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

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

#171

Post by cheapsteak »

Iv wrote: post #148
wdewind wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But ... few people complain about how books corrupt our memory. Socrates absolutely did. > for this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth,…

I was in high school when I first read this opinion (I did not remember it was Socrates though). Also, I learned that Gaul, pre-roman France (where I lived), had a society where the priests/judges, the druids, were forbidden to write down their knowledge. It fascinated me. The idea that books, that were more or less revered depositories of knowledge, could have been seen as anti-intellectual at one time. It pushed me…

Recommendations on intro texts for poetry?

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

#172

Post by contingencies »

jxramos wrote: post #114
throwawaycopy wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

I love that interpretation of jotting down information as creating a mindfulness work of art. What a thought! I used to do the cliche "note to self" with a voice recorder, that I've recently been desiring again. My cell phone is too slow to respond to my inspirations having to log in past the keycode, launch the app, dump mental information. Stepping through those hoops seems to decay my inspiration. You make me thin…

I actually carry a cheap USB wacom tablet around with my laptop for such purposes... I swear by it, it gives you almost the full freedom of paper without the restrictions of manual media (undo, scaling, duplication, restyling, etc.)

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

#173

Post by iClaudiusX »

pm90 wrote: post #75
wdewind wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But ... few people complain about how books corrupt our memory. Socrates absolutely did. > for this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth,…

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.

Case in point: Tycho Brahe's exceptionally detailed and accurate astronomical observations. His recorded work on the position of Mars allowed Kepler to establish the laws of planetary motion using elliptical orbits around the sun. Without that data (and logarithm tables and trigonometry), it may have been impossible to test theories of celestial mechanics and physics that kick-started the scientific revolution.

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

#174

Post by pizza »

ekianjo wrote: post #158
chillwaves wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They didn't have nukes or climate change back then. Human nature + escalating technology is the scary formula we are exploring today.

The plague killed way more people than nukes ever did, and there was no way to stop it until people understood what spread it. Of course technology has bright sides as well. Without medicine and many other discoveries we would not be where we are today.

The variance of the fat-tailed distribution of casualties of nuclear warfare post-M.A.D. is much higher than during WW2, and is may be more prone to inadvertent unintended catastrophe than an epidemic now that we can research them, but that's also unforeseeably variable.

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

#175

Post by wutbrodo »

quacker wrote: post #113
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…

Do you not have a phone now? Does it affect your relationships with people at all? I have family and friends in other cities and a girlfriend across town. Texts are just too convenient not to have when you need to coordinate. Just last week a friend passed through town looking for a new car and we met up for dinner - never would have happened without a phone. GF gets into a minor accident (not her fault, she would li…

> I could do without the "smart" part of the phone. I really just need texting/calling (mainly texting). But I don't want a land line, and I'm pretty sure my relationships with friends and family would quickly deteriorate without my cell phone.

Why not just buy a "dumbphone"?

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

#176

Post by afleck »

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.

Epic recitation was probably not fixed until someone wrote it down. Different recitations of the same plot varied (and were expected to).

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

#177

Post by andrepd »

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.

[citation needed]

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

#178

Post by andrepd »

wdewind wrote: post #47
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…

> But ... few people complain about how books corrupt our memory. Socrates absolutely did. > for this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth,…

The amount of information in existence today is so absolutely mindblowing it's not even funny. No meaningful comparison can be made with Socrates.

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

#179

Post by chiefofgxbxl »

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.

Windows 10 that came on my laptop kept displaying a notification every day in the bottom right of the screen, notifying me that the security scan found no issues.

It seems like that's a regression in design. Only notify me if something goes wrong, don't notify me if things are as they are supposed to be.

Now I've set the "Quiet Hours" setting to permanently on so no notifications are permitted.

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

#180

Post by mysterypie »

Has anyone here tried asking everyone to not look at or fiddle with their phones at a meeting they've called or a social event they've organized? How did it work out?

What about going the extra step of collecting the phones to be returned when the meeting or event is over?

Is there any way to do either of these without coming off as a jerk?

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