Surprise, surprise: the science shows that one of the most widespread myths about technology, that extensive use of smartphones diminishes our skill levels and brain function, isn’t true.
An interesting article in The Conversation, “Your smartphone is not making you dumber — digital tech can enhance our cognitive abilities”, provides evidence that technology doesn’t reduce our cognitive abilities, but instead complements them and allows us to increase our capabilities.
True, we no longer memorize phone numbers now that we know that the technology we carry in our pockets at all times meets that need for us, but that doesn’t mean we’ve lost the ability to do so: we simply free up that brain capacity because we feel it is reasonably covered, thus giving us attentional resources we can devote to other tasks. Socrates and Plato may have expressed concern about the increased use of writing in their time because we no longer needed to rely on memory and instead stored things in external repositories, but the reality is that throughout history, far from making us more forgetful or less intelligent, writing has complemented and enlarged our abilities.
In practice, technology reduces the need to use certain cognitive functions, but not our ability to perform them. We tend to remember less information that we know is stored in a resource that is readily available to us, and conversely, we remember information that we have been told will not be stored more easily, but our ability to recall information is still there when we need it. Our brains don’t get lazy by having an additional resource to store information, they simply make the decision to optimize their capabilities.
New technologies change our environment and our cognitive functions adapt to make the most of them, but it doesn’t destroy anything: it simply frees up resources for other brain tasks.
As ever, technological development and its adoption are surrounded by myths and fears that, over time, turn out to be unjustified. Using technology does not turn us into idiots, or make us slow or forgetful, unable to retain anything in a brain that is becoming progressively “lazy”… it simply helps us to manage our resources better. So, let’s use our devices as much as we can, and not worry when we are unable to remember a phone number. It turns out that our brain is smarter than we give it credit for.
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This post was previously published on Medium.com.
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