Do smartphones make us dumb?

How much are phones to blame for poor school performance, less sleep, more depression and other social ills. It's time to take The Sniff Test.

I used to do a little but a little wouldn't do, So the little got more and more

I just keep tryin' to get a little better, Said, a little better than before

Guns N’ Roses - Mr Brownstone

Addiction is about dopamine hits. An all action-video game or Tom Cruise movie creates hyperarousal, which the brain associates with dopamine, its reward system. Dopamine also plays a role in controlling our movement, attention, learning, memory and mood.

It becomes progressively harder to reach a high, as Guns N’ Roses noted, which can drag you into addiction. A flood of dopamine may sharpen your focus, but only on the task in hand, which makes it hard to concentrate on doing anything else.

Addiction is also about craving. Wordle limited players to one game a day to allow word of mouth to be its main marketing channel, but also to create a craving for the next day’s game. By making it available first thing in the morning, it becomes a habit by being triggered by something you already do, such as commuting or eating breakfast. The holy grail for any product is that it become routine and automatic.

Like checking your phone.

Wordle’s popularity halved over the summer of 2022 following The New York Times buying the game, but more likely due to the ending of lockdowns and losing its uniqueness. The strength of the game was the daily routine, but a single game is easy to copy and alternative versions dilute the scarcity effect.

A smartphone is hardware, the latest means of accessing information, entertainment and communication. It is the software on the phone that makes it addictive, which is why Apple allows anyone to build applications for the iPhone. We need new and different experiences to keep us going back, and there is always a long line of new experiences waiting for us on our phone.

But is that harmful?

Are we getting dumber?

The Flynn effect of rising proficiency in IQ tests was first observed in the 1980s. Every country administering tests consistently reported rising scores, especially among young people.

The Flynn Effect (source: Idea Collector)

Researchers at the University of Edinburgh reported in 2020 that average IQ scores across the UK rose by 3.7 points from 1948. Many reasons are suggested, including better nutrition and education, improved healthcare and technology. It is likely that increased familiarity with the tests and the ability to practise them also led to scores improving.

But around the time of that report, others emerged showing a reverse Flynn effect. Scores in the US declined after 2000 and a 2020 paper claimed average scores in Norway fell 2.5 points from the early 1990s.

The hunt was on for something to blame.

Why might smartphones be bad

Cognitive overload

There is little doubt that we are bombarded with more information and have ready access to it on our phones. Cognitive overload means so much is thrown at us that we cannot focus. Tests show that having a switched off phone in a room with you is still a distraction, because of curiosity and craving for what might be happening, and that the only way to do deep work is to leave the phone in another room.

Macquarie University refers to three decades of research showing that we remember 30% less of what we read on a screen compared to the page, and that we are unable to transfer what do we learn offline. Children who solve block puzzles digitally cannot repeat the solution with physical blocks and must start-over solving the puzzle.

It’s become a necessity to keep up with technology. Grandparents who are not tech savvy were cut off from family and friends during the pandemic and old ways of doing things cannot be the best when they have been retired or forgotten.

Yet learning new skills requires our brain to rewire itself, something that it is especially good at doing. This is called plasticity and the need to keep up with the latest gadgets may prolong the rewiring process late in our lives, when it had been assumed brain plasticity reduced.

Our brains are so good at rewiring themselves that if we did not dream, the parts of the brain responsible for eyesight would be invaded by the workings of the other senses while we slept. Rewiring allows blind people to have heightened other senses and it begins within an hour, hence we use dreams to maintain our vision while in darkness.

Meanwhile, IQ tests change with time and are hard to compare across decades. School exams have undergone far more alterations. Despite this, the education system still fails to deliver skills that are required in the workplace. This indicates that passing exams, which are mostly a memory test, is not an especially useful means of valuing workers and serves mainly to demonstrate persistence in a repetitive task.

Precisely the type of task that artificial intelligence should be able to do.

Informational Amnesia

It is also claimed that smart phones mean we stop using parts of our brains because we no longer need to store information. These parts then deteriorate and we are less intelligent as a result.

The hippocampus in the brain specialises in learning and the memory of facts, events and emotions. London taxi drivers with the knowledge are observed to have expanded their hippocampus, while damage to it leads to memory loss, lack of spatial awareness and difficulty learning new information. These are all symptoms of Alzheimer’s and other mental deterioration.

Yet because our brains rewire, there is no dead space and this theory is wrong. Most of us no longer know how to repair a petrol engine, because it’s not a must-have skill and we know a lot of other things instead. The question becomes whether we are filling the free space in our brains with constructive thoughts.

Academic Performance

The analysis of academic performance considers various factors, such as smartphone usage, sleep duration and quality, and social interaction. These are intertwined and hard to separate, analysis that often comes down to questionable statistical processes. Social isolation may cause more phone use, rather than the other way around.

We show a lot of correlations between smartphones and other things. This is a favourite from Byron Gilliam, who notes tongue-in-cheek that smartphones took off around 2009, since when pedestrian road deaths have risen sharply. Engrossed in our phones we step into the onrushing traffic.

Just because two things coincide does not mean they cause each other. I don’t buy sunglasses because I buy ice cream and the real reason for both purchases may be warm weather. We must look for an alternative explanation for why things are happening.

This is why The Sniff Test repeatedly argues that new knowledge is a result of an improved explanation for the known facts, and not the use of evidence to justify a theory. The reasoning comes first.

A 2019 study in the Journal of the American Medical Association reported that television and video gaming had greater effects on academic performance than social media use. What phones are used for is important, which is because it is the software on the phone that is determining its use. If you want to use your phone less, remove your social media and games from it.

Sleep quality

When fired up by the software on our phones, it’s credible that our sleep quality suffers. Blue light exposure in the evening suppresses melatonin, which is a hormone regulating sleep. It may also disrupt the stages of sleep, making it harder to achieve REM sleep, which is when we dream. If so, phone use may lead to poorer eyesight, but not because you are squinting at the screen.

Yet blue light stimulates the brain and phone use may make us more alert during the day. Whether this is enough to offset sleepiness caused by lower quality rest is unclear.

The conclusions of research are often mixed, most likely because there is too much going on to identify single explanations. Sleep duration appears to be most affected by phone use, but could be a result of noise, light and high temperatures. Many surveys rely on people reporting sleep patterns accurately, which might be enough to question the results. Surveys based on monitoring sleep are limited and as yet inconclusive.

Social interaction

Nearly a third of US homes have a single occupier, which equates to 13% of the population living alone.

The percentage of people with one close friend or fewer has nearly tripled to 20% over the past 30 years, while those claiming over ten close friends has dropped from 40% to 15% for men and fewer for women.

The Journal of Media Psychology showed that loneliness leads to excessive smartphone usage, which doesn’t solve the problem and increases loneliness further. Arguments quickly become of the chicken and egg variety.

Phone use is higher among people who are sensation seekers and those who have more sedentary lifestyles. Yet, even for those who seemingly take the biggest risks, there are alternative explanations for their behaviour than simply sensation seeking. Equally, the phone may be the easiest thing for couch potatoes to reach for and not the cause of the problem.

Depression

Mental health is the largest healthcare cost, ahead of heart disease and cancer. The World Health Organisation reports that major depressive disorder (MDD) rose globally from 4% in 1990 to nearly 6% by 2017.

More worryingly, the National Institute of Mental Health says that MDD in the US increased from 3.5% to 17.3% between 1950 and 2017. The number of people being treated for depression rose from 9.1 million in 1990 to 13.6 million in 2017.

These trends began well before mobile phones were available. Other explanations, such as economic cycles, average household sizes and the breakdown of traditional communities have their proponents.

Humans are social creatures, but we are also curious and adventurous by and large. The availability of international travel and the opportunity to live and work far from our roots is exciting but also potentially alienating. There is a reason ex-pat communities are more passionate about home than those who live there.

Technology that keeps us in touch, including email, video calling and access to news, helps to overcome distance and reduces the feeling of separation. It’s hard to believe having ready access to this is a bad thing.

Suicide

Suicide rates have increased in the West in recent decades. The US Center for Disease Control reports 10.7 deaths per 100,000 in 1999 rising to 14.2 in 2018. This is an increase of nearly one third.

The suicide rate increased in all age groups, but the change is particularly pronounced in young people. The numbers of 10 to 24 year olds taking their own life rose nearly 50% from 1999 to 2018.

More suicides are linked to mental health problems, substance abuse, loneliness and economic hardship, but which comes first? It seems facile to suggest smartphones are the primary cause of these disturbing social trends.

Cycles in social cohesion occur throughout history. The Fourth Turning theory, which argues that we are currently in the eye of a once in 80-year storm, identifies ebbs and flows in trust in institutions, interest in spirituality, and focus on community and self-sacrifice. These are all at low levels currently, which may explain the observations about loneliness, mental health and their consequences.

If in doubt, leave it out

There is no conclusive answer to whether smartphones make us dumber, but there are a lot of more intrinsically appealing explanations for what is limited evidence of declining brain power. Smartphones can have a negative impact on cognition if used excessively or in a way that interferes with our real-world relationships and activities. What we are doing on our phones is an important determinant of what is excessive.

Once you are in a cycle of dependency you become more detached and avoid experimentation, which is a critical means of learning. For example, someone who is emotionally mistreated may develop body image concerns, unregulated eating, depression, social anxiety and poor academic performance. These can be exacerbated by smartphone usage, but removing connectivity to the outside world is harmful and does not address the root cause.

If you want to use your phone less, put it in another room while you eat as a family, work or play games. If you want your children to use their phones less, set an example. Do as I say, not as I do will only encourage everyone to be on their phones during family time.