> Interestingly, the research didn’t show significant improvements in cognitive ability; the phone ban group showed a modest 3% boost in working memory, and there were no improvements in sustained attention. Researchers suggest that these results might mean that changes in cognitive ability could take longer than the study period of 21 days to materialise.
Notice how they had decided beforehand what they were going to find out, and are making an excuse here for not finding part of it.
I’m not a scientist in this field, but I would have been very surprised to have seen a difference in cognitive ability this quickly.
I’ve always felt that we wouldn’t recover from the negative impacts of phone addiction very quickly, if ever, after several years of addiction to doom scrolling, social media feeds, and the short bursts of 10-second videos.
I wish more real research in this field was being done, so that we could have some solid evidence — and proper warnings against — the negative impacts of phone addiction.
Until then, kids — and their parents — are left with the unfortunate decision between phone addition, and social ostracism.
Socrates says that profound knowledge is gained through interaction. He compares the written word to a painting, meaning it can be analysed but it doesn’t respond to questions and is therefore not a substitute for dialog.
This mirrors the critique to phones: used primarily to passively watch “paintings” instead of interacting. The viewer’s knowledge and critical thinking is improving only seemingly at best.
Even Socrates could tell when the consumer has become the product, so I guess this is not a new problem.
I wonder if there is some sort of solipsistic voice within us that recognizes when too much exposure or connectivity to other people becomes overwhelming in a way that we lose ourselves in it. I grew up and remember the times before everyone had easy access to the Internet in their homes, let alone on a high-powered terminal that now fits in our pockets. Those of us of a certain age remember a shift in social interaction that rivaled the previous generations telling mine we consumed too much tv (the 24/7 news cycle was a terrible idea for my generation, in retrospect).
On the one hand, kids don't need their smartphones in schools because mine did just fine without them. On the other hand, the smartphones can be used for a force of good, provided those "paintings" they are looking at are enriching their learning and growth in some way, setting them up to ask better questions when engaged in the Socratic dialogue.
But how do we guide usage toward that aim? That is the real question we should be asking.
Seeing this type of argument always bothers me. It's basically saying that, because people in the past were often overly critical of new technologies or trends, we can dismiss criticisms of new technologies or trends in general. Makes no sense.
I think it's less dismissing criticisms and more "just because it's new doesn't mean it's bad."
Other examples: cars vs horses, household appliances will make people lazy vs household robots will make peopl lazy, or SNL has really gone downhill (people have been saying that for decades, and it is indeed subjective but the generation who says it now thought it was peak in their youth, when the old people of their time were saying it sucked).
There may be some merit of truth and some valid criticisms in all of it. As other commenters have pointed out, books were a one-sided conversation, so Socrates was right in that sense, but sometimes it's necessary to have this one-sided conversation in order to have a fruitful multi-party conversation. And I think it's important for that to be understood -- some things are good for some things in some roles.
It's becoming very difficult to function in modern society without a smartphone. Smartphones have given us luxuries we couldn't even fathom in the 90s. Today I sent a spontaneous birthday gift to a friend in another state using Doordash. Twenty years ago that may not have even been possible.
I think it's important to understand the role of smartphones in our society and lives. It shouldn't replace real-life social interaction. It shouldn't be where we spend half our days looking at. We shouldn't believe the news that comes from our social feeds at face value (that transcends smartphones but you get my drift). But using it as a tool to get stuff done, that's invaluable.
Sure, maybe in his time he was right. Maybe he wasn't. But i think if you go ask parents of grade/middle/high schoolers they'd cry with joy if their children were just addicted to reading. It's fully possible that going from only ever interacting in the real world with people to sitting alone reading all day caused some problems with integration. It's also entirely possible that phones do a different kind of thing by not just dampening real world interactions, but effectively siphoning out your attention span as well (have you never felt this? Do you scroll on any of the infinite feed bullshit? If you think it doesn't obliterate your attention span, spend the first hour of every day watching tiktok and then tell me how easy it is to start work).
We all know that attention span is _required_ to get anything done academically, so directly correlated to intelligence, or at least the ability to get anything done at all. We all know that children are building their brains, and that significant experiences in childhood impact the view and life of the person far into adulthood. Ergo, do you really thing that being unable to read a single paragraph about Socrates for the future of... the world?
I simply cannot understand the pushback to such a simple and effective policy. Sure, the researchers probably have a bias. All schools aren't being made to do this, many schools implementing this are _choosing_ to, because _they_ interact with our children academically and know that the grade school generation is gonna eat rocks on any college level task because they can't stop looking at their phones, something which is easy to observe many children are _physically incapable of doing_.
Sure, maybe it's a really good time for impossibly motivated and unsocial children, i was one of them, and i can tell you that even having not grown up with it, i (almost 30) am having a hell of a time balancing needing to have snapchat to stay in contact with friends i moved away from, and getting trapped in the continuous feed the app seems to insert into more and more places. About using reddit as a scholarly resource for any question google won't help with and getting trapped in their endless feed. I know it's bad, and I'm a fully grown adult member of society, and i didn't grow up with it. And i'll tell you, i'd trade this phone shit for a book addiction in a microsecond.
What you're advocating for is a future where average attention span continuously decreases. Why do you want that? Why are you against the idea that phone might be fucking bad for us, and especially so for children? What experiences have you had with phone addiction in yourself and loved ones that gives you credibility in this topic? Genuinely asking
My kids are addicted to reading and I don't like it. Reading is great but not at the expense of staying up until 3am on a school night, not helping with basic household chores, not practicing music, not doing homework.
I feel this. When I envisioned having kids, I never envisioned having to tell them a dozen times per day to "put the book away!" I accept that it's a relatively good problem to have, but there are absolutely inappropriate times and places to be looking at a book for pleasure, absorbed to the point of losing track of time and not hearing any directions given.
> left with the unfortunate decision between phone addition, and social ostracism.
This line of thinking perpetuates the problem. More people getting addicted does not mean addiction is a prerequisite to live a full life. It's never been more important to aggressively curtail phone use – and make unpopular decisions that your kids will thank you for later – than it is now.
This is why it needs implementing systemically, and not ad hoc. If no one has social media, no one is being ostracised. If only one person opts out then yes, they risk being ostracised.
100% agreed, which was my point above about studies being done to prove the negative impacts, so everyone could actually get on board, instead of it being done ad hoc.
It took public shaming to start to reduce addiction to cigarettes, after we were able to show how bad they were for you.
The ostracization is a strawman. A few good friends (or even just one) is, imo, going to provide far more fulfillment than a million digital friends.
And when living in an appropriate place to raise children (playgrounds, etc near housing) it's super easy to meet other parents. And, in my experience at least, a rather large percent are also against 'digitizing' their kids.
Making friends the old fashioned way, and not just for your children.
I don't think you have the appropriate context here. This isn't about "good" (in person?) friends vs digital friends known only online. This is about schoolkids who almost all have smartphones losing a channel of communication with their schoolmates and thus being excluded from much of what goes on in the social group outside of school.
I have a child around this age and can absolutely see the issue, but I think it's less about phones per se and more about messaging apps and/or social media. For us, banning the phone itself wouldn't have these effects because we impose suitable restrictions on use as well as having put effort into educating our kids on healthy behaviours.
There are a small number of kids in the year group with "nokias" (non-smart phones) and they aren't looked down on or deliberately excluded by others, but they might feel they are missing out on something. As the kids get older and more independent their needs for communication tools will surely grow, but not so much social media.
Yes, the two kids in grade school who's parents wouldn't let them watch SpongeBob felt some exclusions from the lunch table discussion as well. The social aspect is extremely difficult to solve, and the app makers know this and accentuate it. They are shrewd businesspeople who's only goal is a functioning app that brings in more money than last year, hopefully on an exponential curve. This social exclusion aspect is why Facebook is still there, plodding along. They've effectively trapped the last groups of people there, and they raise the wall faster than the stragglers can climb. I'm currently trapped in snapchat as the only way to stay in touch with my old dnd group for when i come around. But those people are actually my best friends, so i speak to them more often, and i will be decompiling the APK and gutting the engagement shit with a rusty saw the moment i have time.
It's crazy there's people here defending these companies.
By good I mean having a small number of good friends rather than superficial relationships with large numbers of people. That should be a false dichotomy of course, but in reality it seems to often hold.
In other words - I'll ensure my chlidren have a small group of kids to regularly play with, ideally in the same neighborhood. Who cares what the other kids are doing?
This sort of stuff is ubiquitous in cheap more ruralish areas. Negligible crime rates are also important, and once again something you'd be more inclined to find well outside the city.
Knowing a few alcoholics this is part of the problem with addiction. You make friends with other addicts, and those bonds are broken when you have to quit.
The social aspect has to be addressed or the addiction is harder to quit.
So I agree with you, but the social isolation is an important factor in keeping people off the phone. Also, I am finding that younger folk do not know how to interact with people IRL. I am faced with fear, uncertainty, shyness, anxiety...and all of these issues were created by the phone use as well.
> I would have been very surprised to have seen a difference in cognitive ability this quickly
Sleep deprivation is really, really bad for you. Here [0] is one example that tries to measure reaction times compared to drinking (in the context of driving). Being tired is pretty much being drunk. Here [1] is another on cognitive activity.
It’s not surprising to me in the slightest (anecdotally, I suffer from bouts of insomnia and my behaviour, mood and cognitive performance in work is definitely lower during those times. Even a single nights sleep shows a huge change in my mood INE) that if reducing smartphone usage they get more sleep that they pretty much immediately saw improvements.
Anectdotally, I've also been getting in a bad habit of staying up 2-3 days and agree there are similarities to being drunk - certainly in terms of cognitive ability and reflexes - but I even experience similar loss of inhibition (although not in nearly as fun a way).
The first serious cognitive effect I've encountered is struggling to find a word I'm searching for (or recalling a person's name) in conversation. On the third day, I also start having significant vision impairment, reminiscent of hallucinogenic effects, where objects seem to be swaying slightly when I focus on them.
It also quite apparent to me that it is much harder to retain information learned after being up for a day or two.
Driving performance after 24+ hours of being awake is pretty irrelevant to phones (even if they cause you to sleep less they don't cause you to not sleep at all), and it's just some brief effect with no reason to think otherwise from looking at this.
I think I had focus issues probably coming from playing too much videogames when I was young and it took 2-3 years to fully reset and achieve a real level of focus. I was able to compound that when I didn't have a proper smart phone for about another 2 years. Since getting a real phone its all been downhill again
> I’m not a scientist in this field, but I would have been very surprised to have seen a difference in cognitive ability this quickly.
Not sure.
I worked with a science team that had found very strong cognitive improvements in the short term (~2 weeks) after improving sleep quality. Though, study participants were mostly middle aged and elderly.
That seems plausible though. I have small kids and hence bad sleep often and when I'm very tired I often have to put off difficult programming tasks for another day and just do refactoring or whatever. I think it's entirely expected that it's harder to think clearly when you're really tired.
Is it harder to think clearly because you've just been watching shorts/reels for an hour? Absolutely not. It's an addictive waste of time, sure. But trying to claim some kind of cognitive impairment is just this generation's "X rots your brains" (where X has been TV and then video games).
Have you watched the infinite scroll much? Because my direct experience says you're wrong. Probably you can't really recreated the teenage phone experience even if you wanted to. What you need is:
1) a large enough group of actual close friends to use some social media app, so that by deleting that app you are removing a large part of your social life
2) those apps to continuously add infinite scroll, ad driven, engagement trap shit into every single aspect of the entire app.
Imagine if your work messages came through tiktok and by pressing back you were instantly dropped into an infinite scroll feed curated to your interests. Or say, slack gets bought and becomes an ad driven company who's only metric is increased time in app. But! Then your work refuses to change apps! So as you watch the app slowly become an attention pit, you are completely prevented from escaping it.
I don't think a lot of you old fogies really understand what the apps are like these days, or what teenage social life is like without the apps.
The fact that you're claiming that it's not harder to read an uninteresting paragraph after watching an infinite feed tells me you, luckily, have the privilege of not being tethered to these apps. You have the privilege to exist in a world where your social life isn't governed by ad revenue.
Because i grew up at the very start of all this, and some of my friends still use some of the apps, and everything that's "common knowledge" about phones and attention spans is true. The phone itself is fine, but i do think that the infinite scroll is just about the most dangerous device on the planet, barring the obvious ones.
This just reads like a thread about preventing teenagers from starting smoking, being filled with older people saying "why would you do that? Quitting smoking isn't hard, i smoked a pack once and was fine. And besides, smoking a cigarette or two doesn't hurt anyone, I'm fine".
I feel like sleep quality and phone addiction are very different, even if somewhat connected.
I would agree, though, that improving sleep quality would definitely improve cognitive function.
But removing phones would only help if it’s degrading sleep. If phone addiction has no impact on sleep (e.g. the parents still enforce regular bedtimes), then I would not expect that much, if any, cognitive improvement. Not quickly, anyway.
Either way, these two need to be studied independently to know for sure.
I agree that this study didn't separate the two very well, but it's a difficult task to be fair.
They found that the kids' bed times were far earlier without phones, but was that a short term effect? Was it an effect of being observed and measured? If the parents valued their kids' sleep, why was the average bed time of 12 year old kids after 11pm pre-ban? You could blame that lack of sleep on phones if it made you feel better I suppose, but it's clearly not the whole story.
I'm not surprised to see cognitive ability rise quickly. When I ditch the computer for two days and use pencil and paper, my math abilities rise sharply.
Perhaps the real research doesn't find these bombastic results that "everyone knows are true"? The 'researchers' in the article had a conclusion, the experiment didn't agree with it and then thought of excuses as to why.
>Until then, kids — and their parents — are left with the unfortunate decision between phone addition, and social ostracism.
you can suggest further experimentation to prove another point, but this is different from assuming a priori that effect WILL happen. The issue is not in the idea itself, but how it is phrased.
They did suggest a new experiment, one lasting longer than 21 days to test their hypothesis.
Hypothesis -> proposed experiment -> results -> questions evoked by results -> new hypothesis -> new proposed experiment
MOST importantly, they didn’t fake any results and went where the data took them. This is the kind of science that has been falling out of fashion for the last few decades in favor of researchers who work based on other principles.
They could have included the obvious (but probably unwanted) alternative hypothesis:
Researchers suggest that these results might mean that changes in cognitive ability could take longer than the study period of 21 days to materialize, or access to devices has a positive effect on attention offsetting the effects of sleep on attention.
It's probably unlikely but it is an obvious possibility.
So is the possibility that attention is an emergent genetic trait. There are many, many alternative explanations. You are lamenting the exclusion of your preferred alternative explanation, but the researchers need to choose one and look further along that branch.
The idea of open science is that other teams would be free to explore plausible alternative hypotheses. Some team might explore yours. Another might dig into my idea about the behavior’s relationship to genetics. And so on.
This is the method by which we move ourselves forward. And it’s easy to see how that effort is hampered by the practice of data tampering and other shenanigans. Which this team did not engage in, even when part of there hypothesis wasn’t supported by their data.
OR - crazy hypothesis - maybe they're familiar with the large amounts of research that already exists which shows that access to devices has a negative effect on attention. Just maybe.
Agree. I propose hypothesis here all the time and people will say "Show me the study that proves what you are saying!".
For instance. It maybe that the distracting quality of the phone is not the only thing providing better sleep and mood, but maybe it is the collective power of the EMF radiation that is disturbing the children's catecholamines.
"They examined the acute as well as chronic effects of EMF exposure and found a significant increase in adrenaline and noradrenaline levels after EMF exposure, following a drop, but the normal levels were not restored even at the end of the study (about one and a half year). They also observed significant diminution in dopamine levels."
Or even banning phones makes schools (where the experiment is probably being conducted) less transparent, allowing more freely to pressure subjects (intentionally or not) to ensure the "proper" result of the experiment.
This typically good science. You have hypothesis and test it, rather than doing an intervention and reporting every random thing that happened.
Although I agree in this case, the alternative hypothesis seems a bit lame, rather than adopting the null hypothesis. On the other hand I guess that more sleep could have some effect on cognitive development in the long run.
Yes but their conclusion is "well our hypothesis is probably still right, we just didn't look hard enough" rather than "maybe it doesn't have a significant effect".
You can look at that statement in a couple of different ways. Yes, experimental bias is one of them. The other is saying: we didn't see this effect, so we need to do longer term studies to see if it does exist.
Regardless, that statement is a good thing. It acknowledges a social bias towards the effect of smartphones. It doesn't give room for people to imply a result based upon that bias. On the surface, at least, it doesn't indicate that data was fudged to reach a particular result.
"Might mean" is a far cry from "our hypothesis is probably still right." This type of speculation is commonplace -- even expected -- in the discussion section of an article. Not much different than the lame duck "further research is needed to..."
Uh-huh. You have a conjecture, you test it, and then you say "looks like reality didn't match our conjecture, the conjecture must be wrong." Except here they got a negative result and said "reality must be wrong". It's a determined effort to find specific results.
They didn't say "reality must be wrong". They said that their initial hypothesis (that significant changes would be observed after 21 days) is probably wrong, so they implicitly proposed a second hypothesis (that significant changes occur after e.g. a few months).
None of this is remotely contemptible.
Pretend you're an immortal alien conducting a study with the hypothesis, "humans are mortal". You observe that your subjects do not die after 21 days. Do you conclude that humans are immortal? (I hope not. It's much better to conclude that humans don't usually die after 21 days in this particular instance of extraterrestrial captivity.)
OK, fine, they didn't literally say "reality must be wrong", they just thought it, probably. The attitude stinks. And I say it is remotely contemptible. Perhaps I'd go as far as to say moderately contemptible.
It's a fair point about the aliens. They are presumably mortal themselves, they have expectations about lifespan. Something about the mind not being a blank slate, it's hypotheses all the way down, can't escape preconceived ideas. Sure. Except you can try. You can be more impartial than you otherwise might be, when you're aware that there's something to be partial about.
In the case of smartphone bans, the viewpoint is almost politicized, like whether you're down with the tech bros or think they're evil. Researchers should know that, and thus should be very coldly objective. Here they expect the degradation of mental function, why? That's not something well-understood like mortality. It's probably something there's a great wobbly mass of very questionable psychological research about - low attention in school and degraded working memory due to what they may well call "screentime" - and they've just gone along with it like it's established. Why is known evil thing not acting sufficiently evil to meet our narrative? Must do more research until true.
Another sketchy part of doing this research is the subtext that smartphones lower the mood entails therefore ban smartphones in schools. That isn't a science-based decision, it's a decision to trample on the kids' rights for their own good: science can't guide moral choices. But the only reason to scientifically establish the first part, the fact, is for the purpose of advocating a ban.
If you think children have a right to smartphones in school, then your priors are just really out of line with anyone who is actually concerned with the well being of children.
Aren't in this case they saying that their experiment might have been the wrong one, and that next time they have to do a different kind of test that takes a longer time span into consideration? They acknowledge the result that no changes in cognitive abilities take place within 21 days, and then from there make the next conjecture that such changes might happen later, which would require a different kind of test?
Not at all. Type II error is routinely the result of methodological flaws like insufficient sample size.
It would be asinine to study the effects of parachutes on survivability of jumping from airplanes, hypothesizing that they would help, but conclude that the "conjecture must be wrong" because the sample size was 2 and it failed to reach statistical significance, or because the airplane was on the ground.
Would you feel differently if the study period was only 1 day instead of 25?
Or maybe 1 hour?
Would it then be reasonable for them to speculate that the methodology might contribute to the failure to reject the null hypothesis?
they found it was invalid in the short term, for this particular study. the long term is still an open question. which is why they’re pointing that out.
saying “we thought this would happen, it didn’t, but maybe there’s just something to do with our study that meant we disnt see the result that confirms our hypothesis” is a perfectly valid conclusion.
By now, most schools in Denmark are banning phones during school hours. My kids' school did it two years ago. I have no idea if it has improved my kids' "cognitive skills", and frankly I don't care that much about their academic level. They are kids. They should run around, play and be happy, and then they will learn what they need.
As a parent it's wonderful to know that the kids have this 5-7 hour break from the screens. Just wonderful.
Someone realized it's not a good idea to hand a bunch of teens cameras, give them unlimited possibility to bully eachother anonymously and then force them to share a space for 8 hours every day, including changing clothes and showering for gym class. In hindsight it seems obvious.
I think that's the norm in UK secondaries too. My 11yo is allowed to take his phone to school for but policy is it stays switched off, in the locker, until the end of the school day.
That’s a very uncharitable interpretation of what they wrote, and goes outside of how what they wrote is supposed to be interpreted.
The researchers are not claiming that cognitive ability changes would definitely take longer than 21 days to appear, they’re suggesting that that is the next thing to test.
Apart from whether the days are enough or not to wean off a long-standing addiction. Maybe a 3% boost in working memory has compounding effects over time as well.
You can't commit to long term memory what you can't keep in working memory long enough. You can't think about complex things if you don't have the working memory capacity.
If you always have 3% more working memory you might accumulate more knowledge after a while.
Like alcohol doesn't delete your brain, but you have serious memory deficits if you drink every day for years on end.
>If you always have 3% more working memory you might accumulate more knowledge after a while.
Or you might accumulate way less knowledge because you don't have a phone to get information from and are getting say 300% less information overall despite retaining 3% more of what you get.
yes they had a hypothesis. that’s how science works.
You left out the other benefits the study found. those benefits seem to be quite significant. In fact, I will go as far as to say that sleep has been well associated with student performance.
You remark comes off as disingenuous and not ready for serious review.
I think you might have responded to the wrong comment. card_zero's reading comprehension appears to be fine. I'm not sure about yours though - the study didn't find any effect of phone use on cognition so why would time without a phone help reading comprehension?
Notice how they had decided beforehand what they were going to find out, and are making an excuse here for not finding part of it.