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

journals.uchicago.edu

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

#21

Post by avar »

nwatson wrote: post #3

Bards pre-literate-times in Greece purportedly could recite Homer's Odyssey themselves after one hearing. Writing destroyed that all. (Maybe I don't have a citation right off, but I've read that on the web or heard it in some college class years ago ... in any case, ability to retain heard information has likely declined since then). But ... few people complain about how books corrupt our memory. So we're the first g…

The Greeks would make performances designed to be performed in front of a live audience.

The comparison to today is not whether you can find someone who can recite a book on first reading, but someone who can recite a song the first time they hear it, or parts of a stand-up routine.

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

#22

Post by stretchwithme »

dmurawsky wrote: post #15
slowmovintarget wrote: post #5

We just need better integration with our exocortex.

Please explain...

I think he's referring to efforts like this one:

https://www.theverge.com/2017/3/27/15077864/elon-musk-neural...

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

#23

Post by thesagan »

I lost mine about six months ago and I haven't replaced it. First couple months I noticed I got VERY irritable when I got a momentary flash of boredom, especially waiting in line in stores, etc. Figured that might've been a budding mental issue, and decided to work on my patience and expectation-setting as a result.

This has been part of a larger life exercise in practicing general moment-to-moment mindfullness, and I think I'm going to keep this up for a while and see how long I can go without a smartphone before people start asking me questions at work. So far, so good.

It's like I've withdrawn from a drug and some of my attention is back under my control, where my mind can better keep its peace. I guess I didn't exercise proper discipline when I had the phone.

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

#24

Post by BoysenberryPi »

eikenberry wrote: post #20
jff wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You seem to be defending against a claim the study does not make. They're not saying "smartphones make us stupid because Google's in your pocket!" Rather, the study is saying that by having your phone on the desk or even in your pocket, you will exhibit decreased mental capacity because your brain is using some cognitive resources to monitor for notifications etc. This may be over-simplified but appears to be backed…

So then the title is misleading. It is not the presence of a smartphone, but over using the notification feature of the phone that causes the issue.

Whether or not the title is misleading you read a headline and decided to drop your 2 cents without actually reading the article. The title isnt at fault here

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

#25

Post by pavel_lishin »

nwatson wrote: post #3

Bards pre-literate-times in Greece purportedly could recite Homer's Odyssey themselves after one hearing. Writing destroyed that all. (Maybe I don't have a citation right off, but I've read that on the web or heard it in some college class years ago ... in any case, ability to retain heard information has likely declined since then). But ... few people complain about how books corrupt our memory. So we're the first g…

Those bards trained to do that, though, right? You couldn't pull a random Greek in off the agora and have him memorize an epic poem at will.

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

#26

Post by kellyjprice »

nwatson wrote: post #3

Bards pre-literate-times in Greece purportedly could recite Homer's Odyssey themselves after one hearing. Writing destroyed that all. (Maybe I don't have a citation right off, but I've read that on the web or heard it in some college class years ago ... in any case, ability to retain heard information has likely declined since then). But ... few people complain about how books corrupt our memory. So we're the first g…

I had heard that recitations of the Odyssey were more improvisational. If I remember the gist correctly, someone proposed that adjectives, for instance, were chosen to match the meter of a particular line.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oral-formulaic_composition

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

#27

Post by pavel_lishin »

jshelly wrote: post #18

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

I agree. Aside from the egregiously asshole move of auto-playing video (sometimes related, sometimes not), I can typically read an article much faster than an anchor can narrate it.

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

#28

Post by obstinate »

laretluval wrote: post #14

Wake me up after the registered replication.

Yours seems like a flippant response, but I don't think that it is. We have to be wary of confirmation bias here on HN. Would someone even think to publish a study where no effect was found? And then would someone post that link to HN? And then would it get upvoted? It's important to remember that we are not seeing a uniform sample of news stories here. We are seeing a highly biased selection, and it's important to appropriately discount things appropriately.

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

#29

Post by clw8 »

Funny timing, I almost got hit yesterday (at a speed that could have been fatal) by a driver who most likely was either checking notifications or actively texting, while I was biking right on the UC campus. Immediately jerked my handlebar to the right and dumped myself into the grass and escaped with a huge gash above my left eye. Our self-driving overlords can't take over soon enough.

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

#30

Post by ckosidow »

sillysaurus3 wrote: post #12
jff wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You seem to be defending against a claim the study does not make. They're not saying "smartphones make us stupid because Google's in your pocket!" Rather, the study is saying that by having your phone on the desk or even in your pocket, you will exhibit decreased mental capacity because your brain is using some cognitive resources to monitor for notifications etc. This may be over-simplified but appears to be backed…

I keep my phone on silent and turn off all vibrations. There's no way to notify me of anything until I look at it, but that's a feature.

I do the same, though I wonder if a part of my brain is still itching to check if I have any notifications.
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