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The Presence of One’s Own Smartphone Reduces Available Cognitive Capacity (2017)

journals.uchicago.edu

341–350 of 379 posts

Re: The Presence of One’s Own Smartphone Reduces Available Cognitive Capacity (2017)

#341
post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I put my phone in "do not disturb" mode for the entire day. Removing notifications altogether was a great improvement, without getting rid of the phone altogether. You go from responding to picking it up when you decide to.

As someone who has been doing the DND mode for over 8 years now to avoid expecting notifications, it instead has taught me to reach over to my phone every 30 seconds to check the screen for any new ones :( i've started to just chuck it somewhere if I'm trying to focus

Don't DND, use airplane mode (if you want antitheft or incoming calls, disable cellular data and wifi--prey and other antitheft can toggle data by text message if necessary). This way you've still got it available for manual use when necessary, without the wait to turn it on.

Also, disable face/fingerprint/pin unlock, and use a longish password, so unlocking it isn't convenient.

Re: The Presence of One’s Own Smartphone Reduces Available Cognitive Capacity (2017)

#342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it weird that I was doing that as I read your comment?

and you replied, so eew, your keyboard ...

Who said anything about a keyboard? We're using phones here, remember?

Re: The Presence of One’s Own Smartphone Reduces Available Cognitive Capacity (2017)

#343
post #256

I made my largest gains in programming competence almost 10 years ago when working on a system with no connection to the internet and no cell phone at hand. I was working a development assignment on an air-gapped network. Not being able to search google every time I got stuck forced me to actually read the documentation, man pages, and reference books and think through what was going on and come up with solutions. Th…

>I treated it like a trip to the library for research only after I had spent time working on the problem myself.

This is contrary to the (also true) conventional wisdom where _6 months in the lab can save you hours in the library_.

So you have to be careful.

But it can work exceptionally well once you've already been to the library a bit, you know better & better what it has to offer, when you do go back it's with a clearer focus on what you need, and you get the most out of it.

Re: The Presence of One’s Own Smartphone Reduces Available Cognitive Capacity (2017)

#344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>What I'd like to see in the future is AR tech that rewards mobility and in-person interaction I think everything you said was great up until here. Technology is part of the problem, so instead of just patching the symptom with even more technology, let's remove the cause: stop consuming, or rather, stop being consumed by, technology. You want to get away from the screen? Then get away. You want to go socialize with…

> Technology is part of the problem I was more explicit: screens time is the problem. We interface with all manner of technology in our daily lives that I don't find myself attached to, including electronics. Everything we use, all our tools, is technology. Colloquially we use the term to refer to computers. I can reframe the problem in other ways, e.g. what would allow me to achieve certain things without screens? >…

>Well Luddites are not suddenly going to gain traction.

Hey, I resemble that remark.

What if I want to gain sudden traction with my offering to productively reverse the connection of the internet to mission-critical devices?

Re: The Presence of One’s Own Smartphone Reduces Available Cognitive Capacity (2017)

#345
Apparently the link submitted here requires you to pay $20 in order to access the content. I emailed one of the authors and he was unaware of this. In response, he added a PDF version of the article on his website. http://www.adrianfward.com/ (third publication from the top as of now).

Re: The Presence of One’s Own Smartphone Reduces Available Cognitive Capacity (2017)

#346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Me too, it is my laptop. I have started implementing laptop free time. Ie after 5pm, no laptop, Saturday no laptop. I find I am a lot happier and less anxious now.

I can echo that restricting time appears to improve my well-being, particularly for news aggregators / social media. What do you tend to do with leisure time away from the screen?

Running/walking/biking and reading make up a huge part of it. Cooking a meal instead of grabbing what is in the fridge. Learning to play piano/guitar.

Re: The Presence of One’s Own Smartphone Reduces Available Cognitive Capacity (2017)

#348
post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple Watch with LTE mostly fulfills this. And the screen is so small that it’s not worth it to port more addictive apps.

I'm surprised Lyft/Uber hasn't been brought back yet. It would be extremely useful to have on hand now with the cellular model.

Uber is still on WatchOS and it works independently with LTE: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/uber-request-a-ride/id36867736...

Re: The Presence of One’s Own Smartphone Reduces Available Cognitive Capacity (2017)

#349
post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you for this - I am considering making the switch also. The biggest switch for me would be losing music streaming. What do you use for music on-the-go (at the gym, commuting, walking around, etc.)?

Gym? Just the gym, no music. Walking? The same, enjoying my surrounding. I quit music streaming (tried Amazon, Google) after some trials and concentrate on a selection of music, which I can listen to again and again. I do use a tablet with a 256GB SD card, so have space to store a variety of things. While my musical taste is eclectic (i.e. from classic over techno to glitch) I mostly prefer to either listen to music…

>The biggest switch for me would be losing music streaming. What do you use for music on-the-go (at the gym, commuting, walking around, etc.)?

I gave that up too, replaced with live music venues where I could interact with the musicians.

Although depending on the venue musicians and even patrons will occasionally be wearing hearing protection earbuds for isolation.

Without earbuds it can only be better for personal interaction at the gym, etc. too.

When the Sony Walkman came out, those who took it to the gym were more keenly aware they were signaling that they didn't want any interaction there.

Solo commuting I'm just fine with news & talk now. Driving passengers or being one I can better appreciate anybody's channel selction. Nonmusic is too boring for most people anyway.

I get plenty of live music and that's all I really need.

If you already have to be on a computer a bit to begin with, might as well make the most of it.

When you do close the laptop and revert to normal in-person interaction, you can always walk away from the PC with mere cellular voice, if you really need that, for the duration.

Twenty years ago smartphones didn't have touchscreens. But they would take messages.

When that was the only thing you were carrying around, all you could really do was talk & text like anyone else.

But when you had your laptop, the built-in IR or USB interface to a top smart phone was what made it smart to begin with.

As a virtual COM port device, the analog modem in your phone was then accessible to Windows no differently than the analog hardware modem the laptop used when hardwired to a phone jack having a dial tone.

Even laptops without built in modems back then still had hardware COM port connectors just like desktops, which could be used with external hardwired phone modems (or used for local hardwired RS-232/TTY within the generous cable length limitation without need for modulation/demodulation).

But the cellphone was about twice the speeds the office was getting with 56K hardware modems.

From anywhere you could get a cellular signal.

This was years before each cellular company began to slowly roll out data plans as the phones got _smarter_.

Which were geographically limited ridiculously by comparison for many more years before data coverage got to where it is today.

Anyway you could get to your office network directly by dialing in to (one of) your target server's phone number(s) (and tying up that landline as long as you are connected).

Without having to go on the internet, so security could be through the roof by comparison.

Alternatively you could dial in to any ISP's phone bank when you needed to get on the web.

This could even be simply done routinely from a different Windows partition, physically separating personal from business for instance.

Would that make it a sandcastle compared to a sandbox?

Even with only a common single bootvolume you could connect to two networks at the same time using two modems, using the built-in Dial-Up Networking in Windows 98. You could become a bridge this way and security could be not so good.

You just pointed & clicked your selection(s) and they negotiated or autodialed if necessary.

So many offices had internet that you would almost always be fine to just dial in to that one place, and with more than one modem using more than one phone line W98 could be configured to communicate much faster than 56K using modem sharing.

And with a laptop you had all the power and software for business & internet connection you needed without having to wait for phones to get more powerful on their own.

With progress phones are much more popular & stylish now.

Posing with a touchphone, one-handed at a characteristic near-45 degree angle as an interested observer, recognizable in silhouette, whether standing (walking) or sitting, is not something that was ever seen in the 20th century.

Likewise the accompanying silhouette with the other hand on the touchscreen as an active operator.

Under laboratory conditions over a period of years, redirecting time otherwise spent in either pose toward actual scientific progress can have much more ideal outcomes when it comes to milestone accomplishments.

Anectdotal data, YMMV.

I do get the idea that more traditional poses such as yoga-style might be more preferable to a great many.

Rumour has it your cognitive capacity can be increased.

Re: The Presence of One’s Own Smartphone Reduces Available Cognitive Capacity (2017)

#350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I read part of the paper. Note the graphs where the y axis is as short as possible to make the effect size look larger. The title is explicitly non-serious. They also represent that they can measure cognitive capacity and fluid intelligence reliably and meaningfully, instead of presenting the data more clearly in the form of... data, eg, raw text scores. It also lacks the sort of control group that has a non-smartpho…

In the physics lab the T.A. will yell at you if choose a scale that starts at zero instead of a scale that shows only the relevant section. When the T.A. is tired, he/she will ask another T.A. to continue the yelling. (Or sometimes just make you redo the report until you choose the correct scale.) The research journal have a similar policy. For some reason people in the Internet don't like it, so a solution for a blo…

Rubbish. Sometimes it is appropriate to start from zero and sometimes it isn't.
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