School smartphone ban results in better sleep and improved mood: study

That seems plausible though. I have small kids and hence bad sleep often and when I'm very tired I often have to put off difficult programming tasks for another day and just do refactoring or whatever. I think it's entirely expected that it's harder to think clearly when you're really tired.

Is it harder to think clearly because you've just been watching shorts/reels for an hour? Absolutely not. It's an addictive waste of time, sure. But trying to claim some kind of cognitive impairment is just this generation's "X rots your brains" (where X has been TV and then video games).

Now I don’t know if you’re being sarcastic. Damn it!

Apart from whether the days are enough or not to wean off a long-standing addiction. Maybe a 3% boost in working memory has compounding effects over time as well.

You can't commit to long term memory what you can't keep in working memory long enough. You can't think about complex things if you don't have the working memory capacity.

If you always have 3% more working memory you might accumulate more knowledge after a while.

Like alcohol doesn't delete your brain, but you have serious memory deficits if you drink every day for years on end.

There's no doubt that internet-connected devices are distracting and can cause all sorts of health issues (and as a college student, my frequently browsing various communities on my laptop is something that is constantly getting in the way of my productivity when I do homework). But people are acting like making kids and teens listen to somebody talk for 7 hours per day in a classroom is the solution, and as someone with an aggressively hands-on learning style, I couldn't disagree more.

During high school, I would frequently tune out during lectures (and this was with phone bans in classrooms) and overall learned next to nothing from them. I got my knowledge from studying notes I copied from the whiteboard, studying the lecture PPTs, reading the textbook, using Khan Academy, completing homework, and utilizing the internet when needed. And I graduated with straight A's taking the most rigorous classes my school offered. Currently I'm in college now, and at some point I decided lectures were wasting my time and stopped attending them so I could sleep in or do homework instead, and it hasn't hurt my academic performance at all (and probably improved it).

Along with the importance of lectures being vastly overstated, a lot of the content from them isn't even particularly useful in real life. Basically all of my tech skills came from family connections, Reddit, HN, YouTube, random blogs and documentation, and having the time to work on projects (and one of my biggest concerns about the push to keep kids off of social media is depriving them of this sort of information and community). Lectures and homework take time away from learning these sort of skills and make people instead learn things much more inefficiently and that are often of questionable value (i.e. studying old poems, learning scattered facts about history but not analyzing why they happened and leaving many of the most important bits out, having the same things be taught multiple times in K-12 then having to take the class yet another time in college).

With this in mind, I wish people would focus more on making the school system more efficient, engaging, and applicable and not a waste of time instead of acting like banning phones is going to fix everyone's problems.

This typically good science. You have hypothesis and test it, rather than doing an intervention and reporting every random thing that happened.

Although I agree in this case, the alternative hypothesis seems a bit lame, rather than adopting the null hypothesis. On the other hand I guess that more sleep could have some effect on cognitive development in the long run.