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I’m not a scientist in this field, but I would have been very surprised to have seen a difference in cognitive ability this quickly. I’ve always felt that we w

I’m not a scientist in this field, but I would have been very surprised to have seen a difference in cognitive ability this quickly. I’ve always felt that we wouldn’t recover from the negative impacts of phone addiction very quickly, if ever, after several years of addiction to doom scrolling, social media feeds, and the short bursts of 10-second videos. I wish more real research in this field was being done, so that we could have some solid evidence — and proper warnings against — the negative impacts of phone addiction. Until then, kids — and their parents — are left with the unfortunate decision between phone addition, and social ostracism.

Liquix 2y ago
> left with the unfortunate decision between phone addition, and social ostracism. This line of thinking perpetuates the problem. More people getting addicted does not mean addiction is a prerequisite to live a full life. It's never been more important to aggressively curtail phone use – and make unpopular decisions that your kids will thank you for later – than it is now.
- jader201 2y ago
  I’m not sure if you have kids, but I’m not sure making the choice to ostracize your kids is one they’d thank you for later. And, certainly not all kids would. It very much depends on the kid / the impact said ostracism would have.
  - acron0 2y ago
    This is why it needs implementing systemically, and not ad hoc. If no one has social media, no one is being ostracised. If only one person opts out then yes, they risk being ostracised.
    - jader201 2y ago
      100% agreed, which was my point above about studies being done to prove the negative impacts, so everyone could actually get on board, instead of it being done ad hoc. It took public shaming to start to reduce addiction to cigarettes, after we were able to show how bad they were for you.
  - ANewFormation 2y ago
    The ostracization is a strawman. A few good friends (or even just one) is, imo, going to provide far more fulfillment than a million digital friends. And when living in an appropriate place to raise children (playgrounds, etc near housing) it's super easy to meet other parents. And, in my experience at least, a rather large percent are also against 'digitizing' their kids. Making friends the old fashioned way, and not just for your children.
    - jensensbutton 2y ago
      > And when living in an appropriate place to raise children (playgrounds, etc near housing) it's super easy to meet other parents. Ah, so this yet another aspect of health that one needs a certain amount of money to enjoy.
      - ANewFormation 2y ago
        This sort of stuff is ubiquitous in cheap more ruralish areas. Negligible crime rates are also important, and once again something you'd be more inclined to find well outside the city.
    - sahmeepee 2y ago
      I don't think you have the appropriate context here. This isn't about "good" (in person?) friends vs digital friends known only online. This is about schoolkids who almost all have smartphones losing a channel of communication with their schoolmates and thus being excluded from much of what goes on in the social group outside of school. I have a child around this age and can absolutely see the issue, but I think it's less about phones per se and more about messaging apps and/or social media. For us, banning the phone itself wouldn't have these effects because we impose suitable restrictions on use as well as having put effort into educating our kids on healthy behaviours. There are a small number of kids in the year group with "nokias" (non-smart phones) and they aren't looked down on or deliberately excluded by others, but they might feel they are missing out on something. As the kids get older and more independent their needs for communication tools will surely grow, but not so much social media.
- FollowingTheDao 2y ago
  Knowing a few alcoholics this is part of the problem with addiction. You make friends with other addicts, and those bonds are broken when you have to quit. The social aspect has to be addressed or the addiction is harder to quit. So I agree with you, but the social isolation is an important factor in keeping people off the phone. Also, I am finding that younger folk do not know how to interact with people IRL. I am faced with fear, uncertainty, shyness, anxiety...and all of these issues were created by the phone use as well. It is a very complex issue to solve.
rrr_oh_man 2y ago
> I’m not a scientist in this field, but I would have been very surprised to have seen a difference in cognitive ability this quickly. Not sure. I worked with a science team that had found very strong cognitive improvements in the short term (~2 weeks) after improving sleep quality. Though, study participants were mostly middle aged and elderly.
- jader201 2y ago
  I feel like sleep quality and phone addiction are very different, even if somewhat connected. I would agree, though, that improving sleep quality would definitely improve cognitive function. But removing phones would only help if it’s degrading sleep. If phone addiction has no impact on sleep (e.g. the parents still enforce regular bedtimes), then I would not expect that much, if any, cognitive improvement. Not quickly, anyway. Either way, these two need to be studied independently to know for sure.
  - sahmeepee 2y ago
    I agree that this study didn't separate the two very well, but it's a difficult task to be fair. They found that the kids' bed times were far earlier without phones, but was that a short term effect? Was it an effect of being observed and measured? If the parents valued their kids' sleep, why was the average bed time of 12 year old kids after 11pm pre-ban? You could blame that lack of sleep on phones if it made you feel better I suppose, but it's clearly not the whole story.
- IshKebab 2y ago
  That seems plausible though. I have small kids and hence bad sleep often and when I'm very tired I often have to put off difficult programming tasks for another day and just do refactoring or whatever. I think it's entirely expected that it's harder to think clearly when you're really tired. Is it harder to think clearly because you've just been watching shorts/reels for an hour? Absolutely not. It's an addictive waste of time, sure. But trying to claim some kind of cognitive impairment is just this generation's "X rots your brains" (where X has been TV and then video games).
llm_trw 2y ago
You should read what Socrates has to say about book addicts. We need to burn more of them to raise awareness of just how pernicious the written word is.
- Jakob 2y ago
  Socrates says that profound knowledge is gained through interaction. He compares the written word to a painting, meaning it can be analysed but it doesn’t respond to questions and is therefore not a substitute for dialog. This mirrors the critique to phones: used primarily to passively watch “paintings” instead of interacting. The viewer’s knowledge and critical thinking is improving only seemingly at best.
  - lilbonaparte 2y ago
    Do you have a link to this. I’m interested in reading more?
  - 0xEF 2y ago
    Even Socrates could tell when the consumer has become the product, so I guess this is not a new problem. I wonder if there is some sort of solipsistic voice within us that recognizes when too much exposure or connectivity to other people becomes overwhelming in a way that we lose ourselves in it. I grew up and remember the times before everyone had easy access to the Internet in their homes, let alone on a high-powered terminal that now fits in our pockets. Those of us of a certain age remember a shift in social interaction that rivaled the previous generations telling mine we consumed too much tv (the 24/7 news cycle was a terrible idea for my generation, in retrospect). On the one hand, kids don't need their smartphones in schools because mine did just fine without them. On the other hand, the smartphones can be used for a force of good, provided those "paintings" they are looking at are enriching their learning and growth in some way, setting them up to ask better questions when engaged in the Socratic dialogue. But how do we guide usage toward that aim? That is the real question we should be asking.
- wholinator2 2y ago
  Sure, maybe in his time he was right. Maybe he wasn't. But i think if you go ask parents of grade/middle/high schoolers they'd cry with joy if their children were just addicted to reading. It's fully possible that going from only ever interacting in the real world with people to sitting alone reading all day caused some problems with integration. It's also entirely possible that phones do a different kind of thing by not just dampening real world interactions, but effectively siphoning out your attention span as well (have you never felt this? Do you scroll on any of the infinite feed bullshit? If you think it doesn't obliterate your attention span, spend the first hour of every day watching tiktok and then tell me how easy it is to start work). We all know that attention span is _required_ to get anything done academically, so directly correlated to intelligence, or at least the ability to get anything done at all. We all know that children are building their brains, and that significant experiences in childhood impact the view and life of the person far into adulthood. Ergo, do you really thing that being unable to read a single paragraph about Socrates for the future of... the world? I simply cannot understand the pushback to such a simple and effective policy. Sure, the researchers probably have a bias. All schools aren't being made to do this, many schools implementing this are _choosing_ to, because _they_ interact with our children academically and know that the grade school generation is gonna eat rocks on any college level task because they can't stop looking at their phones, something which is easy to observe many children are _physically incapable of doing_. Sure, maybe it's a really good time for impossibly motivated and unsocial children, i was one of them, and i can tell you that even having not grown up with it, i (almost 30) am having a hell of a time balancing needing to have snapchat to stay in contact with friends i moved away from, and getting trapped in the continuous feed the app seems to insert into more and more places. About using reddit as a scholarly resource for any question google won't help with and getting trapped in their endless feed. I know it's bad, and I'm a fully grown adult member of society, and i didn't grow up with it. And i'll tell you, i'd trade this phone shit for a book addiction in a microsecond. What you're advocating for is a future where average attention span continuously decreases. Why do you want that? Why are you against the idea that phone might be fucking bad for us, and especially so for children? What experiences have you had with phone addiction in yourself and loved ones that gives you credibility in this topic? Genuinely asking
Aerroon 2y ago
Perhaps the real research doesn't find these bombastic results that "everyone knows are true"? The 'researchers' in the article had a conclusion, the experiment didn't agree with it and then thought of excuses as to why. >Until then, kids — and their parents — are left with the unfortunate decision between phone addition, and social ostracism. Even this just presumes it's all negative. Why?
maccard 2y ago
> I would have been very surprised to have seen a difference in cognitive ability this quickly Sleep deprivation is really, really bad for you. Here [0] is one example that tries to measure reaction times compared to drinking (in the context of driving). Being tired is pretty much being drunk. Here [1] is another on cognitive activity. It’s not surprising to me in the slightest (anecdotally, I suffer from bouts of insomnia and my behaviour, mood and cognitive performance in work is definitely lower during those times. Even a single nights sleep shows a huge change in my mood INE) that if reducing smartphone usage they get more sleep that they pretty much immediately saw improvements. [0] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32571274/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32571274/ [1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23029352/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23029352/
- Tenoke 2y ago
  Driving performance after 24+ hours of being awake is pretty irrelevant to phones (even if they cause you to sleep less they don't cause you to not sleep at all), and it's just some brief effect with no reason to think otherwise from looking at this.
- nverno 2y ago
  Anectdotally, I've also been getting in a bad habit of staying up 2-3 days and agree there are similarities to being drunk - certainly in terms of cognitive ability and reflexes - but I even experience similar loss of inhibition (although not in nearly as fun a way). The first serious cognitive effect I've encountered is struggling to find a word I'm searching for (or recalling a person's name) in conversation. On the third day, I also start having significant vision impairment, reminiscent of hallucinogenic effects, where objects seem to be swaying slightly when I focus on them. It also quite apparent to me that it is much harder to retain information learned after being up for a day or two.
djtango 2y ago
I think I had focus issues probably coming from playing too much videogames when I was young and it took 2-3 years to fully reset and achieve a real level of focus. I was able to compound that when I didn't have a proper smart phone for about another 2 years. Since getting a real phone its all been downhill again
jrtageh 2y ago
I'm not surprised to see cognitive ability rise quickly. When I ditch the computer for two days and use pencil and paper, my math abilities rise sharply.

Liquix 2y ago

> left with the unfortunate decision between phone addition, and social ostracism. This line of thinking perpetuates the problem. More people getting addicted does not mean addiction is a prerequisite to live a full life. It's never been more important to aggressively curtail phone use – and make unpopular decisions that your kids will thank you for later – than it is now.

jader201 2y ago
I’m not sure if you have kids, but I’m not sure making the choice to ostracize your kids is one they’d thank you for later. And, certainly not all kids would. It very much depends on the kid / the impact said ostracism would have.
- acron0 2y ago
  This is why it needs implementing systemically, and not ad hoc. If no one has social media, no one is being ostracised. If only one person opts out then yes, they risk being ostracised.
  - jader201 2y ago
    100% agreed, which was my point above about studies being done to prove the negative impacts, so everyone could actually get on board, instead of it being done ad hoc. It took public shaming to start to reduce addiction to cigarettes, after we were able to show how bad they were for you.
- ANewFormation 2y ago
  The ostracization is a strawman. A few good friends (or even just one) is, imo, going to provide far more fulfillment than a million digital friends. And when living in an appropriate place to raise children (playgrounds, etc near housing) it's super easy to meet other parents. And, in my experience at least, a rather large percent are also against 'digitizing' their kids. Making friends the old fashioned way, and not just for your children.
  - jensensbutton 2y ago
    > And when living in an appropriate place to raise children (playgrounds, etc near housing) it's super easy to meet other parents. Ah, so this yet another aspect of health that one needs a certain amount of money to enjoy.
    - ANewFormation 2y ago
      This sort of stuff is ubiquitous in cheap more ruralish areas. Negligible crime rates are also important, and once again something you'd be more inclined to find well outside the city.
  - sahmeepee 2y ago
    I don't think you have the appropriate context here. This isn't about "good" (in person?) friends vs digital friends known only online. This is about schoolkids who almost all have smartphones losing a channel of communication with their schoolmates and thus being excluded from much of what goes on in the social group outside of school. I have a child around this age and can absolutely see the issue, but I think it's less about phones per se and more about messaging apps and/or social media. For us, banning the phone itself wouldn't have these effects because we impose suitable restrictions on use as well as having put effort into educating our kids on healthy behaviours. There are a small number of kids in the year group with "nokias" (non-smart phones) and they aren't looked down on or deliberately excluded by others, but they might feel they are missing out on something. As the kids get older and more independent their needs for communication tools will surely grow, but not so much social media.
FollowingTheDao 2y ago
Knowing a few alcoholics this is part of the problem with addiction. You make friends with other addicts, and those bonds are broken when you have to quit. The social aspect has to be addressed or the addiction is harder to quit. So I agree with you, but the social isolation is an important factor in keeping people off the phone. Also, I am finding that younger folk do not know how to interact with people IRL. I am faced with fear, uncertainty, shyness, anxiety...and all of these issues were created by the phone use as well. It is a very complex issue to solve.

rrr_oh_man 2y ago

> I’m not a scientist in this field, but I would have been very surprised to have seen a difference in cognitive ability this quickly. Not sure. I worked with a science team that had found very strong cognitive improvements in the short term (~2 weeks) after improving sleep quality. Though, study participants were mostly middle aged and elderly.

jader201 2y ago
I feel like sleep quality and phone addiction are very different, even if somewhat connected. I would agree, though, that improving sleep quality would definitely improve cognitive function. But removing phones would only help if it’s degrading sleep. If phone addiction has no impact on sleep (e.g. the parents still enforce regular bedtimes), then I would not expect that much, if any, cognitive improvement. Not quickly, anyway. Either way, these two need to be studied independently to know for sure.
- sahmeepee 2y ago
  I agree that this study didn't separate the two very well, but it's a difficult task to be fair. They found that the kids' bed times were far earlier without phones, but was that a short term effect? Was it an effect of being observed and measured? If the parents valued their kids' sleep, why was the average bed time of 12 year old kids after 11pm pre-ban? You could blame that lack of sleep on phones if it made you feel better I suppose, but it's clearly not the whole story.
IshKebab 2y ago
That seems plausible though. I have small kids and hence bad sleep often and when I'm very tired I often have to put off difficult programming tasks for another day and just do refactoring or whatever. I think it's entirely expected that it's harder to think clearly when you're really tired. Is it harder to think clearly because you've just been watching shorts/reels for an hour? Absolutely not. It's an addictive waste of time, sure. But trying to claim some kind of cognitive impairment is just this generation's "X rots your brains" (where X has been TV and then video games).

llm_trw 2y ago

You should read what Socrates has to say about book addicts. We need to burn more of them to raise awareness of just how pernicious the written word is.

Jakob 2y ago
Socrates says that profound knowledge is gained through interaction. He compares the written word to a painting, meaning it can be analysed but it doesn’t respond to questions and is therefore not a substitute for dialog. This mirrors the critique to phones: used primarily to passively watch “paintings” instead of interacting. The viewer’s knowledge and critical thinking is improving only seemingly at best.
- lilbonaparte 2y ago
  Do you have a link to this. I’m interested in reading more?
- 0xEF 2y ago
  Even Socrates could tell when the consumer has become the product, so I guess this is not a new problem. I wonder if there is some sort of solipsistic voice within us that recognizes when too much exposure or connectivity to other people becomes overwhelming in a way that we lose ourselves in it. I grew up and remember the times before everyone had easy access to the Internet in their homes, let alone on a high-powered terminal that now fits in our pockets. Those of us of a certain age remember a shift in social interaction that rivaled the previous generations telling mine we consumed too much tv (the 24/7 news cycle was a terrible idea for my generation, in retrospect). On the one hand, kids don't need their smartphones in schools because mine did just fine without them. On the other hand, the smartphones can be used for a force of good, provided those "paintings" they are looking at are enriching their learning and growth in some way, setting them up to ask better questions when engaged in the Socratic dialogue. But how do we guide usage toward that aim? That is the real question we should be asking.
wholinator2 2y ago
Sure, maybe in his time he was right. Maybe he wasn't. But i think if you go ask parents of grade/middle/high schoolers they'd cry with joy if their children were just addicted to reading. It's fully possible that going from only ever interacting in the real world with people to sitting alone reading all day caused some problems with integration. It's also entirely possible that phones do a different kind of thing by not just dampening real world interactions, but effectively siphoning out your attention span as well (have you never felt this? Do you scroll on any of the infinite feed bullshit? If you think it doesn't obliterate your attention span, spend the first hour of every day watching tiktok and then tell me how easy it is to start work). We all know that attention span is _required_ to get anything done academically, so directly correlated to intelligence, or at least the ability to get anything done at all. We all know that children are building their brains, and that significant experiences in childhood impact the view and life of the person far into adulthood. Ergo, do you really thing that being unable to read a single paragraph about Socrates for the future of... the world? I simply cannot understand the pushback to such a simple and effective policy. Sure, the researchers probably have a bias. All schools aren't being made to do this, many schools implementing this are _choosing_ to, because _they_ interact with our children academically and know that the grade school generation is gonna eat rocks on any college level task because they can't stop looking at their phones, something which is easy to observe many children are _physically incapable of doing_. Sure, maybe it's a really good time for impossibly motivated and unsocial children, i was one of them, and i can tell you that even having not grown up with it, i (almost 30) am having a hell of a time balancing needing to have snapchat to stay in contact with friends i moved away from, and getting trapped in the continuous feed the app seems to insert into more and more places. About using reddit as a scholarly resource for any question google won't help with and getting trapped in their endless feed. I know it's bad, and I'm a fully grown adult member of society, and i didn't grow up with it. And i'll tell you, i'd trade this phone shit for a book addiction in a microsecond. What you're advocating for is a future where average attention span continuously decreases. Why do you want that? Why are you against the idea that phone might be fucking bad for us, and especially so for children? What experiences have you had with phone addiction in yourself and loved ones that gives you credibility in this topic? Genuinely asking

Aerroon 2y ago

Perhaps the real research doesn't find these bombastic results that "everyone knows are true"? The 'researchers' in the article had a conclusion, the experiment didn't agree with it and then thought of excuses as to why. >Until then, kids — and their parents — are left with the unfortunate decision between phone addition, and social ostracism. Even this just presumes it's all negative. Why?

maccard 2y ago

> I would have been very surprised to have seen a difference in cognitive ability this quickly Sleep deprivation is really, really bad for you. Here [0] is one example that tries to measure reaction times compared to drinking (in the context of driving). Being tired is pretty much being drunk. Here [1] is another on cognitive activity. It’s not surprising to me in the slightest (anecdotally, I suffer from bouts of insomnia and my behaviour, mood and cognitive performance in work is definitely lower during those times. Even a single nights sleep shows a huge change in my mood INE) that if reducing smartphone usage they get more sleep that they pretty much immediately saw improvements. [0] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32571274/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32571274/ [1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23029352/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23029352/

Tenoke 2y ago
Driving performance after 24+ hours of being awake is pretty irrelevant to phones (even if they cause you to sleep less they don't cause you to not sleep at all), and it's just some brief effect with no reason to think otherwise from looking at this.
nverno 2y ago
Anectdotally, I've also been getting in a bad habit of staying up 2-3 days and agree there are similarities to being drunk - certainly in terms of cognitive ability and reflexes - but I even experience similar loss of inhibition (although not in nearly as fun a way). The first serious cognitive effect I've encountered is struggling to find a word I'm searching for (or recalling a person's name) in conversation. On the third day, I also start having significant vision impairment, reminiscent of hallucinogenic effects, where objects seem to be swaying slightly when I focus on them. It also quite apparent to me that it is much harder to retain information learned after being up for a day or two.

djtango 2y ago

I think I had focus issues probably coming from playing too much videogames when I was young and it took 2-3 years to fully reset and achieve a real level of focus. I was able to compound that when I didn't have a proper smart phone for about another 2 years. Since getting a real phone its all been downhill again

jrtageh 2y ago

I'm not surprised to see cognitive ability rise quickly. When I ditch the computer for two days and use pencil and paper, my math abilities rise sharply.