at that, it only has you click words if you're on the app!). I don't think they're optimizing for comprehension and understanding as much as they're optimizing for user engagement.

kettleballroll 5y ago

It's worth pointing out that this is "published" in Nature Scientific Reports, which has (by design!) A very low barrier for publishing/peer review. It's just a small step up from arxiv. This also means we shouldn't take this report too seriously until it's published in a serious journal

kgarten 5y ago
not really ... anybody with 3 people vetting them can upload to arxiv. Nature Scientific Reports have a decent review cycle. Yes, it's easier to get in than into Nature or other top level publications. Yet, it's still harder than some 2nd 3rd tier conferences (at least in computer science). However, I agree with your sentiment. Don't take it too serious
- kettleballroll 5y ago
  Interesting to hear, i was not aware of that! In my subfield (Machine Learning) publishing in Scientific Reports would be considered 3rd tier at best (frankly, i don't know anyone who's ever done it, because the community would just ignore it)... What field are you in? still, I wasn't aware they had an impact factor of 4.x, that's way higher than i thought.

say_it_as_it_is 5y ago

The grant funding for the study came from the paper industry.

ImaCake 5y ago
Did it actually? They don’t report this in the ethics statement where you would expect such a thing. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-05605-0#ethics https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-05605-0#ethics

ImaCake 5y ago

Unfortunately the p-values that are significant are only nominally significant. If you do a null experiment enough times it will sometimes look significant - even a broken clock is wrong sometimes. This doesn’t mean the paper isn’t detecting a real effect, its just that the noise in these experiments is large and the techniques or sample size insufficient to confidently overcome that noise. It’s a great contribution to it’s field, but I won’t be changing my habits based off it.

eliah 5y ago

Misleading graphs: in the results section, figure 1, the y-axis for the first graph ("Score of reading test") starts at 6, which makes it look like the paper medium has double the comprehension score of the smartphone medium -- actually it's only about 9 vs 7.5. A difference for sure, but not nearly as big as it visually appears.

ne0flex 5y ago

I wonder if this has to do with how our brain associates the importance of us reading something on the smartphone vs. reading something on paper. We spend much of our developing years reading from paper and taking tests, which may be telling our brains that things we've read on paper are likely to be of importance and worth remembering. Whereas smartphone use is mostly to browse / pass time so how brain takes things we've read via smartphone to not be as important. Perhaps the study would show different results if there was a generation of children whose school textbooks were primarily digital and had little social media use.