This is indeed a good study. I recently experienced one such thing. I bought fitness tracker which I used to monitor my sleep quality. I paired it to smartphone and kept phone aside and slept wearing the tracker. This activity I repeated for entire week and I found that my sleep quality over the week exacerbated compared to time when there was no tracker. When I thought over this, I found out that when I was sleeping wearing the tracker, I was subconsciously thinking continuously about how my sleep quality will be, how will be my heart-rate during sleep, it should always be in resting zone, etc... I had all sorts of kinda unnecessary apprehensions/ worries. This was OK for a day or two... then I got used to the tracker, still my quality of sleep was poor for remaining week. When I further thought over this, it appeared to me that I had setup a goal for daily 6 hour sound sleep and I have to achieve that. I had subconscious pressure to achieve that goal which is making me restless frequently. Atlast I gave up experiment of sleep monitoring and now I can sleep peacefully without tracker. :-)
The Presence of One’s Own Smartphone Reduces Available Cognitive Capacity
281–290 of 393 posts
Re: The Presence of One’s Own Smartphone Reduces Available Cognitive Capacity
#282Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wonder about this. Can't you just lock down the app to the point where you don't have to worry about it phoning home or accessing certain information? Or is it just ideology that's stopping you?
Not to my satisfaction, no. But I can't also install it in the first place because I don't have the Play store on my phone. Ideology is a part of it too.
You don't need the Play store for Pleco. You can download the apk from their website for free.
Re: The Presence of One’s Own Smartphone Reduces Available Cognitive Capacity
#283Earlier 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.
A reliable clock produces anxiety over an unreliable one? Citation needed!
Re: The Presence of One’s Own Smartphone Reduces Available Cognitive Capacity
#284I want to learn Japanese. 3 months ago I changed my phone's language to Japanese. Everything is Japanese - maps, services, apps that read from the default phone language. Oddly enough, instead of learning Japanese, I just use my phone less.
Maybe enable TTS so that you heard what you're reading? I once played Metro 2033 on my own "hard mode": Everything on hard, HUD on minimal, text in Russian, spoken on Russian.
When you play the game, listen to what's being said and read the subtitles, you can actually learn the alphabet while playing the game. I still can't read Russian fluently, but I can now decipher/map each individual letter to a Latin version and such at the least understand what's being written! Sadly, a lack of time made me stop playing.
Re: The Presence of One’s Own Smartphone Reduces Available Cognitive Capacity
#285I want to learn Japanese. 3 months ago I changed my phone's language to Japanese. Everything is Japanese - maps, services, apps that read from the default phone language. Oddly enough, instead of learning Japanese, I just use my phone less.
That's kind of funny. Similarly, I stopped listening to any music on my iPhone once I got an iPhone 7. Unexpected side effect of having no headphone jack, but I always forget the dongle somewhere. So, no more music from the iPhone. I listen to old am/fm talk radio again instead.
I've lost my dongle twice now, but only because of being in a hurry during travel or packing. Otherwise it's always attached to my headphones and I don't really have that problem. Although I've considered getting BT headphones to use so I would just stop having that problem. But then I'd never be able to play music at people's houses, so...
Re: The Presence of One’s Own Smartphone Reduces Available Cognitive Capacity
#286Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not a given that it did not end... think to yourself what would happen if Nazi Germany had developed a nuclear bomb ahead of the Americans? If even the US government couldn't resist obliterating 2 cities in Japan with Nukes can you imagine what the Nazis would have done? There would have been zero consideration for the loss of human life, possibly large areas of continental Europe and the US would have been bomb…
I don't think there was economic in massive nuclear bombing, NWs were and are mostly psychological. E.g. the absense of nuclear bombs didn't stop "even" US from grilling Tokyo urban areas with incendiaries with total death toll equal to those in Hiroshima + Nagasaki. Yeah, it could be done much faster with modern delivery systems, but we also have lots of effective non-nuclear mass- and precise-destruction weapons to…
> I don't think there was economic in massive nuclear bombing
There was no economic in V1 and V2, yet they did it, harming themselves economicaly more than they harmed the targets.
Additionally they knew losing WW2 is existential threat for most of them. If they could destroy London with one push of a button - they would.
Re: The Presence of One’s Own Smartphone Reduces Available Cognitive Capacity
#287I 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…
Technology is there (samsung know/android 7 work mode), it 'just' needs UX - separate distraction-free desktop with notifications only from few allowed apps.
Re: The Presence of One’s Own Smartphone Reduces Available Cognitive Capacity
#288Perfect time to recommend a book: The Shallows. Digital information overload not only makes us less attentive, it also makes us shallow. We are exposed to so much information, that we have little time to think deeply about something.
Re: The Presence of One’s Own Smartphone Reduces Available Cognitive Capacity
#289Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 plague killed way more people than nukes ever did No one is worried about the number of people who have ALREADY been killed by nukes, they are worried about the number of people who might be in the future. But I suppose I fundamentally agree with you. I think we may have more to fear from scientifically engineered diseases than we do from nuclear weapons.
Exactly. Every people in their own time considers their time as the most important, crucial and urgent. they consider past times as less important.
If you observe this then you can see that in the future people will look back at now and think the same. history tells us the same thing. it's human nature to think that doom and gloom now is much worse than before, simply because we are in this moment and without perspective.
Re: The Presence of One’s Own Smartphone Reduces Available Cognitive Capacity
#290I'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.
> there is some addictive component there That's by design. There's a whole science of making the customer come back over and over again.
Uh, access to new information? Geeks are especially vulnerable. Or not, because just think about how many people just constantly scroll Facebook, instagram, twitter and whatever.
Humans like to feel connected, like to know interesting things, and like to feel engaged, and so on. And this little magic box pumps a lot of reward for just a few tiny taps. Just a swipe, and new shiny spectacle things happen, woo! One more swipe!
And you see other humans on Facebook. For some people that's addictive. For others learning about new gadgets, for some simply learning (duolingo, coursera, audiobooks), or checking the news, or reading a book, just one more page while I wait for someone to go back for something in the shop/car, etc.