Your Phone Is Draining Your Brain (Even When It's Off)

The Impact of Smartphone Dependency on Cognitive Performance

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Summary

The video explains how we have begun to outsource our mental faculties to smartphones, a phenomenon known as cognitive outsourcing. This trend of delegating tasks that the brain used to perform, such as basic mathematical calculations or spatial navigation, is weakening our natural abilities. For example, studies show that constant GPS use is linked to a decline in spatial memory, as the brain stops making the effort to understand its surroundings. This dependency creates an “illusion of knowledge” where we believe we master a subject simply because we can look it up on Google, when in reality we are only remembering the location of the information and not the data itself.

A surprising finding is that the mere physical presence of a phone, even if it is turned off or face down, drains our intellectual capacity. Research from the University of Texas revealed that the brain subconsciously consumes valuable cognitive resources to ignore the device and avoid the temptation to use it. Those who keep their phones nearby score lower on concentration and memory tests compared to those who leave them in another room. This “brain drain” is constant and manifests even in phantom vibration syndrome, proving that our minds are permanently monitoring the device.

The impact is especially concerning regarding emotional development and mental health, particularly in young people. Excessive screen use has been linked to the onset of ADHD-like symptoms and a notable difficulty in establishing genuine human connections or interpreting non-verbal language. Furthermore, the content we consume is not neutral; social media experiments have shown that algorithms can systematically manipulate our moods through emotional contagion. By responding predictably to these digital stimuli, we begin to act less human and more like programmed machines.

Despite the advances in artificial intelligence, the human brain remains an unsurpassed structure due to its efficiency and complexity. While the most powerful supercomputers require massive facilities and an exorbitant amount of energy, the brain performs trillions of operations per second using barely the same energy as a dim light bulb. However, the most critical human advantage is creativity and moments of deep introspection or “Eureka” moments. These flashes of genius require boredom and the ability to let the mind wander, mental states that we are eliminating today by filling every second of leisure with digital distractions.

To mitigate these effects, solutions are proposed to return the spotlight to the brain, such as short-term screen fasts or setting strict limits on social media use. Introducing “friction” into device usage, such as disabling notifications or setting the screen to grayscale, helps reduce impulsivity without relying solely on willpower. Ultimately, the video suggests that reclaiming our humanity involves cultivating silence and presence, allowing the brain to think independently once again to foster empathy, morality, and original creativity.

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by The Upgrade with Makai Allbert

When you go out to eat and have to leave a tip, do you calculate in your head or do you pull out your phone? Because how you outsource your thinking may have long term consequences. Doctor Elnasri, a computer engineering professor, asked his 10 and 11 year old grandchildren, what’s 1 third of 9? They opened the calculator app. He then asked them, what’s the capital of Cuba, a country they had just spent 2 weeks visiting?

They opened Google. Now his grandkids aren’t dumb, their brains have learned to outsource and so have ours. Now the problem isn’t just what we do with our phones, it’s what our phones do to us when we’re not using them. A study even found that having your phone nearby, even if it’s turned off, sitting face down in your bag, significantly reduces the ability to think. You don’t even have to touch it or look at it.

It’s pulling on your brain anyway. Today, we’re exploring what the research shows about what smartphones do to the human mind. And stay with me because what you’re about to learn might change how you use your phone forever. Most of us carry a smartphone. 60% of the world does now.

And if you’re under 30, it’s 97%. Without realizing it, we’ve started letting these devices handle things our brains used to do on their own. They’ve become extensions of how we think. Researchers call this cognitive outsourcing. Relying on external systems to handle information, your brain would normally process itself.

And I wanna make it clear that this is not a bad thing. We outsource many things. But emerging data is showing very troubling trends. Take navigation. A 2020 study tracked 50 drivers to measure how GPS use like Google Maps affected their spatial memory.

People with more lifetime GPS experience performed worse on navigation tasks when they had to find their way without any help. The researchers followed 13 of those participants for 3 more years. And over that time, greater GPS use was associated with a steeper decline in spatial memory. They also tracked whether the heavy GPS users were maybe just people who had a poor sense of direction. They weren’t.

The conclusion was that GPS use itself drove the decline. Now this GPS case study raises the question of what are we losing nowadays when 55 percent of Americans report regular AI use? Well, researchers are finding that outsourcing to tools like ChatGPT is linked to impaired critical thinking, dependency, weakened decision making, and perhaps not surprisingly laziness. But even without AI, tech has had significant effects on our relationships, cognitive ability, and emotional development. Let’s take a look.

In 2011, researchers at Columbia University published a landmark study in the journal Science that identified something they call the Google effect, also called digital amnesia. Here’s a simple way to understand what they found. Imagine someone tells you a piece of trivia. An octopus has 3 hearts. Interesting right?

Well now imagine you’re also told that that fact has been saved to a folder on your computer. You can look it up anytime. Are you more likely to remember it? Well the answer across the experiments was no. Participants who believed that information was saved for later on Google remembered significantly less of it.

But interestingly, they got way better at remembering where the information was stored. So their brains weren’t actually encoding the knowledge, they were encoding the location of the knowledge. Kind of like a filing cabinet, but not the files. It’s likely you’ve experienced this, I know I have. Every time you Google something, you read the answer, move on, your brain registers that the information is out there somewhere, but it’s not worth holding onto.

So you’re training your memory to let go of the thing itself and just remember the path back to it, which honestly seems to work fine until you’re in a conversation or working through a problem on your own and you realize that the shelf is empty. How many hearts did an octopus have? 3? 2? Well, you literally just read it but then you forget it.

And it gets worse because a follow-up study in 2021 found that people who googled their way to information not only remembered less but they were more confident that they’d mastered the material. Now researchers call it the illusion of knowledge. You feel like you understand something, but you don’t. It’s like you rented it out for a few seconds and your brain filed the receipt instead of actually getting the goods. Everything so far involves actually using a device.

Now here’s where it gets strange because you might think, if I want to focus, can just put my phone away. Right? Well, not exactly. Before I tell you about this next study, I want you to do something. Where is your phone right now?

Is it on your desk, in your pocket, somewhere in a room or in another room? Now hold that answer because in 2017 researchers at the University of Texas at Austin published a study with nearly 800 smartphone users to test something no 1 had really measured before. What happens to your thinking when your phone is nearby but you’re not actually using it? So participants sat at a computer and took a test measuring their available cognitive capacity, basically how well you could hold and process data at any given time. Before starting, each person was randomly told to put their phone in 1 of 3 places.

Face down on a desk, in their pocket or bag, or in another room. And the result was clear. Those who left their phones in another room scored the best. Phones on the desk, the worst, and the pocket or bag in between. Here’s the thing though, nobody was getting notifications.

Everyone’s phone was put on silent and nobody was sneaking. At glance people said they didn’t actually think about the phones at all but the cognitive cost was still there. The researchers’ explanation is pretty intuitive once you hear it. Adrian Ward, 1 of the co authors said in a news report: Your conscious mind isn’t thinking about your smartphone. But that process, the process of requiring yourself not to think about something, uses up some of your limited cognitive resources.

It’s a brain drain. And they tested the obvious fixes. Putting the face down, it didn’t help. Turning it off completely, it didn’t help either. The effect was robust to both.

The only thing that worked was the physical separation, literally having to put the phone in a different room. Oh, and you know that feeling when you think your phone just vibrated but it didn’t? That’s called the phantom vibration syndrome. 89 percent of phone users experience it. It’s the same mechanism.

Your brain is monitoring your phone constantly even when you’re not aware of it. So if you want to do your best work, don’t just put your phone down. You have to put it in another room. As the authors noted in their discussion, ironically, the more consumers depend on their smartphones, the more they seem to suffer from their presence. Or more optimistically, the more they may stand to benefit from their absence.

In The US, children ages 8 to 12 spend 4 to 6 hours a day on screens, teenagers up to 9 hours. 44 percent of teenagers say they feel anxious without their phones. 39 percent feel lonely. Now physicians and neuroscientists I’ve spoken with who treat children and adolescents tell me they’re seeing patterns in their patients: mechanical speech, flat emotional expression, poor eye contact, difficulty forming genuine connections, and many show ADHD type symptoms, responding to the world with a kind of detachment. And the research generally seems to back this up.

Excessive screen time has been linked to autistic like symptoms with longer durations correlated with more severe presentations. And the JAMA study followed about 3,000 adolescents in Los Angeles who had no prior ADHD symptoms. Over 24 months, so just 2 years, higher digital media was associated with significantly higher odds of developing ADHD symptoms. And because this was a longitudinal study, it showed that the media use came first and then the symptoms followed. Here’s the thing, we might be subtly influenced by digital media far more than we can imagine.

For 1 week in January 2012, Facebook ran an experiment on almost 700,000 of its users. None of them knew. The researchers tweaked Facebook’s algorithm. 1 group had positive posts from their friends reduced, and the other group had negative posts reduced. When people saw fewer positive posts from their friends, they posted more negatively themselves.

And when they saw fewer negative posts, they posted more positively. Emotional contagion happened at a massive scale through text alone and without anyone realizing they were part of an experiment. This showed that technology can nudge human behavior in subtle yet systematic ways, and this nudging can make our actions and emotions predictable similar to programmed responses. We start acting less like humans and more like machines. We have to come to appreciate what makes us truly special.

Sitting on your shoulders is the most complicated object in the known universe, said Michio Kaku, the theoretical physicist. No technology, not even the most advanced AI comes even close to matching it. And here’s why. Your brain has roughly a 100,000,000,000 neurons connected by a 100,000,000,000,000 synapses. But what makes it extraordinary isn’t the raw numbers.

It’s what it does with them and how little it needs to do it. The human brain operates at roughly a quintillion operations per second. That’s 1 followed by 18 zeros. It achieves this while weighing 3 pounds and consuming about 20 watts of energy. That’s the same as a dim light bulb.

The world’s most powerful supercomputer, the Frontier, at Oak Ridge National Laboratory is able to match that processing speed, but it consumes 21 MW, about 1000000 times more energy, and it covers the area of 2 basketball courts. And it weighs so much that a single cabinet equals 2 trucks. Your brain is able to do the same amount of computation on a sandwich and a nap. And even by the crudest measure, the data input, humans dwarf what machines process. Yan Lekun, the former chief AI scientist at Meta, explained at a conference that a 4 year old child, through vision alone, has taken in about 10 to the fifteenth bytes of sensory data.

That’s a pentabyte. Now the largest language models, the ones behind Chatuchupti, are trained on about 10 to the thirteenth bytes. So a 4 year old has absorbed roughly 50 times more data than the biggest AI ever built. And that’s just vision. It doesn’t include touch or sound, smell, taste, emotion, pain, or balance.

The sheer number of sensory experience that a human takes in dwarfs anything we fed a machine. And that’s because the real world is highly dimensional. It’s noisy, continuous, continuous, and we humans have to navigate it from birth. So computers and AI are really good synthesizers, but they’re not good thinkers. And there’s something else that AI will never have, the ability to have a eureka moment.

The flash of insight. The sudden breakthrough when everything seems to just click into place. It’s the moment when an idea arrives from nowhere. Not from processing data, but from the mysterious creative depths of human consciousness. Think about Archimedes in his bathtub.

He wasn’t trying to solve the problem of volume and displacement. He was just taking a bath and suddenly eureka! The insight struck him. He discovered the principle of buoyancy, a foundation of physics in a pure moment of inspiration. Or take Einstein.

He was taking a break from his work and letting his mind wander. He imagined an experiment involving 2 lightning bolts. Just a daydream, but that single thought experiment led to the theory of special relativity. But the catch is that these eureka moments require boredom. When our minds are allowed to wander, when we’re not constantly stimulated, that’s when creativity happens.

Our brains make unexpected connections, they explore new territory, and generate novel solutions. So boredom is the soil in which inspiration grows. And there’s plenty of research on this. The more people are bored, the more they are able to come up with novel associations and ideas when asked to engage in creative tasks. Now, sadly, we’ve eliminated the mental state that fuels creative insight.

We tend to fill our boring moments with a scroll, a swipe, a notification. Boredom barely exists anymore. And with it, we may be losing 1 of the mind’s most productive modes. And it’s not just about memory or focus. We may lose the ability to have original thoughts, to make creative breakthroughs, to experience those flashes of insight.

Now can we actually do something about it? Well, the answer is yes. There are effective ways to reclaim what makes us human. Let’s talk about solutions. First, experts suggest a screen fast, even a short 1.

UCLA researchers sent sixth graders to a nature camp for 5 days. They had no phones, no screens, just hiking, being outside, talking to each other. When they came back, they were significantly better at reading emotions from faces and body language than kids who stayed on their normal routines. So 5 days, that’s all it took. And if a full detox isn’t realistic, just set limits.

Research shows that young adults who capped social media use at 30 minutes per day for 2 weeks reported lower phone addiction, better sleep, less stress, and stronger relationships. Or just add friction. Research found that disabling notifications, keeping your phone on silent, turning off face ID, hiding social media apps, and even switching to grayscale, all measurably reduce screen time. That’s no willpower required. You’re just making it slightly harder to mindlessly pick up the phone.

And if you want to keep your mind sharp, you need quality sleep. It’s a non negotiable. Sleep is essential for learning and memory consolidation. During sleep, your brain runs a cleaning process flushing out neurotoxic waste that builds up during the day. We have a whole video on that so check it out in the comments.

Even 1 bad night of sleep significantly impairs your ability to form new memories. So you can do everything else right, but if you’re not sleeping, it won’t stick. And perhaps what I think is most important is cultivating a sense of spirituality. The word spirit comes from spiritus in Latin and it just means breath. Spiritual practices, whatever form they take for you, are fundamentally about slowing down, being present, and reflecting.

And there’s a bunch of research showing that they cultivate exactly the cognitive abilities that technology erodes. Creativity, attention, empathy, meaning making, and a sense of purpose. And 1 more thing, another tip. This is something I used to do with friends in grad school. We set a rule.

You only get 3 Google searches per day. Anything else you have to figure out on your own. Try it for a week. It’s a very small exercise, but it shows you just how reliant you’ve become. It forces your brain to do what it was built to do.

Think. Over reliance on technology risks narrowing the path to the deeper, more inspired knowledge that has driven major breakthroughs in human history. It’s not to say that technology is bad, but we humans possess something unique, something no machine can simulate spirit, morality, compassion, the ability to forgive, to love, to truly understand 1 another. These aren’t features that come with a software update. There’s something beautiful about sitting in silence and having something arrive that wasn’t there before.

So put the phone in another room, go for a walk without earbuds and let yourself be bored. Pay attention to what your mind does when you finally give it the space. You might be surprised by what’s still in there. If you liked this video let me know by leaving a like and if you want more content like this about technology, AI, what makes us uniquely human, let me know in the comments. I’d be happy to make more for you.

And make sure you subscribe so you can keep track of what we’re posting. And share this video with someone who might be relying on their phone a little too much. Until next time.

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