Just being able to see our smartphones might be draining our brain power

Let's face it — some of us are living deep in the trenches of smartphone addiction. Whether it's by constantly checking social media networks, reading push alerts, or responding to texts, we spend more time than ever on our phone.

So it shouldn't come as a huge surprise that, according to a new study from McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas at Austin, our brain power is significantly reduced when we are near our smartphones.

The study is titled "Brain Drain: The Mere Presence of One's Own Smartphone Reduces Available Cognitive Capacity" and the study suggests that — as the title states — our proximity to our smartphone reduces our brain power.

Dude, where's my phone?

The study was composed of two experiments. In the first, researchers gathered 548 smartphone users, asked them to turn their phone on silent, and randomly instructed each user to place their phone in one of three places: face down on the desk next to them, in their pocket or bag, or in a separate room.

Then participants were asked to complete two computer tests to measure how well each person could hold and process data thrown at them. After the tests, participants were asked to complete a questionnaire about the lab and their smartphones, which was designed to figure out how often users thought about their smartphones during the test.

And it turns out, those who put their phones in another room were able to retain the most data thrown at them. Meanwhile, people who kept their phones in their pocket or bag came in slightly behind those who kept their phone in a separate room. But test takers with their phones next to them on the desk scored the lowest in being able to retain data out of all three groups.

Interestingly, the most frequent answer to the question of how often each participant thought about their smartphone was "not at all."

Put together, this suggests that even when users didn't realize they were thinking about their phones, the presence of a phone was still enough of a distraction to diminish cognitive capabilities.

"This contrast between perceived influence and actual performance suggests that participants failed to anticipate or acknowledge the cognitive consequences associated with the mere presence of their phones," researchers wrote in the study.

Power on or off

Researchers also ran a second experiment for the study, this one designed to see how people's self-reported dependence on their smartphone affected their cognitive ability throughout the day.

For this second experiment, researchers gathered 296 smartphone users and once again randomly assigned them one of three locations to place their phone, but this time the locations were slightly different. Test takers were asked to put their phone face up on the desk next to them (rather than face down), in their pocket or bag, or in another room. Researchers also added a second variable to the experiment: Some of the participants were told to turn their phones off while others were told to keep their phone turned on, completely silent, like in the first experiment.

Then, participants were asked to complete the same test from the first experiment as well a second test asking participants to respond to "go" and "no go" targets.

And finally, researchers asked participants to answer questions about their connection to their smartphone.

For the second experiment, once again, people who had their phones next to them performed the worst at retaining information compared to those who had their phones in a separate room.

"The results of experiment 2 suggest that the mere presence of consumers’ own smartphones may adversely affect cognitive functioning even when consumers are not consciously attending to them," researchers wrote.

Even more striking was that the most phone-dependent people were most likely to be affected by their phone location during the study.

"Ironically, the more consumers depend on their smartphones, the more they seem to suffer from their presence," the study outlines.

Overall, between both experiments, the study suggests that even if you think you're giving all of your focus to the task at hand, the mere ability presence of smartphone is enough to distract you, even when you don't realize it.

"Because the same finite pool of attentional resources supports both attentional control and other cognitive processes, resources recruited to inhibit automatic attention to one’s phone are made unavailable for other tasks, and performance on these tasks will suffer," the researchers acknowledged in the study.

But hold the phone!

But Dietram Scheufele, a life sciences communication professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, advises that the results should be taken with a grain of salt.

One gray area in the study is what is actually meant by "presence of the users' phones."

"Presence in this study means the phone being there, not some LED going off, some on-screen alert coming in, or the phone vibrating," Scheufele said. "In order to isolate effects of presence, the researchers instructed the participants to turn off their ringer, but it’s unclear if participants really followed these instructions, or if on-screen alerts (that are pretty standard on Android and iOS now) or phones on vibrate in participants’ pockets distracted people."

Basically, even if your phone is on silent, you can still see when it lights up if it's in your vicinity. And we can't be sure the researchers confirmed all of the phones were actually silenced.

"The working memory finding would be consistent with people leaving their phones on vibrate, given that there is no significant difference between desk and pocket, and the only significant difference was found when the phone was out of the room," Scheufele said. "The fluid intelligence findings would be consistent with users having visual alerts on, given that only the desk condition was significantly different from the others."

Scheufele explained that the tricky part of the study's results is that the tests were "black box experiments." In other words, researchers have an idea about what's happening with the way people think, but it's not so easy to test. Since we can't actually see inside people heads, researchers create scenarios they think will accurately test their theories. But there can be a lot of ways to interpret those results.

A phone addiction's not that bad, is it?

But overall, the question remains: even if our phones do distract us, is that necessarily a bad thing?

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via GIPHY

So it turns out, yes, your phone being nearby could be distracting you, but maybe that's not the worst thing after all. For now, just be sure to track your own usage and try to spend some time interacting with real people instead of your phone.