Having Your Smartphone Nearby Takes a Toll on Your Thinking | Hacker News Reader

Having Your Smartphone Nearby Takes a Toll on Your Thinking

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23 points_ttg13 comments

It‘s easy enough to believe, but newer research says that the mere presence of a smartphone does not have a measurable effect on cognitive function.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S10538...

What about awareness/unhealthy attachment to the things it represents?

I think everyone here has a living experience of how smartphones reduce productivity. Even seeing one makes me want to check if I have new messages for example. Even if this one test did not replicate, I think its fair to say that there is a dark side of smartphone use

That's the case if you often get messages or notifications. I often get less than one message a day on my smartphone, so I can keep it on my desk without problems.

I failed basic reading comprehension. The first sentence of the abstract clearly says "It has recently been shown that the mere presence of one’s own smartphone on the desk impairs working memory performance."

So while the presence of a smartphone does indeed seem to impair the working memory, they found "no overall effect of smartphone presence on short-term and prospective memory performance".

I feel like that the resulting lower attention span is a bigger issue. Even if my phone is away, I constantly find myself switching tabs - moving from work related reading to HackerNews or reddit. I'll tell myself I'll take a 20 minute break but end up extending that by reading articles that really don't improve my life in any meaningful way. I would be far happier if I could just work and then relax.

And that's by design...

All the devices I am aware of offer the ability to turn them off, or even simple, quick options to turn off all notifications. You can even turn off all notifications except phone calls, or even restrict phone call notifications from only certain people.

What else can phone OS makers do?

Sadly its not just notifications. As much as we blame the device for demanding our attention, we also give it our attention as well by pulling it out to surf twitter or facebook in any idle moment. Even for people who aren't obsesively checking their phones, it almost becomes an act of mental exertion to NOT check your phone. If there was some mode that was like "Will act as a dumb phone, if you want smart phone functionality press this button and wait 10 minutes" MAYBE that would solve the problem.

This problem will not be solved by technology. If you want away from it bad enough, you will stop using a smartphone or at least uninstall all apps that are for chatting and interacting with the Internet.

Then you install Lineage OS without google apps on it so you have no connection to google on it.

It would take quite some willpower for someone to do that but the added massive bonus is that no tech company can read your private conversations or look at your images.

> If you want away from it bad enough

This vastly understates the nature of addicting technologies and the psychological tricks used to ensnare users and keep their attention. Willpower is the oft-cited by never sufficient commodity used to deflect blame to the individual. No neuroscientist in her right mind would tell you that all it takes is willpower. If that were true, then addiction, to gambling, tobacco, and drugs, and physical inactivity wouldn't exist.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9311924/

https://web.archive.org/web/20210416052902/https://www.econo...

https://gizmodo.com/its-time-to-treat-social-media-like-the-...

It is not the OS maker, it is the bottomless pit of content running inside of it: IM, Email, Twitter, IG, you name it.

BlackBerry phones used to be called "Crackberries" in the 2G/3G era, because people could not stop themselves from constantly checking the web or sending emails and IM. And that was years before the content deluge really started.

They were called that because the user's interaction w/ push-notification devices was very different from Palm PDAs which were offline-first. You had to manually sync the device with your computer. When you were on the go, your content was only whatever you synced. There was no reason to check your device for something 'new'.

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