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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

#61

Post by thesagan »

kowdermeister wrote: post #52
thesagan wrote: post #23

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…

Mine simply died and I also skipped buying a new one, this was in last September. I didn't even have a cell phone for months :) Now I just use my dumbphone. I lasts a week on one charge. I didn't miss the calls, or anything. Only the possibility to take pictures on the spot.

I do miss the camera sometimes. :(

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

#62

Post by movedx »

throwawaycopy wrote: post #41
thesagan wrote: post #23

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…

Try keeping a sketch pad for quick illustrations or perhaps a notebook for poems. The world is filled with inspiration! Not only will you be more present, but you'll be turning your seemingly humdrum life into a work of art!

What a beautiful attitude :)

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

#63

Post by notadoc »

clw8 wrote: post #29

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.

The next time you're driving around on a street or highway, look around at your fellow drivers. It is absolutely shocking the number of people who are staring down at their phones.

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

#64

Post by bigbugbag »

isaaaaah wrote: post #4

it is rather that wikipedia and google, parts of my weltbild (brain), get totally damaged in the wake of the adpocalypse

Google got really bad at providing relevant search results, wikipedia did a terrific job of providing URL to official websites and killing many of the relevant and interesting websites that I used to find left and right, they gone now.

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

#65

Post by Florin_Andrei »

notadoc wrote: post #56

I've come to hate notifications, alerts, and digital nags of all kinds. I disable practically all of them on every device I own, the only unsolicited notifications I want are from rare legitimate emergencies. But yea, simply having a smartphone around makes you want to fiddle with it. I would guess there is some addictive component there, as it impacts nearly everyone.

> there is some addictive component there

That's by design. There's a whole science of making the customer come back over and over again.

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

#66

Post by Sir_Cmpwn »

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…

You can still train yourself to be better at remembering things today, and supplement your digital memory (in your phone or online or whatnot) with better meat memory. It just comes down to recognizing how your brain works and applying that understanding to specific memorization tasks.

Apply stories and mnomics to information you want to remember. Leverage your spatial memory by associating particular locations in a familiar place with a memory. Get into the habit of reviewing your situation at opportune times, i.e. when you get home or enter your car, and remember things you wanted to do there.

A good approach to this makes it a lot easier to effectively apply your digital memory, and is also useful in situations where electronics are inappropriate (i.e. recognizing someone IRL).

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

#67

Post by OJFord »

Why do I need to enable cookies to see any content here?

I'm genuinely asking, because there's an informative error message, so it's clearly deliberate; I just can't understand the motivation.

Edit: the only human-readable cookie is 'machine_last_seen', perhaps that's just considered a really important statistic...

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

#68

Post by sharkweek »

kowdermeister wrote: post #52
thesagan wrote: post #23

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…

Mine simply died and I also skipped buying a new one, this was in last September. I didn't even have a cell phone for months :) Now I just use my dumbphone. I lasts a week on one charge. I didn't miss the calls, or anything. Only the possibility to take pictures on the spot.

I always struggle with the photo thing.

It's fun to review old photos, so I enjoy taking lots of them. But anytime I put my camera between myself and whatever I'm photographing, it also feels like a removal of being in the present moment and just enjoying it for what it is.

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

#69

Post by bigbugbag »

buf wrote: post #44

I want to learn Japanese. 3 months ago I changed my phone's language to Japanese. Everything is Japanese - maps, services, apps that read from the default phone language. Oddly enough, instead of learning Japanese, I just use my phone less.

That's not how you learn japanese.

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

#70

Post by Sir_Cmpwn »

buf wrote: post #44

I want to learn Japanese. 3 months ago I changed my phone's language to Japanese. Everything is Japanese - maps, services, apps that read from the default phone language. Oddly enough, instead of learning Japanese, I just use my phone less.

I did the same thing! The difficult part is looking up kanji I encounter in app UIs, you can't exactly copy+paste them and manual lookup is annoying.
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