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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

#131

Post by lazyasciiart »

kowdermeister wrote: post #94
sharkweek wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This argument get brought up quite a lot, but rarely by someone sharing his own experience which is interesting. I never really felt like this. Snapping a photo takes a few seconds and I can continue enjoying whatever I was doing, not that I'm not enjoying taking a photo :) To me it's just shrink-wrapping my mood.

I've actually noticed that I pay more attention to my surroundings when I want to take a photo - I think about what's actually engaging me, what I'm trying to record in a photo, notice the background environment, etc. Most of the time I end up not taking any photos because I know I won't capture what I want, but I like the increased mindfulness that thinking about it gives me.

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

#133

Post by svachalek »

aggie wrote: post #42
sillysaurus3 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That was what they had participants do in this study, and they still observed the effect.

I suspect that actually having loud and obnoxious alerts would probably reduce the burden, because then you'd never worry you missed one.

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

#134

Post by paublyrne »

eikenberry wrote: post #126
BoysenberryPi wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

What about that comment lead you to believe I didn't read the article.

Your summary of the paper is incorrect.

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

#135

Post by [deleted] »

eikenberry wrote: post #126
BoysenberryPi wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

What about that comment lead you to believe I didn't read the article.

[deleted]

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

#137

Post by noam87 »

d0100 wrote: post #119
holografix wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The insights and characterisations of human behaviour found in ancient records sometime shock me with their accuracy and depth. Human nature has not changed and it was well, if not better understood, Millenia ago.

Wouldn't that mean, then, that most all "doom and gloom" we get today is as irrelevant as those of old?

Were they irrelevant? -- I see plenty doom and gloom in my history books and, hell, twitter feed.

It was just a few decades ago that 80 million people died in a single war.

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

#139

Post by JoshMnem »

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…

> Bards pre-literate-times in Greece purportedly could recite Homer's Odyssey themselves after one hearing. Writing destroyed that all.

They had amazing memories, but they couldn't memorize large works like that after just one hearing. There are techniques that allow one to remember information like that, but it still requires effort.

Here are two great books on that subject:

- The Art of Memory by Frances Yates (covers Greece, Rome, and Europe)

- The Memory Code by Lynne Kelly (goes back further into prehistory)

And two quick articles about memory feats in ancient Greece[1] and Rome[2].

[1] http://blog.artofmemory.com/simonides-of-ceos-81.html

[2] http://blog.artofmemory.com/pliny-the-elder-on-memory-5824.h...

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

#140

Post by wil421 »

throwawaycopy wrote: post #96
pm90 wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right but there is so much more information of every kind today than what used to exist at the time of Socrates. Attempting to remember all that information would probably be infeasible.

"More and more information, less and less meaning." - Jean Baudrillard "The more words, the less the meaning, and how does that profit anyone?" - Ecclesiastes 6:11 "Let's start from the premise that more information, more empowerment, is fundamentally the correct answer" - Eric Schmidt One of these two quotes is not like the others...

“I never commit to memory anything that can easily be looked up in a book.”

-Albert Einstein

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