Are smartphones making us dumber?

Anywhere between 6-10% of Internet users are addicted.
Do you ever sneak away from people to check your smart phone?
Have you ever check your blackberry while at a meal with others?
Do you use your smart phone in the bathroom?...and wish you could use it in the shower?
Do you feel lost or naked if you don't have your phone with you?
Do you have to check your phone before bed and immediately when you wake up?
Do you constantly check your phone even when you know there is no new email or text?
Have you ever ignored others in a real conversation to use your phone?
Have you ever checked your phone at a stoplight?

you might have a problem.

3 billion cell phone users. 12 Billion text messages are sent worldwide every day.

Before office workers received their company issued blackberry's, they were working about 47 hrs a week. 9 months later they were averaging over 70 hrs a week.

Somehow the marketing has convinced us that it's a better way to do things. Studies have shown it is associated with increased levels of stress, burnout and decreased job and life satisfaction and increased marital conflict. Smart phone designers engineer them expecting users to touch them over 200 times a day for 20-30 seconds at a time. One of the great myths of technology is that gadgets are supposed to give us more time. But doesn't it feel like they take time away from us?  We are always tinkering with them, changing settings and troubleshooting etc.

The productivity paradox has shown that the more a company invests in technology the LESS productive it's people are.

What I see is more and more distraction. Less deep thinking and more superficial information just being passed quickly along.  Like foreworded texts of a joke, or a twitter picture of someones lunch. Can our brains keep up with all the modern demands for our attention?

Are we all born multitaskers? Cell phone researchers use a term called inattention blindness to describe the mental state we are in when talking on our phones as opposed to listening to music. What is even more frightening is that cell phone users who are proven to have missed parts of tasks, BELIEVED that they were aware of everything going on around them. On average, texters look away from the road for almost 5 seconds. At 50 mph you can travel the length of a football field without looking at the road. At any given time 10% of drivers are texting and 23 times more likely to be in an accident. Our brain is really only capable of doing one thing at a time. So if you think you are a good multitasking actually what you are doing is switching tasks very quickly.  Studies have also found that a middle aged person who "multitasks" makes more errors. One interesting positive is that surgeons that play video games make less errors in operating rooms.

It may seem that we are getting more done, but really we are just getting sloppier. Because when we are doing this we are paying partial continuous attention to many things. This can't be good. Because we have to reorient our brains every time we shift back and forth to tasks. Some research shows that those that multitask the most have more memory problems and are more easily distracted.  All this media is aggressively going after our attention.

Younger users have had their attention spans shortened by technology. They can't handle large chunks of information. Their music reflects this and their choices reflect this. Most students spend less than 2 hours a week reading and studying for class but over 9 hours on facebook per week. With the Internet the majority of brain energy is used to find information and not to deeply study it once it's found. It inhibits creative thinking because instead of pursuing an idea, your twitter followers give you instant feedback before the idea can fully develop.

In the end there is no putting the genie back in the bottle. The flow of information through our lives is only going to increase as new and faster devices are made. The simple solution seems to be to turnoff and tune it out. But is that possible? We can either manage our usage or it will manage us.