Gadgets may be making us dumber, studies show

[IDemo]

Are gadgets making us dumber? Two new studies suggest they might be. One found that people who are interrupted by technology score 20 percent lower on a standard cognition test. A second demonstrated that some students, even when on their best behavior, can't concentrate on homework for more than two minutes without distracting themselves by using social media or writing an email.

Interruptions are the scourge of modern life. Our days and nights are full of gadgets that ping, buzz and beep their way into our attention, taking us away from whatever we are doing.

We've known for a while that distractions hurt productivity at work. Depressing research by Gloria Mark at the University of California, Irvine, says that typical office workers only get 11 continuous minutes to work on a task before interruption. With smartphones reaching near ubiquity, the problem of tech-driven multitasking — juggling daily tasks with email, text messages, social media etc — is coming to a head.

Multitasking has been the subject of popular debate, but among neuroscientists, there is very little of that. Brain researchers say that what many people call multitasking should really be called “rapid toggling” between tasks, as the brain focuses quickly on one topic, then switches to another, and another. As all economics students know, switching is not free. It involves "switching costs" — in this case, the time it takes to re-immerse your mind in one topic or another.

http://redtape.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/05/17/18322435-students-cant-resist-distraction-for-two-minutes-and-neither-can-you?lite

[winter is coming]

1. My phone didn't come with the proper instructions.

I didn't get the insert about how I'm not allowed to turn my phone off or put it on stun.

[randome]

6. Easy enough to put one on 'stun'.

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[randome]

2. Gadgets, TV, gaming, advertising.

All of it is pervasive and interferes with cognition, IMO.

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[notadmblnd]

3. Used to be a time when people kept all the phone numbers of people they knew in their head

now they're in our phones. Sometimes I even have trouble remembering mine. I used to have to know how to read a map to get to someplace unfamiliar. Now I just plug in the addy in my GPS unit and to tells me where to go.

[NRaleighLiberal]

4. one major gadget in particular - the TeeVee!

[Skidmore]

5. I'd say that the TeeVee has been supplanted by the

Smart Phone. People are plugged into those mini computers all of the time.

[NRaleighLiberal]

7. Ah, but the amount of disinformation and selling on a massive scale still impacts more people, I bet

and the hours and hours and hours spent in front of them, on average...

[Marr]

9. Yep-- I can't tell you how many times I've seen groups for 3-5 people,

ostensibly hanging out together, all absorbed in their phones and texting other people. Not speaking to the people they're actually *with* at all, and never really *there*.

Go to a concert or an event of any sort now, and the majority of the crowd is going to be viewing the event through a tiny screen on their stupid phone-- something they could do without GOING to the event at all.

[GoCubsGo]

15. I noticed that watching baseball games.

Half the people in the background are always looking down at their smart phones. I don't get it. They page huge sums of money on tickets, yet they don't watch the games?

[Nay]

17. It puzzles me, too. After watching many gatherings of relatives and strangers alike, I've come

to the conclusion that it is definitely an addiction/compulsion that, even when users are in the presence of other people or at a spectacle of some sort, forces the addicted to constantly look and interact with a device.

It certainly keeps me from giving a shit about much human contact. My DIL has her face in her phone all day, every day. It's like trying to interact with a zombie. I have friends who are not addicts, but they are my age (55-65). I don't see non-addicts in younger ages; they are nearly all like that. It's sad.

Edited to add: I also have observed that the addicts seem to have no attention span at all when they are dragged away from their devices and forced to pay attention to something like a movie, a book, an outdoors bird walk, etc. They simply cannot focus for any length of time on one thing, AND they display utter boredom with subjects/activities/interactions that do not involve a screen. I don't think that's a good thing.

[DirkGently]

8. Wonder if tech has anything to do with all the

ADD / ADHD we keep hearing about, and all the "medication" being doled out to little kids as a result.

Whenever I hear something about fragmented attention, I think of a friend of mine. A bit younger, so he basically grew up with computers / Internet / video games as a constant. Intelligent, but cannot sit still for even a movie, never mind, say reading a book. He can concentrate for hours working on cars, though.

I just wonder if early hyper-stimulation affects cognition as it's developing, making it harder to focus on one thing for an extended period. It could be seen as an adaptation to modern life, but I wonder how deeply a person can develop their intellect, ethics, or personal philosophy if their intake of the world is limited to two-minute video clips and text messages.

Are we developing fractured consciousness as a culture? What are the implications?

[randome]

10. Well, our brains split into two hemispheres at some point in our evolution.

Maybe another split will occur at some point in the future?

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[treestar]

11. There is the other side that they make information available quickly

Things you used to have to take a trip to the library to find out - you can google.

[Jester Messiah]

12. I hate the term "gadget."

It is a shorthand for "device that I don't fully understand and therefore do not value." It is dismissive and trivializing. Consider, we have "gadgets" that allow you to access gigantic repositories of knowledge, get information on goings-on the world over, communicate nigh instantly with anybody anywhere. We're so used to it that we take for granted these tiny miracles in our pockets. "Gadgets." Feh.

[Egalitarian Thug]

13. Exactly right. K&R

There are multiple factors contributing to this, but the gadgets are certainly a big one.

[AndyA]

14. Explains a few things

[aristocles]

16. I bleave ti. tn