I recently removed all notifications from my phone (except calls) and it has drastically improved my life. I felt like a slave to a fucking device. It was ridiculous.
The Presence of One’s Own Smartphone Reduces Available Cognitive Capacity
251–260 of 393 posts
Re: The Presence of One’s Own Smartphone Reduces Available Cognitive Capacity
#252Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
yet the world did not end. Countless prophecies aboutvthe absolute apocalypse have gone and passed. So yeah it is by large irrelevant.
of course the world ended at the time. but the end of something is the beginning of another.
Re: The Presence of One’s Own Smartphone Reduces Available Cognitive Capacity
#253Earlier quoted context omitted.
This reminds me of my experience giving up my wristwatch. I would glance at it frequently, but then didn't know the time because the behavior was strictly reflex. Finally, someone asked me for the time right after I did this and I had to look again because I hadn't internalized it. That was the day I removed my watch forever. Your comment about being beholden to your phone reminds me a a great quote that I recalled o…
> "Wearing a watch is like being handcuffed to time." I like the quote because that's how I feel when I look at any digital clock or watch. The millisecond accuracy of any NTP-aware device produces anxiety and is unnecessary. An analog watch, especially if it's a wind-up mechanical watch, which is by its nature slightly inaccurate, is much more comforting. I feel like an observer of time, and not a slave of it.
You should get a fuzzy clock. A cute version of those are the Word Clocks.
Re: The Presence of One’s Own Smartphone Reduces Available Cognitive Capacity
#254Earlier quoted context omitted.
You seem to be defending against a claim the study does not make. They're not saying "smartphones make us stupid because Google's in your pocket!" Rather, the study is saying that by having your phone on the desk or even in your pocket, you will exhibit decreased mental capacity because your brain is using some cognitive resources to monitor for notifications etc. This may be over-simplified but appears to be backed…
As a manager in IT I have to have my phone on 24x7 for escalations and I hate it. On the occurrences that I take a real vacation and can turn my phone off, something in my head flips and I can truly forget about it. When it is on, there is something subconscious that will not quite let go and I can feel it. I feel I would benefit greatly from being able to truly turn my phone off one day a week.
Are you really the only person it can be escalated to? What happens if you're sick, or your phone breaks, or whatever?
Re: The Presence of One’s Own Smartphone Reduces Available Cognitive Capacity
#255Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think if anything, the talk about moral decline can be ignored completely. It seems people have been complaining about moral decline since earliest written records.
Alternatively, it does decline and raise, in cycles, and the complaining may be what helps it raise. I don't think so, but a regular decline isn't impossible.
Didn't consider that, thanks. Yeah, it works as a possible explanation, though I don't buy into it either.
Re: The Presence of One’s Own Smartphone Reduces Available Cognitive Capacity
#256I 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…
I've often thought of going back to a dumb phone. The thing is, I want easy to use texting (only to reply with, I abhor texting but the rest of the world loves it), a phone, and this is the killer - good GPS. None of the dedicated GPS devices can hold a candle to what google maps has. I travel to new places too much not to have one.
Re: The Presence of One’s Own Smartphone Reduces Available Cognitive Capacity
#257I predict someone will invent a smart utensil. It will be a smartphone-like device that has a curated app store which only includes utilitarian apps. It'll contain all of the apps people think "I'd love to ditch my smart phone, but I'd really miss ". Apps I really want AND never waste time on: - ride sharing (Lyft, Uber) - calendar - calculator - mobile banking - movie times & reviews - booking a place to stay (Counc…
I feel like a device without a screen, but using spoken speech, could be adapted for this type of need. Nearly all these applications seem to me to not need visual overview for fast interaction (like “set up an alarm for tomorrow at eight”, “who directed the film seven ?”, “contact a cheap Airbnb with good reviews that is close by”), but could be accessed from another screen later on for more complex interaction. I think this could maintain usefulness (and I dream that spoken interaction could be expanded a lot and be very efficient) while strongly throttling the always-on information-packed feedback loop.
Also I dream that spoken interaction / programming would force us to be more expressive than through touchscreen / mouse control, just following what someone put on a screen. Though I guess “user-friendly” speech interface could always be developed to keep users engaged without having to think about what they're doing :/
Re: The Presence of One’s Own Smartphone Reduces Available Cognitive Capacity
#258Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Bards pre-literate-times in Greece purportedly could recite Homer's Odyssey themselves after one hearing Is this a true fact, or just a story people keep repeating because it sounds interesting? If it were true... how would we know? Presumably you would cite sources from Ancient Greece where people reported that they knew bards who could memorize a whole story with one listen, but like, there are sources from Ancie…
It wasn't rote memorization IIRC but a highly structured retelling that used all kinds of tricks to keep it poetic (epithets for characters that took up one, two, or three syllables for instance, used without fail in those situations) but still retained flexibility. Poets would tell the story of the Iliad differently depending on the audience, and I mean they're not going to tell the whole thing every night. But ther…
This is correct -
there are many mnemonic devices strewn throughout the text of the Illiad and the Odyssey, for example, 'rose-fingered dawn' shows up many, many times as a 'stopping point' for remembering.
There are many, many different manuscripts of the Homer's works which all had minor or major differences, depending on who wrote them down - there's one project that tries to pull them all together: http://www.homermultitext.org/about.html
Only relatively recently has there been 'one' Iliad, before that it was whatever the orator remembered, and memory isn't perfect
Re: The Presence of One’s Own Smartphone Reduces Available Cognitive Capacity
#259Earlier quoted context omitted.
As a manager in IT I have to have my phone on 24x7 for escalations and I hate it. On the occurrences that I take a real vacation and can turn my phone off, something in my head flips and I can truly forget about it. When it is on, there is something subconscious that will not quite let go and I can feel it. I feel I would benefit greatly from being able to truly turn my phone off one day a week.
Are you really the only person it can be escalated to? What happens if you're sick, or your phone breaks, or whatever?
Would go up to the senior manager, or whoever else my team can get ahold of. During vacations I have another manager cover for me. There's always options, but it's expected that I be first point of contact.
Re: The Presence of One’s Own Smartphone Reduces Available Cognitive Capacity
#260Earlier quoted context omitted.
As a manager in IT I have to have my phone on 24x7 for escalations and I hate it. On the occurrences that I take a real vacation and can turn my phone off, something in my head flips and I can truly forget about it. When it is on, there is something subconscious that will not quite let go and I can feel it. I feel I would benefit greatly from being able to truly turn my phone off one day a week.
Are you really the only person it can be escalated to? What happens if you're sick, or your phone breaks, or whatever?
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