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As the phone’s proximity increased, brainpower decreased. It was as if the smartphones had force fields that sapped their owners’ intelligence. In subsequent interviews, nearly all the students said that their phones hadn’t been a distraction—that they hadn’t even thought about the devices during the experiment. They remained oblivious even as the phones muddled their thinking.
It isn’t just our reasoning that takes a hit when phones are around. Our social skills and relationships appear to suffer as well. Because smartphones serve as constant reminders of all the friends we could be exchanging messages with electronically, they pull at our minds when we’re talking with someone in person. Conversations become shallower and less satisfying.
At every instant of the day, our nervous system is bombarded by stimuli that may be worthy of our attention—objects in our field of view, sounds and scents, people we know and people we don’t know, ideas and memories, emotions, bodily sensations.
From the near-infinite welter of possibilities, the mind has to choose a target. This enormously complicated, enormously important task—nothing so determines our thoughts and behavior as the distribution of our attention—is accomplished through a neural system called the salience network.
In selecting targets of attention, the network gives priority to four types of stimuli: those that are novel or unexpected, those that are pleasurable or otherwise rewarding, those that are personally relevant, and those that are emotionally engaging.16 These are exactly the kinds of stimuli our smartphones supply—all the time and in abundance.
Imagine combining a mailbox, a newspaper, a TV, a radio, a photo album, a public library, a personal diary, and a boisterous party attended by everyone you know, and then compressing them all into a single, small, radiant object. That’s what a smartphone represents to us.
The seemingly innocuous features we now take for granted on social media—the “like” and “heart” buttons that signal appreciation and affection, the swipe gestures that refresh the screen with new information, the “streak” counts that tally exchanges with friends, the infinite scrolls of stuff—are variations on psychological-conditioning techniques pioneered by slot-machine makers.
We’re never sure exactly what will happen when we touch the screen, but we know we might like it. So, like compulsive gamblers, we keep coming back for more.
The goal of the programming is to maximize “time-on-device”—a term common to both Las Vegas and Silicon Valley.
It’s common today, even more so than ten years ago, to think of knowledge as something that surrounds us, something we swim through and consume, like sea creatures in plankton-filled waters. The ideal of knowledge as something self-created, something woven of the facts, ideas, and experiences gathered in the individual mind, continues to recede.
Digital recording encourages neurological erasing. They dubbed this phenomenon the “Google effect,”
Human beings are “cognitive misers,” a half century of research has shown.25 If we can offload or otherwise avoid mental work, we generally will, even when it’s not in our best interest.
when people record their experiences in digital form, they end up with foggier memories of the experiences.
If prints of snapshots glued to the pages of photo albums served as aides-memoire, digital pictures stored as intangible data appear to have the opposite effect, rendering the mind less absorbent.
It turns out that we’re not very good at distinguishing the knowledge we keep in our heads from the information we find online.
when people call up information through their phones or other computers, they often end up suffering delusions of intelligence. They feel as though “their own mental capacities” had generated the information, not their devices.
We want to blame algorithms and bots for the circulation of lies online, but the real culprits, the researchers discovered, are people: “False news spreads farther, faster, deeper, and more broadly than the truth because humans, not robots, are more likely to spread it.”
When we constrict our capacity for reasoning and recall, or transfer those skills to a machine or a corporation, we sacrifice the ability to turn information into knowledge. We get the data but lose the meaning.
