Your smartphone is
making you stupid, antisocial and unhealthy. So why can't you put it down?
Eric Andrew-Gee notes:
“The evidence for
this goes beyond the carping of Luddites. It's there, cold and hard, in a
growing body of research by psychiatrists, neuroscientists, marketers and public
health experts. What these people say – and what their research shows – is that
smartphones are causing real damage to our minds and relationships, measurable
in seconds shaved off the average attention span, reduced brain power, declines
in work-life balance and hours less of family time.
They have impaired
our ability to remember. They make it more difficult to daydream and think
creatively. They make us more vulnerable to anxiety. They make parents ignore
their children. And they are addictive, if not in the contested clinical sense
then for all intents and purposes.”