VIDEO – ONE LESS IQ POINT AT A TIME –
April 3, 2023 – It’s a vicious circle. The more useful our phones become, the more we use them. The more we use them, the more we lay neural pathways in our brains that lead to pick up our phones for whatever task is at hand – and the more we feel an urge to check our phone even when we don’t have to. Worries about specific aspects of our hyperconnected world – like social media and its increasingly hyper-realistic beauty filters – aside, what is our reliance on these devices doing to our brains? Is it all bad for us, or are there also some upsides?
As you might expect, with our societal dependence on devices increasing rapidly every year, the research struggles to keep up. What we do know is that the simple distraction of checking a phone or seeing a notification can have negative consequences. This isn’t very surprising; we know that, in general, multitasking impairs memory and performance.
