Is Your Phone Actually Draining Your Brain?

Scientific American has a 60-second science. My name is Shayla Love.

If this sounds familiar, tell me. You are trying to get some work done and you misplace your phone. If you are frustrated, you might slam the phone down next to you and vow to leave it alone.

My phone is not being used right now. I don't know if I've protected myself from its distraction or its ability to affect my mind. According to a study published in the Journal of the Association for Consumer Research, the answer is no.

Adrian Ward and his colleagues proposed the "brain drain hypothesis" by showing that having a phone next to you could affect cognitive function, specifically, working memory, or the mental system that helps us hold information about what we are currently doing.

It is measured by having people solve math problems at the same time. The idea is that there are two very different cognitive skills, word memory and math problems, but they are using the same general cognitive resources.

People had their phones on a desk, in their pockets, or in the next room. The farther away a person's phone was, the better they did.

The process of not thinking about your phone requires some cognitive resources.

This was an intriguing, though slightly concerning, finding that triggered more studies on how the presence of our phones might affect how well we think. A new meta-analysis that looked at data from 27 different brain drain studies has made the story of the brain drain hypothesis more complicated.

Do you think it is a problem if it is sitting next to you while you work? To know more about that is an important question.

Doug Parry is a lecturer at Stellenbosch University who studies socioinformatics and who did the meta-analysis, a study in which data from multiple published papers are combined together and reanalyzed.

From studying multitasking, Parry became interested in brain drain.

We are constantly aware of the online world and the mobile world. The news cycle, our friends and family that we can connect to through our phone, are some of the things we are thinking about.

He wondered how strong brain drain's effects really were.

Over the last seven or eight years, there have been about 20 to 30 studies done on the phenomenon and what it means. Is it always the same?

Love: Past studies on brain drain focused on five cognitive functions. When he did a sixth analysis, he looked at all the results together. He looked at the effect sizes on how phones affect our minds from 27 studies.

The only significant result was for working memory.

There were no statistically significant effects of the presence of a phone on the other cognitive functions. That is in line with what Ward and colleagues have said. They found a negative effect for working memory but not a negative effect for sustained attention.

It is similar to what Ward found, but the impact on working memory was smaller than first thought.

The magnitude of the effect is the main difference between this meta-analysis and the Ward paper.

It's important because it can tell us if our phones are affecting one aspect of our thinking or if they're just diversions from our attention.

We would all be distracted. It would be meaningless. This is between the two. The earlier research showed a bigger effect.

The meta-analysis is a preprint and hasn't been peer reviewed yet. When I talked to Ward about the paper, he said he was happy that there was enough work done on brain drain to look at evidence together and that it reinforced the idea that phones are interfering with our working memory over other cognitive functions.

You think you are doing great when you don't look at your phone. You are not paying attention to it on the desk in front of you. There is no difference in attention. Some of your working memory capacity is being used by that process of not paying attention. The negative effect on working memory capacity is shown by that.

Parry thinks that his findings raise more questions for further study, such as whether there is something about the individuals in the past studies that led to a stronger brain drain effect. Some people might want their phones more than others.

It is going to be different if you are very involved and your life is dependent on it.

The fear of missing out could be one of the factors. There is an official scale for fear of missing out that could be used to measure brain drain and see if it affects the effect.

"We're not going to get rid of our phones." We are likely to become even more dependent on them over time. I just had a kid, and I keep an eye on this kid when he has a diaper on. This little device records my entire life. Every aspect of our lives is interwoven with them.

Knowing that the presence of a phone affects working memory could lead to having more targeted technology harm reduction or keeping an eye out for that effect.

This meta-analysis shows that we might not have to be very distressed about what a phone is doing to us. There could be a significant brain drain for some people, but for others it could be more of a trickle.

I would like to thank you for listening. Shayla Love is for 60-second science.