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Mar.1,2019,5:42PM
All day long, we're inundated by interruptions and alerts from our devices. Smartphones
buzz to wake us up, emails stream into our inboxes, notifications from coworkers and
far away friends bubble up on our screens, and "assistants" chime in with their own
soulless voices.
Such interruptions seem logical to our minds: we want technology to help with our busy
lives, ensuring we don't miss important appointments and communications.
But our bodies have a different view: These constant alerts jolt our stress hormones into
action, igniting our fight or flight response; our heartbeats quicken, our breathing
tightens, our sweat glands burst open, and our muscles contract. That response is
intended to help us outrun danger, not answer a call or text from a colleague.
Another 86% of Americans say they check their email and social media accounts
"constantly," and that it's really stressing them out.
Endocrinologist Robert Lustig tells Business Insider that notifications from our phones
are training our brains to be in a near constant state of stress and fear by establishing a
stress-fear memory pathway. And such a state means that the prefrontal cortex, the part
of our brains that normally deals with some of our highest-order cognitive functioning,
goes completely haywire, and basically shuts down.
"You end up doing stupid things," Lustig says. "And those stupid things tend to get you
in trouble."
AP/Rafiq Maqboo
But since only about 1 in 50 people are super taskers, the rest of us mere mortals are
really only focusing on just one thing at a time. That means every time we pause to
answer a new notification or get an alert from a different app on our phone, we're being
interrupted, and with that interruption we pay a price: something called a "switch cost."
Sometimes the switch from one task to another costs us only a few tenths of a second,
but in a day of flip-flopping between ideas, conversations, and transactions on a phone
or computer, our switch costs can really add up, and make us more error-prone,
too. Psychologist David Meyer who's studied this effect estimates that shifting between
tasks can use up as much as 40% of our otherwise productive brain time.
Every time we switch tasks, we're also shooting ourselves up with a dose of the stress
hormone cortisol, Lustig says. The switching puts our thoughtful, reasoning prefrontal
cortex to sleep, and kicks up dopamine, a brain chemical that plays a key role in
pursuing reward and motivation.
In other words, the stress that we build up by trying to do many things at once when we
really can't is making us sick, and causing us to crave even more interruptions, spiking
dopamine, which perpetuates the cycle.
The more tasks we have to do, the more we have to choose how we want to use our
precious brain power. So its understandable that we might want to pass some of our
extra workload to our phones or digital assistants.
But there is some evidence that delegating thinking tasks to our devices could not only
be making our brains sicker, but lazier too.
We also know that reading up on new information on your phone can be a terrible way
to learn. Researchers have shown that people who take in complex information from a
book, instead of on a screen, develop deeper comprehension, and engage in
more conceptual thinking, too.
Recent research on dozens of smartphone users in Switzerland also suggests that staring
at our screens could be making both our brains and our fingers more jittery.
Last year, psychologists and computer scientists found an unusual and potentially
troubling connection: the more tapping, clicking and social media posting and scrolling
people do, the "noisier" their brain signals become. That finding took the researchers by
surprise. Usually, when we do something more often, we get better, faster and more
efficient at the task.
But the researchers think there's something different going on when we engage in social
media: the combination of socializing and using our smartphones could be putting a
huge tax on our brains.
Social behavior, "may require more resources at the same time," study author Arko
Ghosh said, from our brains to our fingers. And that's scary stuff.
Flickr/André-Pierre du Plessis
This technique isn't just used by social media, it's all over the internet.
Airline fares that drop at the click of a mouse. Overstocked sofas that are
there one minute and gone the next. Facebook notifications that change
based on where our friends are and what they're talking about. We've gotta
have it all, we've gotta have more, and we've gotta have it now. We're
scratching addictive itches all over our screens.
Lustig says that even these kinds of apps aren't inherently evil. They only
become a problem when they are given free rein to interrupt us, tugging at
our brains' desire for tempting treats, tricking our brains into always
wanting more.
"I'm not anti technology per se," he counters. "I'm anti variable-reward
technology. Because that's designed very specifically to make you keep
looking."
"My hope is that we will come to a point where you can't pull your cell
phone out in public," Lustig says.
This story was originally published on March 10, 2018 as part of Business
Insider's "Your Brain on Apps" series.