That Ping In Your Head

“That’s why I call this the illiterate generation. Epiphanies—sudden, striking realisations—never come from smartphone surfing,” he says. Here, in his class, was living proof. “The boys preferred pornography because it is consumable, easy, and transferable—everything their smartphones enable. Real women, real relationships, never meet such criteria,” he says. Somebody should also tell them that knowledge, unlike information, becomes a part of you, it doesn’t free- float in cyberspace. It’s never downloadable, cannot be transmitted. But what can we, in our smartphone daze, do?

Sonepat’s computer science class could be almost any semi-urban location in India. Most people have a mobile phone, many with internet access. Urban subscribers have already migrated to a smartphone, the device that’s going to capture half of India’s handset market by 2017. Make no mistake: the smartphone is truly smart and epoch-changing. We can’t live without it. Nearly 160 million of today’s 250 million internet connections are on mobile phones equipped for shopping and with enough bandwidth to take on Youtube, Reddit, Facebook, Twitter, CandyCrush and more.

Right now India’s most popular mobile ‘apps’ relate to chatting—Whatsapp, Viber and the like. Next come search engines, Google, Yahoo etc—evidence of the widespread hunger for information. It’s a trend many teachers, students, parents, social scientists, HR managers and psychologists are noting nervously. The oncoming smartphone blitz is already visible—the colleague lost to virtual groups serving obscure hobbies; busloads of people plugged in to remote conversations or music stations; students using ‘Google baba’ and ‘Wikipedia’ as sou­r­ces of knowledge; an inability to travel without GPS. And so on.

Graphics by Rahul Awasthi

Does the dazed look in their eyes obscure an inner crisis? By serving everything up to us in a jiffy, is the smartphone changing us fundamentally—how we think, how we process information, how we’re wired to interact with society? Particularly in the West, these questions are being increasingly raised. The signs are evident—distractedness, an inability to remember basic information, digital passivity, and even deeper digital neuroses. The smartphone is rewiring our mental circuits (see graphic). The problem is we don’t yet know what impact this will have on how we’re thinking—whether we as a race have become stupid. The early warning signs are certainly not encouraging. And that is bad news for everyone, students and professionals, older people, housewives.

“We believe it imperative that more researchers consider reliance on smartphones as a new kind of thinking, as our collective psychology may change alongside the technological advances,” wrote Dr Nathaniel Barr, a postdoctoral fellow at University of Waterloo, Canada, in a widely quoted paper about smartphones that was published in Computers in Human Behaviour (www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0747563215001272). For his research, Barr asked people how often they used their smartphone to search for information. It turned out that lazy thinkers—“people less willing and able to think analytically”—were more likely to use smartphone search engines to find information.

Photograph by Sanjay Rawat

“Since we find that people who more often rely on their sma­rtphones for information are lazier thinkers, we guess that people are using it to access information they would likely have already seen, but did not put in the effort to learn,” Barr says in an e-mail interview. “It might have turned out that more analytic and eager thinkers could be using their smartphone to increase knowledge, but this is not what we found.”

Dr Zaheer Hussain, a lecturer on psychology at the University of Derby, recently released one of the first scientific studies in the UK to establish that smartphones are “addictive”. “Smartphones can be psychologically rewarding and can reinforce behaviour so we end up doing it again,” he says, over e-mail. Using these devices can influence mood, taking us from an arousing “buzz” or a “high” to the paradoxically tranquilising feeling of “escape” or “numbing”, he says.

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Ten Ways Smartphones Are Making Us Dumber

• Attention Attention span is an early victim

• Memory We are outsourcing memory to our smartphone, choosing not to remember since we have “fed” the phone data

• Analysis If we are already prone to intuitive guesswork rather than analysis, we end up doing more guesswork than hard work

• Distraction Night hours spent on the smartphone imply greater distraction the next morning

• Unreal The smartphone gives us pleasure, by making us connected. The more it makes us happy, the more we can tune out of the real world.

• Echo If we hold obnoxious views, the phone/social media can help us find other obnoxious people to hang out with and opt out of where we feel criticised

• Direction We are forgetting “where” we are as our brains rely on maps to get us around

• Ties Studies are already ringing the warning bell on what the phone is doing to family time, relationships, classwork etc

• Narcissism I-me-myself problems stemming from overuse of social media

• Dependence Remembering numbers, names, faces, even simple calculations, is tougher

The Numbers: Up, Up And Away

• 159 MN mobile internet users in India in Jan 2015; 40 million in rural areas, a 45% growth rate

• More smartphone users in India access internet than in the US

• 77% Small screen devices will be 3/4th of all mobile broadband connections in emerging markets

• 80% smartphone users in APAC states are first-time users

• By 2017 half the Indian handset market will consist of smartphones

• 1.6 billion connections by 2015

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In a quiet Chennai suburb, Dr S. Vasantha of the School of Management Studies, Vels University, narrates her personal struggle over smartphones. She noticed her daughter spent inordinate hours on chat “apps” rather than talk or even watch TV. “My daughter got so addicted to phone chatting that I had to send her to a hostel. Her grades had been falling,” says Vasantha, a single parent. “I suppose, now that she is not alone, the phone is less of a distraction.” They now only meet over weekends.

Crushed by her daughter’s constant urge to “stay connected”, Dr Vasantha undertook a survey to see if schoolgoers and older college students had similar phone habits. They did. “Lon­eliness, isolation or boredom can be replaced with the pleasure of free flow of electronic delights,” her report from December 2013 states. The 15-to-24-year-olds in her study said their phones helped them assume they are in “a different world”. The study linked phone usage with poor academic performance among the most active users, who talked hours into the night, frequently smsed each other. “Now, with Whats­app and other apps, even Class III-IV students are hooked,” she says.

Moreover, it isn’t just students or children fuelling the smartphone boom. “Working women and housewives are adding to the growth too,” says Nilotpal Chakravarti, associate vice-president, Internet and Mobile Association of India. So, for each group, there’s a different way of being driven crazy by the same device we cannot do without. Ask Prof Nalin Pant, who teaches at IIT Delhi and is no Luddite. Once he chucked a student’s mobile phone out of a fourth floor classroom window. “The real world is not a board exam where people can regurgitate facts they’ve downloaded. The real world is a problem you have to solve right now,” he says.

By now, many smartphone users have realised that chat applications in particular reveal “a layer under people” that they might not have known existed. Internet junkie Arun Prabhudesai calls it “the dumbing down of adults”. Everyone’s ‘received’ and ‘sent’ some of this, for example, WhatsApp messages from 50-plus IAS officer acquaintances that feature teddy bears; or pictures of candles glowing over mawkish messages, such as “Friendship is ever-lasting”. “Lewd jokes, facile pictures...yes, I do get them from people I would have thought had different interests. My take is that it was difficult to communicate this kind of stuff earlier. Now, it’s easy,” says Prof Shobhit Mahajan, professor, dep­artment of physics and astrophysics, University of Delhi.

What’s going down, you may wonder, why are we all being foo­lish? Scientists peering into the inner workings of the human mind, psychologists, neurobiologists, experts on human cognition, they are all struggling to find answers, with psycho­logists the first to sound the alarm. Behind every expert conc­l­usion lies a deeper, more fundamental, change in how the human brain works. Could reaching for smartphones turn grey matter into sentimental flotsam floating on a hyperspace jelly?

Dr Neeraj Jain of the National Brain Research Centre ventures a proposition: “I think the internet is like an extension of the brain’s memory function. And a smartphone, which helps access the internet and apps, is probably becoming like a prosthetic limb,” he says. The brain remembers by repetition—short-term memory becomes long-term if you’ve remembered something long enough. Memory, psychologically, is broader than retention. As Prof Visvanathan reminds you, “Human memory is not a record but a reinvention.” A prosthetic limb, on the other hand, forces the brain to recalculate everything around it—the distance from here to the door, which part of the leg wants to be scratched, and so on. This is what scientists call ‘plasticity’—the brain’s ability to rewire.

Dr Jain, whose work revolves around how the brain “changes” to assist recovery from spinal cord injury, quips that even he “cannot remember my wife’s number sometimes” because it is, of course, stored on his phone. That may not be a memory “problem”, he says, as many people are simply deciding they don’t want to remember some details. Smartphones do give him trouble, though. “Half an hour is also tough for my students without their phone. It’s always distracting them. I tell them to not confuse information they get on it with knowledge,” he says. He urges them to not remember, or recall, but to “make something new of what they read—that’s cognition,” he says, echoing Visvanathan.

His students are research scholars, expected to concentrate over difficult problems for long hours. What once took one hour, in the social media/smartphone era, takes four. Dr Jain calls what’s happening to his students “classical distraction, a serious problem”. There’s more, though (see graph). Like the dog in Pavlov’s experiment, can the brain get trained to use smartphones even beyond reasonable need? “I see no reason why not. Like the dog salivating at the sound of his food bowl (instead of when he’s actually eating),” he says.

For this, the mobile phone must first become a source of pleasure, and recognised by the brain as such. “A smartphone is a source of pleasure. In a way it is, isn’t it?” says Dr Jain. Across countries, smartphone users say their devices are critical to “stay connected” with friends, family, work—a great pleasure indeed. Similarly, when New York cabbies were tested in 2011, it was confirmed that they have pronounced ‘navigational material’—an improved hippocampus, if you will—from having memorised the city’s streets. That part of their brains just got better. Touch screen users have higher touch sensitivity—quite like string instrument players and Braille readers. Could a smartphone user’s brain then also weaken, if parts responsible for memory, concentration, sense of direction, and ability to think through problems lie in disuse?

“What we do repeatedly trains our brain to get better at. The converse is also true. The less we use our internal system, the rustier it gets,” says Dr Sridharan Devarajan, an assistant professor at the Centre for Neuroscience at the Indian Institute of Sci­e­nce, Bangalore. Sridharan does not work specifically on smartphone usage and its impact on cognitive behaviours, but makes “a reasonable speculation that people who use maps on smartphones appear to get lost more often”.

IIT Madras professor of electrical engineering, Ashok Jhu­njhunwala, has noticed another oddity in people hooked to smartphones. As smartphones are personal devices, people with “peculiar” views—say, on Mahatma Gandhi—have found a way to tune out dissent. “You can find one person in Turkey, another in France, another in Germany, and remain lost in that virtual group. You can opt out of the real world and keep your peculiar view, even if it becomes more anti-social over time,” says Jhunjhunwala.

This would be the ultimate irony: to be trapped in a bubble enabled by a device that promises to democratise knowledge—but to still be able to tweet about it. One would laugh at all of this but for the massive political propaganda being served up online. In fact, the 2014 general elections was India’s first in online campaign tactics. This is just the beginning, there’s more interactive stuff to come. Hopefully, our political parties aren’t taking advantage of the fact that our brains have turned to mush. For we are smart enough to see through it, aren’t we?