In a 2017 interview with The Guardian, software engineer Loren Brichter said “smartphones are useful tools, but they’re addictive. Pull-to-refresh is addictive. Twitter is addictive. These are not good things.” What makes this quote significant is the knowledge that it was none other than Brichter who invented pull-to-refresh, a feature now ubiquitous among smartphone apps. It should raise alarm when a once proud father of one of the most popular software features in the world forsakes his own brain-child. But, Brichter has good reason.
For years, mounting evidence has suggested that smartphones, along with many other technologies we rely on, have increasingly costly externalities. In many cases, that cost is paid in what researchers call attentional capacity — humans only have a limited number of things they can pay attention to. When a distraction occupies some of this capacity, something else must, necessarily, be deprived. It comes as no surprise then, that people perform worse on cognitive tasks when distracted by smartphones. In fact, researchers at Xavier University found that students reliably performed worse on 25-40% of test questions for which their phones rang during the relevant lecture content.
It should raise alarm when a once proud father of one of the most popular software features in the world forsakes his own brain-child.
One of the most reproducible results in psychological research is that humans are unable to multitask. Trying to engage in a task while using a smartphone means, in practice, that the task is not really getting done. Adam Gazzaley and Larry Rosen, neuroscientist and psychologist, respectively, put it succinctly in their book Distracted Minds: Ancient Brains in a High-Tech World, when they wrote, “our brains do not parallel process information.”
In fact, the situation is even more dire. In a recent study out of UT Austin and UC San Diego, researchers showed that even the mere presence of a smartphone can degrade cognitive performance. In this study, participants were asked to complete tests of working memory and fluid intelligence. Half of the participants were told to leave their phones in their bags in another room. The other half was told to keep their phone on them as they normally would. The researchers found that the students who kept their phones on them performed significantly worse on the tests — even though no participants actually touched their phones during the course of the experiment. The reason for this, posited by the researchers, is that the presence of a smartphone eats up significant attentional capacity.
In a recent study out of UT Austin and UC San Diego, researchers showed that even the mere presence of a smartphone can degrade cognitive performance.
At a deeper level, smartphones may be hijacking our focus via a mechanism called automatic attention. When stimuli are frequently associated with long-term goals, our brains may continue to respond to those stimuli, even when we are not actively thinking about the goals they relate to. One example of this is when people respond to hearing their own name, even when focused on something unrelated. This response can backfire, however, when such a stimulus is frequent in the environment but irrelevant to the task at hand. When such a situation arises, attention shifts from the task to the stimulus. When it comes to smartphones, the researchers say that they “may redirect the orientation of conscious attention away from the focal task and toward thoughts or behaviors associated with one’s phone.” In fact, the cognitive cost may come not just from the distraction itself but from our own effort to ignore the stimulus and continue focusing on the task at hand.
Given these disturbing developments, it should come as no surprise that there is a growing movement of tech insiders who are raging against the machine. Along with Brichter, numerous others have gone from technology developers to Cassandras, warning of impending doom. This brings to mind the Biggie Smalls lyric, alluding to the dangers of dealing in addictive drugs: never get high on your own supply.
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