A simple maths equation. The spelling of a polysyllabic word. A news story you heard yesterday and can’t recall. We instinctively reach for our phones and find the answer to our thoughts in seconds, without so much as a neuron disturbed in our brains.
Is this impulse to use our phones a symbol of intelligence, for knowing to utilise the tools we have acquired? Or, could it be making us lazy and reliant on technology to perform tasks that we no longer have the cognitive ability to do.
The association between substantial smartphone use and lowered intelligence has been studied in recent research by the University of Waterloo in Ontario. The study focused on 660 smartphone users and compared the way in which analytical thinkers and intuitive thinkers used their smartphones. Their findings showed that intuitive thinkers (those who rely on gut feeling and instinct to make decisions) more often than not use their phone’s search engines to find a solution rather than their own brainpower; whereas the analytical thinkers tended to give more thought to solving problems themselves.
It is difficult to decipher if this is a problem with mankind as a whole, or just a problem with those personalities categorised as intuitive. How many of us would say we are intuitive thinkers, and will this number keep rising as smartphones continue to dominate how we live?
Gordon Pennycock, co-lead of the study, said “this means that people may look up information that they already know or could learn, but are unwilling to make the effort to actually think about it.”
So, can we infer that smartphones are making intuitive thinkers lazy? Nathanial Barr, the second co-lead in the research described people using Smartphone’s as “an extended mind.”
Take a second to have a look around you. How many people have a smartphone as an extension of their arm, let alone their mind, right now? This is damaging our IQ, as well as our social skills. Since the mobile revolution, our attention span has dropped from 12 seconds to just 8 seconds – we now have a shorter attention span than a goldfish!
If you are a millennial reading this, you may be familiar with the term ‘technophobe’. You likely use it to describe your parents, grandparents, or anyone senior to you for their inability to work smartphones, or perceived fear of this technology. We may laugh at their unfounded fears and ignorance to handheld technology, but ask yourself this; can your brain calculate the same equation that they can, without reaching for the nearest iPhone calculator? Would you be able to sit and write a letter in perfect form without the need to consult your old friend auto-correct? Unfortunately, I think the answer would be a resounding negative.
Smartphones aren’t just creating lazy brains, they are creating tired brains. Our ability to sleep is directly affected through our usage of smartphones, which could lower our IQ by an average of 15 points. The less sleep we get, the more impact on our capacity to commit information to memory. This may be why we seem to find ourselves reverting back to Google for information we have previously processed, but have difficulty remembering.
On the other hand, it could be argued that smartphones give us access to a whole new realm of educational materials that we would never have been able to make use of before the mobile revolution. For the youth of today, e-learning comes naturally, with apps for revision, Google Translate aiding multilingualism, and even apps to help you pass your driving theory test. Interactive learning can be more productive than traditional textbook education. Mobile education allows students to personalise their learning and be more flexible with where and when they can learn.
Daisy Whitehead, a London office worker who is learning to drive, stated,
“From just a touch of a smartphone screen, I am able to practice the theory test whenever I have time, wherever I am,” she says. “I no longer need to carry heavy books and try to read on crowded tubes.”
It is worth considering that our minds have evolved so rapidly, and in fact become so unequivocally intelligent that we now don’t even need to think about how we source information, we just do it. Surely, this demonstrates intelligence, rather than stupidity.
Our inability to stop scrolling, glancing, and searching on our smartphones has become the norm – a worldwide habit that we are unlikely to break. It is just a question of whether we use our new-found handheld technology for educational advancement, or if we allow it to hinder our minds and incite laziness – the choice is in the hands of the iPhone user (unsurprisingly, along with the iPhone).