Bill Dalton: Dumber and dumber
"Recent experiments showed that just having a smartphone in a room significantly reduces your ability to concentrate," Bill Dalton writes.
EDITOR'S NOTE: The views and opinions expressed are those of the writer and not of Ottawa News Network.
Smartphones are making us dumb.
Or so warns Cal Newport, professor of computer science at Georgetown University and the author of “Deep Work.” Newport knows a thing or two about computers, and he’s done a lot of research on how they are messing with our brains. Or as he puts it more eloquently, “the negative impact of digital on our ability to think.”
He’s calling for a lifestyle change similar to one that improved this nation's cardiovascular health by promoting a low-fat diet and aerobic exercise. Millions of people changed their eating habits and became less sedentary, saving thousands from dying of heart disease.
But that involved our bodies. Newport argues in a recent New York Times article that now we have to save our brains from too many hours of staring at our phones. He says we’re losing our ability to think deeply at all.
Newport backs it up with scientific research. The data show our attention spans are about one-third — oh look, a penny! — as long as they were in 2004.
The biggest drop occurred around 2012, reinforcing studies showing the number of adults struggling with basic reading and math had risen significantly — all of which coincidentally started about the time smartphones became “ubiquitous.”
A meta-analysis released last fall also showed short-form video content usage, i.e., TikTok and Instagram, is associated with “poorer cognition and reduced attention.”
In fact, recent experiments showed that just having a smartphone in a room significantly reduces your ability to concentrate.
Now the rise of A.I. is making things worse. A study in January found a “significant negative correlation between frequent A.I. tool usage and critical thinking abilities.”
This stands to reason because if you use your brain less and rely on a computer more to do your thinking, you lose your ability to think. Duh!
So, who cares? Well, Newport suggests that “thinking is also an engine for making sense of our lives and cultivating our moral imaginations.”
Wouldn’t you like to make sense of your life? Or what's happening to America?
Now there’s a startling study suggesting we’re losing our ability to speak. Scientists have even quantified it. We’ve lost 338 spoken words per day, according to Valerie Pfeifer, assistant professor at the University of Missouri-Kansas City.
She warns it’s happening across all age groups, but those under 25 are losing the most, speaking an average of 450 fewer words per day.
“All the small conversations we’ve lost over time are going to make a big difference long term, because that’s the training ground for having larger and more important conversations,” Pfeifer said in a recent interview on KCUR radio.
Maybe that’s why we’re having trouble talking to each other and resolving our differences in America.
Pfeifer said one solution is to try to speak to just one more person each day. Strike up conversations even when they’re not necessary. Even small everyday conversations could make a big difference.
Newport argues that if you learned to put down the Twinkies and Doritos, you also could learn to put down your phone.
If you’re really serious, you can go cold turkey on TikTok and Instagram. Push legislators to ban social media, like Australia recently did, for kids under 16. And support parents fighting to keep cellphones out of classrooms.
Just having a phone on your person is a problem, Newport points out. It’s training your short-term motivational systems to expect a “quick reward” from looking at the phone, creating the urge to pick it up.
Put the phone out of reach so you can focus on other things with less distraction. Just make sure you’ve got a bottle of wine within reach, because research also shows that 2-3 glasses reduce your risks of caring about anything. (OK, that wasn’t Newport, that was me.)
These are all good starts, but Newport also prescribes what you’re doing now — reading. Even a few dozen pages a day helps. Reading exercises your mind, retraining your neuronal regions in ways that scientists say increase "the complexity and nuance of what we’re able to understand."
In short, Newport is calling for a new American revolution by not surrendering our brains to the “financial interests of a small number of technology billionaires.”
Viva la revolucion!
Now put down that phone and read “Wuthering Heights.”
— Bill Dalton is a former reporter and editor for The Kansas City Star and worked for several Michigan newspapers. He spends summers on the family farm near Fennville. His novel “The Bank Game” — a crime thriller — is available from Amazon along with "Dalton's Bend."
How to submit an opinion
Ottawa News Network accepts columns and letters to the editor from everyone. Letters should be about 300 words and columns should not exceed 1,000 words. ONN reserves the right to fact-check submissions as well as edit for length, clarity and grammar. Please send submissions to newsroom@ottawanewsnetwork.org.
