Reading on smartphone affects sigh generation, brain activity, and comprehension
nature.com
nature.com
I have no idea how people can deal with their phone beeping and vibrating constantly. Actually, I get annoyed pretty quickly when e.g. my partner leaves her phone in the room.
Still, I've had to push back against the expectation of being available 24/7 and responding immediately to everything. A text that goes unanswered for a few minutes becomes a phone call or three, to ask why I'm not responding. It's bloody exhausting sometimes.
I can't say I really regret this change, I haven't noticed any real downsides. There's too much content and not enough time these days.
I think Movies just suck because TV shows are where all the good production is happening.
Making a good and compelling movie is really really hard, and now you can just churn out superhero stuff and make millions or do a TV show and have nearly none of the constraints of cinema.
The 90s was an odd period with countless great movies and massive budgets.
It would be easy to say "today's movies aren't as interesting as the ones of 20 years ago" but that would be ignoring that I changed in those years - namely, I've seen a lot more movies and read a lot more books and watched a lot more TV.
It would be unsurprising for someone to say "not everything I liked at first still holds up today."
But I apply the same reasoning against my forward-looking watching/reading: "I've seen so much more now that fewer things impress me at first, as I have so much more to compare with."
So a book that's only mildly capturing my attention? I can speed up my reading, skim a bit more over the uninteresting parts. A movie? So much harder!
Reading the paper mentioned, I also feel that we need more than just experience reports (e.g. comments and feelings in forums like hackernews) and controlled experiments.
Comprehension is down, yet I wonder about recall and the general amount of information we are processing. As we experience a lot of information in context, it might lead to a decrease in overall comprehension, yet a stronger recall on the bits we do remember. It would be super interesting to setup a larger scale in-situ study on the topic. Yet, I wonder how to get a baseline on that.
On the other hand, the latter are rare, and you don't even know it they're decent (lots of "landmark" studies get debunked years or decades later).
Attention is a task dependent context. I can drive for hours with no incident but be bored by a meeting in 5 minutes. Very little to link the two, because they're not the same by any metric outside of time. To average that out is oversimplying to absurdity.
Secondly, this myth has been debunked _thoroughly_. I don't have offhand access to the papers but I will add some write ups about it. But the state of attention report report 2018 is a good place to start if you feel like a Google hunt.
Third, most all of the theories around a shrinking attention span are based on unreplicated drivel. And it is drivel. Psychology is a new field still figuring out it's limits and medicine predates science and has a lot of falsehoods-presented-as-fact (this is a huge problem and contributes to the rise of anti vaxxers). Not a lot of evidence so much as opinions.
I find the idea that I comprehend something less than if i had it on paper to be hilarious. I grew up on screens, maybe I'm just accustomed to it, but i have decades of learning mundane and complex subject matter via various tech portals. There is so much evidence that this happens on a large enough scale to dismiss this nonsense here and now
> A path analysis suggests that the interactive relationship between sigh inhibition and overactivity in the prefrontal cortex causes comprehension decline.
I can't ever remember sighing, but I guess I'll be paying attention to it now.
I like reading on my Kindle, fwiw.
One trick I use to shake up my persective is to remember the other side of the equation: When change occurs, some things are lost, but also some are gained. In some ways, I expect we function better reading on screens. Or I try to look at it the other way, remembering that there is nothing more natural about the older technology (usually) - it's only what we are accustomed to - i.e., what if instead of moving from technology A to B, we were moving from B to A? And then remembering: A has matured (being older); B usually has not but, if adopted, will mature.
One thing I would guess, if moving from screen to paper, is that the technology wouldn't keep up with our cognitive processing; I think we just accept that paper is that way, but personally, having switched to reading PDFs (with bookmarks, search, etc.), I find paper very slow for any sort of random access. Also, I expect that as screen reading tech matures, the level of stress distraction will become much less. As a simple example, look at the recent boom (afaict) of applications offering and people using dark mode and night color mode.
Another trick I use is to remember the outcomes for past reactionaries: They are popular and self-justified in the moment, but in the end all they did was waste time and miss out.
Without that, I can’t imagine how much slower it would have gone and how many more dead ends I would have got stuck in.
An iPhone can be configured to work in your interests, but it takes quite a bit of effort. Aggressively curate the notifications. Turn most of them off. Put the phone on silent. Turn on all the "humane" features Apple has developed: the focuses, "wind-down," the sleep aids, etc. At night, leave your phone on your desk. Do not take it into your bedroom. Read a book in the bedroom.
Try to use the phone to achieve specific goals, which you pre-mediate. That's the goal.
Paper books exist in a totally different and simpler economy. It's not that they're perfect, but they're simpler. They're more about authors genuinely communicating their thoughts directly to you. There's an innocence lacking from smartphones.
You can feel this if you pay attention. A smartphone gives me a stimulated, "something cool around the next corner," "on the verge of fulfillment" kind of feeling. That's why it can suck you in for literal hours if you let it. The feeling in many cases is a lie. You'll find yourself just swiping and tapping for no reason at all, just automatically, unconsciously. That's the trick of "variable rewards" e.g. a phone is a slot machine. A book is a quieter more peaceful feeling. You're just reading the author's words, one after another. You have no option to switch to something else. The magic of books is created by your own active attention & focus. Some people can probably achieve this on a phone, but it's definitely harder.
It turns off ~all apps fully, and makes you click through a dialog to enter one - and then click again after 5 minutes or the app turns off again.
The downside is that you don't get notifications from messaging apps, which can be a problem (or amazing) depending on your situation. Whitelisting messaging apps would defeat the battery-saving purpose, of course.
…but I wonder if the extra amount of scrolling one has to do on smartphones compared to printed books could be distracting and lowering comprehension.
Also, when I try to remember something I have red on a printed book, - sometimes - I can remember where on the page it was written, what else was on the page, or even what the page looked like. I experience none of that when reading on my smartphone.
This is so obvious to me but more than once I have hit the typical robot HN user on this topic for whom it doesn't matter the medium because he's an eidetic machine. So I'll just post this:
> Beyond treating individual letters as physical objects, the human brain may also perceive a text in its entirety as a kind of physical landscape. When we read, we construct a mental representation of the text in which meaning is anchored to structure. The exact nature of such representations remains unclear, but they are likely similar to the mental maps we create of terrain—such as mountains and trails—and of man-made physical spaces, such as apartments and offices. Both anecdotally and in published studies, people report that when trying to locate a particular piece of written information they often remember where in the text it appeared. We might recall that we passed the red farmhouse near the start of the trail before we started climbing uphill through the forest; in a similar way, we remember that we read about Mr. Darcy rebuffing Elizabeth Bennett on the bottom of the left-hand page in one of the earlier chapters.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/reading-paper-scr...
And repost my comment from one of those times:
>> The value provided by a physical map of a book is knowing how far along you are in the book, yet that's also available in a visual form in an ebook as well. You can even riffle through pages on most e-readers as well, seeing a preview of the page as you move quickly forward or backwards.
>> Aside from weight, what value is the physical map really providing?
> No, it provides more.
> Actually your brain maps physical properties of the book to actual content, creating an overlay map over the story or the content (and our brain is really good at mentally mapping things). This is that map that is being used to know where in the book a particular piece of information is.
> Reading on e-reader is more linear than reading a paper book. See: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/reading-paper-scr... https://insights.uksg.org/articles/10.1629/uksg.236/ and https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/aug/19/readers-absorb...
> Besides, no e-reader today can let your riffle through pages as fast as paper book.
> When you are in a novel, or in a manual, you have some kinetic and touch feedback to build memories of where's what. The book becomes an extension (à la proprioception) with much less friction than an e-read for which you have to wait for visual feedback (screen refreshing).
> With paper books things are at the tip of your fingers.
> E-reader have more friction.
> That's a reason why I only read novels on e-reader and jot notes in a notepad for non-fiction books.
> If I had the budget I'd only have physical books.
And that has to be more distracting, because you can't read any part of the page while it is turning.
But I also had the experience once (and I think most readers has had it more than once) of reading a book and having to stop because somebody turned the lights off - then realizing that I had been so engrossed in a book that several hours had gone by and the sun had gone down by then.
Most paperbacks have paragraphs that are about twice as wide (10 to 12 words) and it definitely feels more natural.
But seriously, the form and tactile sense of the object in your hand seems to be related to how well you remember things. The trend on phones may be moving away from what makes things easier to remember.
If you read articles on your phone you may notice that you read in a fundamentally different way then you read printed text. You generally keep your visual field located in exactly one place relative to the phone and then scroll content with your finger up into that space. It's as if you moved the book around while keeping your eyes in one place. On the printed medium your eye stays locked to the corners of the page, the page doesn't scroll out from underneath you.
But of course you are also phrasing an interesting point, which is that screens are usually way brighter than ambient light. To this we can add that a mobile phone is so much smaller than a printed page, you think about the cognitive tasks involved in opening a paper where at first you would open it up wide and be surrounded by word and then you would fold it down to the part that you wanted to read and focus on... Hard to imagine a similar experience on a phone; a set of desktop screens has the right size, but maybe not the ability to effectively expand/condense...
The act of turning a page may also serve some function: the visual content is "refreshed", the patterns on the page are brand new and stimulating. Perhaps the memory for each page is "chunked" in a way that a write to long term storage occurs on pageflip. If so, then infinite scrolling would lead to "buffer overflows".
Another thought about scrolling: I also wonder if the movement of the eyes "across" a page is more stimulating and ergonomic than keeping them in one place, which in my experience gets rather tiring.
I find this to be very much true personally. The spatial organization of words on the page seems to provide a trellis that helps structure how I recall information. So much so that I intentionally convert epubs and other long-form documents to PDF these days before reading. I find this becomes even more important on material where I'm writing comments in the margins; the spatial relationship between the comments and the text helps me to recall both.
I also tend to favour software tools that try to preserve the spatial relationship between pages. On Sony and Fujitsu e-readers, for example, when you pinch out, the display transitions to a 16-page contact sheet view that doesn't shift depending on what page you were just reading. At first blush, it seems lazy, why not show the current page and the prior 7 and subsequent 8 pages instead? But after a while you start to realize that it's to help structure your spatial position within the document, a little like how in a book the left hand pages are always to the right of the right hand pages.
It's not, for me at least, the distraction potential. I think its more-so the tertiary sensory experiences physical books carry: the smell of the binding; the dimples & knots in the paper as you trace your finger over lines; the visual clarity of your position in the book relative to what is left; there's a lot that even eink sacrifices. People often say that these qualities are what they enjoy about books, but I suspect it runs even deeper than that; that these qualities add landmarks to your memory, and aid in recall.
So, if you read on an electronic device, it's probably beneficial to configure it to not use "continuous scrolling" but rather use something "fixed".
You'll have just as hard of a time concentrating on your 5000 dpi perfectly lambertian eink display in 2030 as you do now on your phone, simply because it's a multimedia device built around capturing and redirecting your attention.
However, I agree with your sentiment. Don't take it too serious
still, I wasn't aware they had an impact factor of 4.x, that's way higher than i thought.
Anecdata: I frequently read books on my smartphone, but I'll put it in airplane or focus mode to rest easy that there will be no interruptions in a while. I've tried to read on a tablet, but the smartphone pinging from the desktop across the room can be very distracting.
That's one of the reasons I've moved as much as I can to an e-reader, I know it won't interrupt me with other stuff.
[0]: https://news.utexas.edu/2017/06/26/the-mere-presence-of-your...
Having something that can not be lost, forgotten or misplaced, in a place you are not used too have it could reduce focus too. Maybe the same lost of focus would happen with keys, or credit cards.
"Previous studies have indicated that the number of sighs increased with increased cognitive load[14,21]. In our study, the number of sighs increased during cognitive reading activity on a paper medium and decreased when reading on a smartphone."
My anecdotal experience is that I sigh when tired, so the research passes my tests.
Also, I love physical books. I love holding them, opening them, and of course, reading. If possible with a pencil in my hand.
ie. It could be argued that some western nations feel dumbed down by mobile phones, while people in underdeveloped nations see it as a on-ramp to modernisation and a vector of information discovery instead of a vector of distraction.
Just because your have found yourself searching for meaning in your life through your phone distractions, doesnt mean its a bad thing. Its your body telling you that while you may be making some money right now, your actually not persuring a dream that is satisfying your inner yerning for a meaningful existance.
I cant watch a movie at length anymore, but i can keep my phone next to me for an entire day and actually forget its there enough to go looking for it in other place when i actually need it. I love my work though, coding is a hobby turned passion turned career turned never worked a day in my life after quitting k-mart at 20 to live it. Yet im divorced from a doctor who spent every hour of every day she was not working, distracting herself with her phone, gaming, ignoring the world, obsessed with stalking people on facebook, getting despressed with her life, trying to bandaid it with InstaSatisfation, because of all the trauma she has suffered yet never dealt with. On the outside, she is a success of a women, and will save your life in the ER; but in every other situation, she is a complete mess on the verge of suicide due to unresolved PTSD.
Your education, or your job does not define you. You are more then your successes (and your failures) and the WWW has allowed people to see this at scale more then anytime in history. its reshaping our society, and what we grew up with, what our parents valued, is slowly fading away for a new modern set of skills. Those modern skills dont resolve around books, or attention. But the ability to wade through through loads of crap to find the gems that add value to your existance. Not distract from it.
I got a kindle last year. Since then I've been reading (mostly novels) for at least 45 mins every day. Some weekend days I read for like 2-3 hours. It's been wonderful. My iPad Pro has been collecting dust for months.
The whole time I'm reading something on a phone my brain is constantly pinging me about all the other things that I do on my phone: emails/WhatsApp/Google word I don't know.
So our conscious control centres in the PFC are always firing to mediate these little temptations. There are less of these temptations on a e-reader.
So much stuff can happen on a phone that the brain can't relax and focus on a single task.
There's something about keeping my fingers in other page sections, folding over the corners of useful pages (even if I never revisit), and remembering the location of information on the page. In college I would often remember WHERE a detail was located, but I didn't know the detail itself. It's like my brain was creating an index to the data based on its approximate page location and the location within the page itself (and crucially whether it was on the left side or the right side of the book when open).
Did anyone else experience something like this?
I'm not sure about increased comprehension directly, because I've heard that the best way is to more actively engage with the material (e.g. by asking yourself questions about what you read), but there may be a link to mindfulness.
maybe this is just my training and gen Z can handle it fine? but scrolling feels like mandatory vertical layout jank to get to page 2
enlightened UX archaeologists from the future will look back with humane pity on a web with increasingly prevalent sticky headers that destroy keyboard-based paging
Learning platforms such as Duolingo, Brilliant, or Khan Academy very infrequently give you a wall of text to parse. This suggests, that it isn’t a necessity or preferable for comprehension.
So to me, this feels silly. As if someone is complaining that a bike hurts your ability to leisurely move at a walking pace through a park.
Why was there an expectation that it would be more ideal?
Use tools are that are appropriate for the context.
For long form text, use a context that allows you to consume slowly, whether than be an e-book or hard copy.
No, that suggests that those platforms understand the limitations of the medium and try to work around them - with mixed results. They still have to use a modicum of text, they just build other stuff around it to reinforce meaning.
Your critique would be valid if these platforms were not using any text whatsoever - which might well happen at some point, in the distant future, but definitely is not the case now.
Must have been because I read this comment from my mobile device. Time to get the printer going ;)
Or, it shows that they're trying to get people to stay around and use them more. I actually really doubt Duolingo produces anyone who has true comprehension in reading a passage of text simply because it only ever asks you to translate one-off sentences (and rarely at that, it only has you click words if you're on the app!). I don't think they're optimizing for comprehension and understanding as much as they're optimizing for user engagement.
This pathway has been effective for me, I've been doing Duo for a few months now! Which leaves me lost in your premise of "true comprehension"?
But maybe that would mean this conversion is about semantics rather than us having a "true conversation"
> Which leaves me lost in your premise of "true comprehension"?
"True comprehension" in a foreign language is, in my opinion, when you can read a full passage (not a random sentence or even something like Duo's stories) and answer questions about it. It doesn't have to be a literary passage, but it shouldn't be something as simple as "Translate to English: Mes frères sont gentils", as the French course often asks (and then only makes you pick words, not actually type). And the comprehension should be inferring something from the passage, not something you can get by just matching word patterns.
So, again, maybe DL does it later on in the French course, but it certainly isn't available in their (horrible, to be honest) Irish course.
The state of the internet. Sigh.
Likewise, I keep my phone on Do Not Disturb at all times, and have it configured to allow numbers in my contacts to ring through in case of emergencies. Everything else is silent.
These things have significantly decreased the activity in the part of my brain that expects distractions and adverse UI patterns at any moment.
Personally I don't feel like i have trouble reading on either epaper or a tablet, but in either case all the notifications are off.
I'd love to see the difference between someone reading a phone-sized piece of paper, a phone, a non-touch LCD that only shows a block of text, and a similarly sized e-ink screen.
I wanted pdf to improve my reading but very very often is stalls, even on networkless tablets.
This is the reason I can only tolerate reading ebooks in iBooks. If they ever remove the ability to idly mess with page corners in a way that feels almost like a physical object, I guess I'm just done with ebooks. Other readers I've seen with faux-page-turning don't do it right. They don't allow partial turns (just a page-turning animation—not the same thing, and always hideous), only allow a tiny amount of partial turn before the whole page flips over, or it doesn't feel closely-enough connected to your input. Even iBooks could be a lot better, but it's good enough.
[EDIT] Apple Books, rather. Was it ever iBooks, or did I invent that? Either way, that's the program I'm talking about.
https://www.macrumors.com/2010/05/07/apple-to-begin-internat...
We spend much of our developing years reading from paper and taking tests, which may be telling our brains that things we've read on paper are likely to be of importance and worth remembering. Whereas smartphone use is mostly to browse / pass time so how brain takes things we've read via smartphone to not be as important.
Perhaps the study would show different results if there was a generation of children whose school textbooks were primarily digital and had little social media use.
Keep in mind the internet is also one of the only places where young Chinese might get exposed to English and western content. Can you imagine a Chinese child having a conversation with a young American and learning that they have multiple parties? Checks and balances? Tiananmen Square?
This doesn’t mean the paper isn’t detecting a real effect, its just that the noise in these experiments is large and the techniques or sample size insufficient to confidently overcome that noise. It’s a great contribution to it’s field, but I won’t be changing my habits based off it.
* screen type vs paper
* size
* attention span reduction (even without notifications and so on, a phone automatically gets a negative amount of focus on a single thing)
* "lost cost" to start using
trying each of those specifically is possible - and will hint at much more.