Is the Physical Use of Your Smartphone Reducing our Intelligence?
A wise man once said “evolution is the spice of life.” The human race has evolved in every sphere since the first man took a pee, we have evolved greatly from when we were ‘monkeys’.
In contemporary times rapid tech advancement has been at the fore of human evolution. Technology itself has been battered with rapid change, they are now smarter with the fusion of AI (Artificial Intelligence), VR (Virtual Reality) and AR (Augmented Reality) our cars are smarter and less dependent on human control, our houses are cooler with lights and curtains been controlled by just a press of a button, voice commands and, even a clap!
At the center of our lives are our mobile phones, some of us will die… Literally, without our phones. Why won’t you? These phones have made life easier for us, just with an app you can have a dog like feature on your face, you can decide to be in the galaxies and look way finer than you really are. Well, that may not be the only reason we like our mobile phones.
You can run a community using apps, navigate through new territories using certain apps, you can even run a cryptocurrency portfolio and if you are anything like me you can write essays with the aid of word predictors and dictionaries even if you are actually bad at spelling.
I guess what I’m trying to say is that we become reliant on our mobile phones as they become smarter.
There have been arguments as to whether our mobile phones make us dumber. A study published in researchgate indicated how the radio-frequency emitted by our mobile phones can affect a cerebral hemisphere and inhibit our cognitive abilities. Another study/article published on psychologyToday showed how the presence of our mobile phones can affect our cognitive abilities i. e our abilities to learn, remember, problem-solve, etc when around us even if it is put on silent, turned on it’s face or even switched off.
A specific area where our phones affects us adversely, is the area of spatial recognition i.e the capacity to understand and remember the spatial relations among objects, Actively using our mobile phones while been driven around or while walking around a new area may inhibit our ability to recognize key buildings, markings and even street names that will ease navigating the area in the future. May be it’s due to the radio-frequency been emitted but, definitely because we are distracted with the messages, latest gossip and emails coming into our phones. We are naturally bad at multi-tasking.
Much research is still needed in this area but, for the mean time it’s smarter we spend less time with our phones.
Chinonso Solomon, holds a degree in Psychology with aspirations to become a clinical psychologist and a counsellor. He blogs at solomonsarea, you can also connect with him on twitter
