Dependent Dumbing Down

Smart devices reconfigure the way of thinking

Recently, many people using Apple's latest phones will shake their heads and show their teeth at the phone screen to challenge the latest facial recognition unlocking feature. If they find that a certain angle can fool the phone, they will be as happy as if they have found a treasure.

This kind of comparison of intelligence with the phone is done by more than one person, and this kind of group behavior makes people start to feel anxious about their cleverness.

Maybe it's not that people are getting dumber, but that machines are getting too smart. When the artificial intelligence "Alpha Dog" swept the top human players in such intellectual games as Go, people have to admit that in some ways machines are indeed smarter than people.

And there are more and more areas where smart devices may be smarter than people, and there may even be a new Moore's Law. And smart machines can create a serious dependency mentality, with people putting them within reach almost every moment. People get information, receive messages through apps, and are alerted multiple times a day by various notifications and pushes ...... Smartphones have become on-the-go information repositories, capable of recording and sending text, sound, and pictures, and these basic information carriers define people's behavior patterns and ways of thinking.

In a survey conducted by Gallup Consulting in 2015, more than half of people said they couldn't imagine life without their smartphones. Two years on, as smart devices become even more divine, the percentage of people who have a dependency complex on them is even higher.

Smart devices are taking control of people's attention to an unprecedented degree, and are having a greater impact on people's thoughts and behaviors, including some negative effects. Studies have shown that as the brain becomes more dependent on technology, human intelligence is correspondingly weakened.

For nearly a decade, Andrea Ward, a cognitive psychologist, and professor of marketing at the University of Texas at Austin has been studying how smartphones and the Internet affect human thought and judgment. There is growing evidence that using a smart device, or even just hearing a phone ring or vibrate, can distract attention. This leads to greater difficulty in focusing on a particular puzzle or task, and the distraction poses a barrier to people's reasoning ability and performance.

A study published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology involving 166 respondents also concluded that when people are dealing with a challenging task, if the phone rings or vibrates, whether or not they check their phones, their attention will waver and their productivity will decrease.

Another study of 41 smartphone users showed that if people heard the phone ring but couldn't answer it, their blood pressure would spike, their pulse would race, and their problem-solving skills would decrease.

Dependency gets dumber

In science fiction, writers outline an image of the human future that often has a big head and skinny limbs because the default development path is that humans will do more mental work and therefore get smarter; limbs will degenerate when heavy physical labor is handed over to machines.

But a small smart device disputes this assumption: if the machine is smart, will people still be diligent in using their brains?

The optimistic view is that the more intelligent devices are ultimately invented and created by people. People who can identify needs and meet them through design hardly seem to be labeled as getting dumber. Yet for the vast majority of ordinary users, what they care about is the ability to solve problems conveniently, which is exactly what smart devices do so well.

According to data collected by Apple, a typical user will pick up and use their phone about 80 times a day. People have come to think of smart devices as trusted, all-purpose assistants that cannot be separated.

Dr. Ward suspects that people are so enamored with smart devices that the phone is enough to undermine intellectual performance as long as it is in their hands. Dr. Ward and three of his colleagues demonstrated this "dependent dumbing down" through an elaborate experiment.

The researchers recruited 520 current college students at the University of California, San Diego, and subjected them to two tests of intellectual acuity. The first test assessed "accessible cognitive ability," which measures a person's ability to focus completely on a specific task. The second test assesses "intellectual mobility," which is a person's ability to interpret and solve unfamiliar problems. The only variable in the test was the placement of the participant's smartphone. The researchers asked some students to place their phones on the table in front of them, others to put their phones in their pockets or handbags, and still, others were asked to leave their phones in another room.

The test results were shocking. In both tests, subjects who kept their phones in sight scored the lowest, while students who left their phones in another room got the highest scores. Students who put their cell phones in their pockets or handbags scored exactly medium. In other words, the closer you were to your phone, the more sluggish your brain became.

In subsequent interviews, almost all participants said that their phones did not distract them, and they insisted that they did not think about them at all during the test. This suggests that the smart devices had interfered with their ability to focus and think in a way that they were unaware of.

A second experiment conducted by the researchers later yielded similar results, and also found that the more dependent students were on their phones in their daily lives, the more cognitive impairment they suffered. In a paper based on the study, Dr. Ward and his colleagues said that the "integration of smartphones into everyday life" appears to cause a "brain drain" that weakens key mental skills, such as "learning, logical reasoning, abstract thinking, problem-solving, and abstract thinking, problem-solving skills, and creativity.

Emotional intelligence is also impaired

Smart devices are supposed to be the best tools to aid learning, but in practice, they can create barriers to learning. Smart devices could have made the world a flatter place, but instead, many people suffer from communication barriers.

Researchers evaluated how smartphones affected the classroom learning of 160 students at Arkansas State University, Monticello. They found that on a test of classroom content, students who did not bring their phones into the classroom scored a full grade higher than those who did. A survey of 91 UK secondary schools found that when cell phones were banned from schools, students' test scores improved dramatically, with the lowest-performing students benefiting the most.

Smart devices allow people to stay in touch with each other anytime and anywhere, which in theory can improve people's communication skills, but in practice has given rise to many "geeks". Although they can "talk and laugh" with people through smart devices, once face-to-face communication, they lack emotional intelligence.

The popularity of smart devices has impacted people's social skills and interpersonal relationships. When using smart devices people often express their feelings through emoji patterns, but when talking with others face to face, the lack of these "shortcuts" will lead to superficial communication, bringing a sense of satisfaction that is also greatly reduced.

In a study conducted by the University of Essex, researchers divided 142 respondents into groups of two and asked them to talk privately for 10 minutes. Half of the respondents brought their smart devices into the room while talking, while the other half did not bring their phones. Respondents were then tested on rapport, trust, and empathy. The study found that the mere presence of cell phones was enough to hinder the development of interpersonal closeness and trust and to reduce "the degree to which individuals feel empathy and understanding from their partners.

The results of this test were also confirmed in a subsequent study conducted by researchers at Virginia Tech.

Designers of smart devices try to do their best to make their products attract as much attention as possible, and some health monitoring programs even fall asleep at times. The irony of these smart devices is that the qualities that seem most appealing to us, such as uninterrupted network connectivity, a wide variety of applications, instant response, and portability, are the very qualities that cause our behavior patterns to change and make us dumber.