Could smartphones be reshaping not just our habits, but our very capacity to reason?
Have you ever found it difficult to concentrate on doing homework after hours of scrolling TikTok and Instagram. It turns out that your experience is not unusual: smartphone use and short-form content consumption have been shown to rewire our minds, gradually eroding our thinking capacity and our attention span.
The author recalled her experience at a Waldorf school in England, where she was prohibited from watching TV too much and encouraged to read books or play sports instead. At first, she chafed at the stricture, and her annoyance only grew as her friends at other schools were allowed to watch TV for an unlimited amount of time. Now, she finally realizes the policy’s merits. She does not watch TV a lot but still reads books every day, a habit that helps sharpen her reasoning skills and attention span. A more insidious and enticing means of entertainment, called technology, has evolved and competed for our attention. Frequent use of smartphones is associated with reduced cognitive ability. This phenomenon, however, generates little media interest as people believe our intelligence has been increasing. It is true that international IQ scores have been rising steadily, largely attributable to broader access to education and test preparation, but we have become less capable of applying our knowledge. Adults and children score lower in numeracy and literacy tests, with the sharpest declines visible in the poorest countries.
The erosion in basic literacy and numeracy is attributed to how we consume content in a post-literate era. We consume everything through our smartphones, eschewing dense, long texts in favor of short, bite-sized videos and posts. Our aversion to long-form content also makes us read fewer books: half of Americans read zero books in 2023.
The main reason why technology decays our cognitive abilities lies in how it rewires our brains. The digital environment is saturated with memes, clickbait, and inane distractions, all of which compete for our attention with notifications and other demands. The sheer volume and diversity of content on offer rewires our brains, encouraging us to hop from text to text. This maximizes compulsiveness at the cost of thoughtful reasoning and nuance. We are spoon-fed with information and consume it so passively that few of us can recall, for instance, main points from an article aside from the title. Technology conditions us to skimming and pattern recognition. Long-form literacy is different. It is not an innate skill but a learned skill. It stimulates the development of the left hemisphere in our brains, a part dedicated to analytic reasoning. Establishing a habit for long-form reading, therefore, increases our attention span and hones our analytic and reasoning skills. This explains why nearly all people who occupy executive positions at large companies have gone to great lengths to restrict their screen time, while maintaining a habit of book reading. Decision-making is part and parcel of their jobs, and in order to make judicious decisions, they have to learn how to think deeply, a skill acquired through long-form reading.
Liberals might argue people have the right to decide what type of content they want to consume, but to those individualists, a deterioration in literacy carries severe consequences that extend beyond the individual, spilling over into our society. Reduced cognitive capacities render people less rational and less capable of distinguishing right from wrong, thus allowing misinformation to spread like wildfire. Corrupted politicians, then, might use this to shape policy to their advantage. Oligarchs know very few have the capacity and attention span to read the types of long, detailed documents issued by governments, let alone track or challenge policies in dull, technical fields. The public, therefore, will lose the power to defend themselves and inform federal policies, and no one will ever speak up for the disadvantaged.
Technology might entail another form of inequality. The best way to illustrate this effect, I think, is through an analogy with fast food consumption. As digital content, fast food is available, diverse, and irresistible. There has been a strong anti-fast-food sentiment in recent years, with health experts appearing on TV programs calling out the greed of McDonalds and KFC and urging consumers to eat more healthily. However, few people have financial resources to sustain a healthy lifestyle. Ultra-processed food is cheap and convenient, the two factors that position it as the optimal meal for laborers and low-income workers. For these individuals, scarce time and limited money restrain their choices for diet, prompting them to opt for fast food as necessities rather than indulgences. Heavy fast-food consumers are at a higher risk of developing cardiovascular diseases, which leads to more expensive healthcare costs. This, coupled with low wages, further plunges low-income workers into poverty, whereas well-off members of society, having access to fresh vegetables and nutritious foods, can sustain a healthy lifestyle and work productively. Such a difference reinforces social inequality.
The same thing applies to technology. Recognizing the brain-altering effects of smartphone use, parents seek to restrict their children’s screen time. However, few have money to send children to a private school like Waldorf School, which will set you back 34,000 dollars a year for the elementary grades, compared to free tuition offered at public institutions. Poor parents also happen to have lower levels of education, so they are less likely to be aware of the effects of smartphone use (some even fall into the same trap as their children). Therefore, they spend less time educating their children about those effects, which explains why literacy, smartphone use, and poverty have long been correlated. Now poor kids spend more time on screens each day than rich ones (the difference amounted to nearly 2 hours in a 2019 study conducted in the US). Heavy smartphone users report worse memory, processing speed, and attention span, which cause them to perform badly at school. Therefore, they will make less money, thus continuing the vicious cycle of intergenerational poverty.
– Tran Khanh Huyen