Are smartphones making us dumb?
This modern dread – that chronic distraction from all our e-gizmos is mangling our focus, maybe permanently – has become so acute that one leading scientist went so far as to compare the threat to climate change.
Even so, experts have yet to find the smoking gun for the alleged theft of our neurons. Scientists immersed in the growing field of distraction studies say there’s still no hard evidence that cellphones, e-mail and social media have impaired our intelligence.
“Direct systematic studies are either unavailable or I am unaware of them,” notes neuroscientist Gary Small, who, as author of “iBrain: Surviving the Technological Alteration of the Modern Mind,” closely follows the field.
Still, there’s a rising tide of worries, fed by recent books with grim titles like “Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age,” and “The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains.” There are hints that some worry is justified: indirect evidence strongly suggests that increasing exposure to flashing and pinging screens is shaping our ever-adapting human brains.
In one seminal study in 2005, the University of California at Irvine informatics professor Gloria Mark found that information workers on average switch tasks every three minutes. In more recent research, Mark has shown that people working on computers toggle between windows – mainly to check e-mail or surf the Web – on average 37 times an hour.
Such task-switching, aka multi-tasking, has been shown in several studies to increase stress, which can interfere with short-term memory, leading to more mistakes. Scientists have found that people who constantly multitask are more easily distracted, as a rule – although they’ve yet to confirm whether such people multitask a lot because they’re by nature more distractible.
Given the high stress and potential risks of juggling tasks, why do so many people do it? The answer has to do with a powerful brain chemical called dopamine, which surges when people encounter something new or important. Our brains evolved to love dopamine back in the days on the savannah. Novelty was in scarce supply, but it proved helpful for humans to become stirred up by a new kind of predator or food source. Today, novelty surrounds us 24/7, making it hard to determine what’s worth our limited attention.
The magnitude of this change in less than two decades, is what prompted Oxford neuroscientist Susan Greenfield, in an interview with British reporters, to call it “almost as important as climate change,” citing her fear that the our new hyper-connectedness is “rewiring the brain” to encourage instant gratification and erode empathy.
Neuroscientist Adam Gazzaley at the University of California at San Francisco agrees that we’re in the midst of an epic transformation. Yet it’s hard, if not impossible, he says, to tease out the specifics of the re-wiring in progress, including whether the changes are more negative than positive. Some brain-imaging studies suggest that people who regularly use the Internet become more skillful in tracking down data and some video games appear to help players improve visual acuity.
Especially confusing, says Gazzaley, is that key brain functions, like short-term memory, processing speed, and the capacity to multi-task, decline steadily as we age. Is it age alone that’s causing the decline? Might older people be even worse without all the increased practice they’re getting? These questions remain unanswered.
Last spring, however, Gloria Mark at UC Irvine and collaborating U.S. Army scientists produced another intriguing study involving e-mail. They monitored 13 office workers who abstained from using e-mail for five days, and found that at the end of the time, the workers were multi-tasking less, less stressed, and more able to focus.
Mind psychologist-author Sherry Turkle has observed that “We don’t do e-mail; our e-mail does us,” and suggest that, for our brains’ sake, some new restraint would make sense.”
Katherine Ellison (www.katherineellison.com) is a Pulitzer-prize winning journalist and author, most recently, of “Buzz: A Year of Paying Attention.”