Imagine… Imagine there’s no heaven
It’s easy if you try ….
WAIT, STOP – CAN YOU?
Do you remember this legendary song by John Lennon?
Now, try and imagine the world without a smartphone…
IMPOSSIBLE, ISNT it? Let’s STOP the SONG right here!
It’s impossible in today’s fast-paced, social media & digitised times to let our imagination go that far! The 21st century is the age of smartphones and social media usage. It’s a reality, which is not going anywhere!
With Android and iOs being the two main mobile operators that people use, smartphones are slowly killing our cognitive abilities, without us even realising it.
Does this mean that we need to stop using them? Certainly not, but we should at least be informed about the consequences of its over-usage. The over-use can lead to memory loss and severe cognitive deficits.
Smartphones are electronic devices that help us to stay in touch, are mobile cameras, a tool for sharing photographs, surf the Internet, navigate using GPRS, listen to music and play videos.
When it comes to keeping in touch and keeping ourselves well informed about the world around us, smartphones are irreplaceable.
However, when it comes to wasting time, things become very, very different. These gadgets are no doubt designed to make life easier and help the user work-smarter, but It has been found by experts that the unrelenting pings can throw the brain into overdrive, affecting its cells and blunting the mind over time.
The same ‘smart’ phones have a negative affect for those activities that require undivided attention, such as driving, performing surgery, etc.
Edward de Bono, father of lateral thinking and one of the pioneers of brain training calls moments of boredom as ‘creative pauses’ which allow the mind to drift and avails the person to new forms of input and understanding. In fact, research studies have shown that the use of smartphone can actually ‘teach our brains’ to easily become bored by ‘eroding the ability’ to focus.
Smartphones also play a strong role in making us more absent-minded!
There are two questions here:
- Are ‘absent-minded’ people more likely to use their smartphones?
- Do ‘absent-minded smartphone-use’ make people ‘MORE absent minded’ in their daily lives?
According to a book by Nicholas Carr (The Shallows: What The Internet Is Doing To Our Brains),“It is without doubt that the Internet has made us mentally lazier than we have been in the pre-Internet age”. Many studies and accepted wisdom suggest that time spent doing nothing, being actually bored is in fact beneficial for sparking and sustaining creativity.
With our iPhone or any other smartphone in hand, our minds are constantly engaged; fixed on that tiny screen and it is our creativity which suffers.
Dr Sangeeta Ravat, Head of the Department of Neurology at Seth G S Medical College and KEM Hospital is critical of the Internet which none of us can do without. “Our increasing dependency on search engines like Google is making us poor thinkers”, she argues. “Our minds are getting lazy because gadgets ensure we don’t use them enough,” she says. “
With our iPhone or any other smartphone in hand, our minds are constantly engaged; fixed on that tiny screen and it is our creativity which suffers.
Dr Sangeeta Ravat, Head of the Department of Neurology at Seth G S Medical College and KEM Hospital is critical of the Internet which none of us can do without. “Our increasing dependency on search engines like Google is making us poor thinkers”, she argues. “Our minds are getting lazy because gadgets ensure we don’t use them enough,” she says. “
While earlier, we’d easily remember at least 10 important phone numbers by rote, today we can’t recall any other than our own. Our mind is not challenged. Everything is fed in the phonebook, and under categories — family, work, miscellaneous. Sometimes, there are so many, we can’t recall the face to the name and number,” says Dr Ravat.
In another interesting argument by neuro-experts, the very advantage of smartphones becomes a cause for worry. Smartphones encourage you to carry out multiple tasks at once.
Clifford Nass, professor of communication at Stanford University, reckons, “It is not physiologically healthy for you because (humans) are not built to do a multitude of tasks at one time. Your phone makes you feel like you have to respond, which then increases your stress and harms your cognitive thinking.”
Shraddha Shah, clinical psychologist with the Department of Neurology at KEM is most concerned with the absence of external stimuli and the smartphones impact on children. Shah explains, “This mental process of awareness, perception, reasoning and judgement can only be built if the child experiences something physical, like playing with clay, blocks or a bat and ball. It isn’t possible if s/he is staring into a screen and conquering angry birds.”
Physical activities, she adds, help build a child’s motor skills (a learned sequence of movements that combine to produce a smooth, efficient action in order to master a task) that can range from cutting a paper with a scissor to running and jumping. Phones can’t play a role here.
She discusses Piaget’s Theory of Cognitive Development- a comprehensive theory about the nature and development of human intelligence, that deals with the nature of knowledge and how humans gradually acquire, construct and use it.
If we were to look into the future and imagine the smartphone design, the only limitations that would exist would be how far the imagination can travel. There will be an evolving AI (artificial intelligence), transparent screens, an impact of wireless power and so much more that is beyond our very own imagination!
Afterall, as the American philosopher, A.B. Johnson once said, “Mighty Oaks from little acorns grow”.
Afterall, as the American philosopher, A.B. Johnson once said, “Mighty Oaks from little acorns grow”.
