How Does The Smartphone Affect Your Brain and Your Baby

Let's face it - most of us depend on mobile phones. We use them countless times a day to keep in touch with our children, to read the news, to fill our free time, and to see what our friends are doing. However, endless typing, dialing, reading e-mail, and everything you do on your phone directly affect your intelligence.

Our phones are easy to access, at work, at the table, during exercise, and when we rest. When smartphones were a novelty, it didn't seem so annoying to constantly check emails and reply to texts, or to see others break away from face-to-face interaction to do the same.

At one point, it was really funny to watch people so devoted to technology. Now, those who just sit on the phone are considered rude and antisocial. As more and more teens and younger children are stuck to screens, the ubiquity of smartphones can be a threat to academic performance and social skills development.

New research from the University of Texas at Austin suggests that the habit of always holding the phone in your hand is more than annoying to others. The mere presence of the smartphone decreases the power of intelligence. The greater the degree of telephone addiction, the greater the reduction in available cognitive ability.

Professor Adrian Ward led a team that conducted two experiments over two weeks to test whether or to what extent the presence of a smartphone affected working memory - which includes the ability to select and process information - the ability to reason and to solve problems.

The team also wanted to know if there was a difference when the phone was on the desk, in the bag, in the pocket, or another room.

The first experiment involved 548 students whose smartphones were either on their desks or next to them with their bells and vibration settings turned off. The researchers found that the mere presence of a person's smartphone negatively affects their cognitive ability "even when participants do not use the phones and do not report thinking about them."

After completing a complex set of tasks, such as math problems and attention retention tests, students answered questions about how they felt that smartphones had affected their test performance.

They were asked, for example, how often they thought about their phones and whether this had an effect on their attention.

In the second experiment, researchers explored how an individual's dependence on his or her phone - the belief that they needed it at any time - affected their cognitive ability. The subjects of this experiment performed tasks on the computer, some with their mobile phones on the desk, while others in a bag or pocket, in another room or was stopped.

When participants were asked how their mobile phone location affected them, you probably think that most of the test subjects stated that they had no effect. Well, 75 percent said the phone's location didn't affect them at all, and 85 percent said their phone's location "didn't help or affect" their performance.

The research showed otherwise, and the nearby mobile phone particularly challenged those who reported being addicted to the phone. Ward found that those who cling more to their phones had worse test scores.

The results of the two experiments, published in the Journal of the Consumer Research Association in April, indicate that "defined and protected periods of separation" between the mobile user and his mobile phone can improve brain function and allow people to do better.

With the start of the school year, parents of children and teenagers who are predictably connected to their phones should take action. Maybe putting your phone in the closet or bag at the beginning of class could reduce children's addiction and increase their academic performance. According to recent research, those most dependent on their devices benefit the most from their absence.

We can all rethink where and how we use mobile phones and our relationship with them. You may be surprised at how simply keeping it out of our sight could clear our minds.