How Smartphones Affect Your Brain

Every year, young people spend more time on their smartphones. It’s probably making some of them lazy thinkers, less likely to analyze an issue.

Irony, when it really applies, is delightful. Which is why a study that concludes smartphones are making us dumber is funny — and disturbing.

The funny part is obvious. They are, after all, called “smart” phones. The disturbing part is that 85 percent of Americans have one.

In essence, the study argues that smartphones make some of us lazier because they rapidly address questions we might have researched and thought about extensively in the distant past, circa 2007 or so.

YOU MIGHT ALSO LIKE: Smartphone Thumb Injuries Are on the Rise

How smartphones affect your brain

This study suggests that smartphone users who are intuitive thinkers — “more prone to relying on gut feelings and instincts when making decisions” — use their smartphone’s search engine more and analyze less than they might have before, the study says.

“They may look up information (they) actually know or could easily learn but are unwilling to make the effort to actually think about it,” said Canadian behavioral psychologist Gordon Pennycook, a co-lead author of the study.

Analytical thinkers, on the other hand, “second-guess” themselves and analyze a problem in a logical sequence. A hallmark of highly intelligent people, the authors say, is that they are more analytical about everything and less intuitive when solving problems.

What type of thinker are you?

Which begs the question: which type of thinker are you?

Being intuitive doesn't mean you’re not as capable of making good decisions as someone who is more analytical. Intuitions based on extensive experience are valuable, as the author Malcolm Gladwell explained in his popular book “Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking.” But that book was not a blanket endorsement of following uninformed hunches. Intuitions based on little information aren’t as helpful as you think.

If you’re inclined that way and a smartphone allows you to gather more information than you would otherwise, it’s helped you act more like analytical thinkers do.  

But, according to the study authors, smartphone users are instead tipping too far toward the easiest and fastest way to find information and make a decision.

“Our research provided support for an association between heavy smartphone use and lowered intelligence,” said Pennycook. “Whether smartphones actually decrease intelligence is still an open question that requires future research.”

What you can do

In an essay, Jenny Davis says the research began with a false assumption. Defining “cognitive functioning (incorrectly) as a raw internal process, untouched by technology in its purest state. This approach pits the brain against the device, as though tools are foreign intruders upon the natural body.”

Tools always can be used for better or worse. A smartphone can save us time arguing over facts. Instead, we can look up the answer. If you’re inclined to analysis when you need more information, you have a tool in your pocket or purse. If you’re just curious about any subject, you can dive in while sitting on a bus. If a bright idea occurs to you, you can see whether anyone else has mentioned it.

But having so much information at your fingertips can lead you into black waters. Using the internet correctly is a skill. Much of what you see might be wrong, or at least half wrong, which is hard to figure out. Believing something because a friend forwarded it to you is human nature — we trust our friends — but your friend could have been fooled, too.

You need to use your judgment, not necessarily your intuition.

Should you get rid of your smartphone?

The research on smartphone usage is mainly about whether it creates behavioral addictions, by giving us little bursts of the pleasure-chemical dopamine. Being addicted doesn’t mean you become less intelligent — but it does mean you may act unintelligently, for instance, by texting while you’re driving a car.

Services like Facebook and YouTube are designed to capture your information. As Tristan Harris, a former Google design ethicist who co-founded the Center for Humane Technology, said during testimony before the Senate Commerce Committee in 2019, “The business model is to keep people engaged.”

In 2014, neuroscientist Abraham Zangen could still find a group of college students who didn’t yet use smartphones. He found that heavy users scored 5 to 10 percent higher on tests of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder than non-users. The users also had diminished activity in the right prefrontal cortex, which regulates attention.

More recently, scientists have conducted brain scans and other tests on people who use smartphones more heavily than their peers. The results aren’t positive. As a 2021 overview, published in the prestigious journal Frontiers, concluded, “Excessive smartphone use is associated with psychiatric, cognitive, emotional, medical, and brain changes that should be considered by health and education professionals.”

Perhaps you have been badgering your kids for years to get their heads away from that little screen and to stop texting and playing video games for hours on end.

How many times have you said, “I have to take a break from this thing,” or “I need to spend less time on Facebook,” or Twitter, or a dozen other social media outlets?

Addiction takes up time and energy you could be using elsewhere and distracts you from other demands.

If you think your smartphone is feeding your laziness, chances are you’re also at least a tad “addicted.”

You know what to do. Read a book. Ask an expert a question in person. Put your phone down and take a thoughtful walk. Consciously limit how you use your smartphone and the time you spend on it.

YOU MIGHT ALSO LIKE: Smartphone Distracted Parenting Is a Bad Habit