Is Your Smartphone Making Your Brain Lazy?
Women's Health News
Obie Editorial Team
Intuitive thinkers are more likely to make decisions based on gut instinct whereas analytical thinkers tend to second-guess themselves and rely on logic rather than instinct. Analytical thinkers tend to be more intelligent than intuitive thinkers, according to the research team.
After assessment of cognitive and mental skills, the research team evaluated each study participant’s smartphone use. They found:
The Barr study does not prove that heavy smartphone use lowers intelligence but “our research provides support for an association between heavy smartphone use and lowered intelligence,” according to Pennycook.
The amount of time a study participant spent using their smartphone for entertainment or social media interaction did not affect cognitive thinking in either the intuitive or the analytical groups. The only smartphone feature linked to mental laziness was the phone’s search engine function; the researchers describe this smartphone activity as offloading one’s thinking to the device.
Barr said, “Our reliance on smartphones and other devices will likely only continue to rise,” a prediction that makes it all the more important to understand how human psychology is affected by them “before these technologies are so fully ingrained that it’s hard to recall what life was like without them.”
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