Your Smart Phone is Making You Lazy

Its official! your smart phone is making sure that you think less and become lazier. Scientists at the University of Waterloo have conducted a research which says that our dependence on smart phones to find out everything from instant directions to a place or recommendations for a good restaurant is making us think less.

Users of smart phones avoid thinking for themselves, prefering instead to just glean the data that they require using a quick search or an app. Gordon Pennycook, co-lead author of the study, and a PhD candidate in the Department of Psychology at Waterloo says that their  research provides support for an association between heavy smartphone use and lowered intelligence. Whether smartphones actually decrease intelligence is still an open question that requires future research says Gordon.

Nathaniel Barr, the other lead author of the paper says that decades of research has revealed that humans are eager to avoid expending effort when problem-solving and it seems likely that people will increasingly use their smartphones as an extended mind. Our reliance on smartphones and other devices will likely only continue to rise, said Barr.

Therefore it makes sense to understand how smartphones affect and relate to human psychology before these technologies are so fully ingrained that it’s hard to recall what life was like without them. Already it is difficult to imagine doing science projects without the help of a smartphone.