Mobile Phones Are Making Us Stupid

[Memphis Raines]

Here's a trend that has been years in the making. Since the advent of speed dial on land lines, people have been training themselves that memory is unimportant, placing every phone number you could need at the touch of a button. Now science has proven it: Phones, computers, and PDAs are making us dumb.

The stats: A quarter of UK residents (these studies always come out of Britain) don't know their home phone number. Only one-third know the birthdays of their immediate family. Half use one password, exclusively, presumably because they just can't remember any more.
The problem is pretty simple at heart: The less you use your memory, the study says, the worse it gets. The study indicates, shockingly, that people in their 50s and 60s have generally better memory than people in their 30s.

Why? The older group was tasked with committing more to memory when they were younger, "training" their brains appropriately. Our gadgets make it simple to offload our memory to electronic devices. That's a good thing when it comes to keeping track of the 1000 people in your address book (each with multiple phone numbers and email addresses), but maybe we're taking it too far?

The good news is that you can exercise your brain without memorizing numbers by rote. Games like Brain Age and Sudoku and other mental stimulation can do just as good a job at keeping your memory sharp (and possibly even ward off ailments like Alzheimer's), the experts say.

[baker123]

tsk tsk. the effects of being dependent to technology.

[box_type]

yes they will, if you let them...

[zero]

that's why we still need to read some good books and magazines to feed our minds.
bawal ang pork, beans... hehehe...

[awing]

Thats technology....and we cant stop it.

[BlueBimmer]

hey i have sudoku and brain juice games in my mobile fon, need to play more often

[theveed]

May "research" pa about this issue sa UK hehe... but it's so true... I remembered back in 99 or so when I was using a motorola phone, that stupid phone doens't have caller ID pag text (sending and receiving) so i was forced to memorize quite a few numbers...

when I switched to a more standard phone, wala na, pati home number I can't seem to remember it...

I never was good at bdays (for some reason, i can only remember my own, my wife's, my sister, my son's bday clearly, everyone else's is blurry in my mind...) cellphones/PDA/outlook made it worse...

Planning to go back to paper-based organizer nadin... hirap pag naubusan ng battery and i need to make that imporant phone call but can't recall the number (happened so many times na actually)...

[empy]

hey i have sudoku and brain juice games in my mobile fon, need to play more often

so pano yan...the pon makes you stupider, but the games make you smarter...so bale quits lang :rofl01:

[Bogeyman]

Oh, sh*t. So compared to eight years ago, I'm already dumb?

And I thought it was just me.

[Bogeyman]

Oh, sh*t. So compared to eight years ago, I'm already dumb because of my cellphone?

And I thought it was just me.

[Flagg]

Wala ba study about texting grammage?

[AnuVaYan]

Sudoku na nga ako ng sudoku e, pero hina pa rin ng memory ko. Pero nabasa ko nga na dapat nga talaga may mga mental exercise gaya ng sudoku.

Naalala ko yung napanood ko sa Discovery about brains, ang may pinaka malaki daw na brains sa mundo ay mga taxi drivers sa UK (yata, not sure about the country). Kasi before they qualify to be a taxi driver, they are required to memorize the routes within that country.

[theveed]

Sudoku isn't a memory-enhancing game, though....

[dazedchiq]

that is so true... i noticed the effect of texting when i was in HS. it seemed like the correct spelling looked so different or weird that i had to check with a dictionary everytime. i even installed one on my pda (technology pa rin!) so it would be there whenever i needed it.

nangyari na ba sa inyo ang ganyan? anyway, what i did was change the way i would text. i now spell everything correctly except for most tagalog words.

[oldblue]

that's why I always considered smartphones as very smart phones indeed. you put all your knowledge into it therfore making it smart, and you dumb

[caloyski5]

that is so true... i noticed the effect of texting when i was in HS. it seemed like the correct spelling looked so different or weird that i had to check with a dictionary everytime. i even installed one on my pda (technology pa rin!) so it would be there whenever i needed it.

nangyari na ba sa inyo ang ganyan? anyway, what i did was change the way i would text. i now spell everything correctly except for most tagalog words.

same here. ever since the year 2001, i have been texting completely. nabobobo kasi ako pagnagtatype ng reports, projects, etc sa school

[theveed]

For those who don't use a pen most of the time but needs to convey a message (like here sa board), have you noticed how difficult it is to continously write half a page?

My goodness, I can literally type faster than I write these days hehehe... If I write at the same speed, chances are, my handwriting changes every 2-3 paragraphs.

[OTEP]

I've always typed faster than I can write [I'm really a slow writer].

Typing was one of my favorite subjects in high school.

I also use my work as an excuse for my craptacular penmanship.

Data storage devices can really make us dependent and dull sometimes.

[Alpha_One]

I'm not worried. Frankly, this sounds like more media scaremongering. Somehow, hearing "speed dialing make us dumb" sounds like they're coming from the same people who say "our grandparents are smart because they had to memorize Imperial measurements as opposed to metric".

How did the study manage to correlate forgetting birthdays to using one password, anyway?

Mobile phones don't make people stupid. It just makes stupidity more apparent. Usng txtspk ds nt prvnt nEbdy frm spelling their words out completely.

For those who don't use a pen most of the time but needs to convey a message (like here sa board), have you noticed how difficult it is to continously write half a page?

My goodness, I can literally type faster than I write these days hehehe... If I write at the same speed, chances are, my handwriting changes every 2-3 paragraphs.

Of course you can type faster than you write! It takes one finger drop to type out a capital "G", while four strokes to write a capital cursive "G". I didn't find learning to use a keyboard crippling in terms of handwriting, but that's because my handwriting is terrible ANYWAY, with or without computers

Cursive capital letters have been the bane of my elementary schooling. My classmates having micrometer-precision margins and letter widths didn't help in me hating to write with a pen.

"Experts" that claim any keyboard causes injury (there's one such warning on my Logitech) have never had the misfortune of needing to write a five-page report in cursive. I don't see how using a pen to write is any more "natural and ergonomic". God forbid that people had to write before the ballpoint was invented, if I had to take an exam using a fountain pen, I would've dropped out on the first sem - all my papers would have been flooded with spilled ink.

Of course, pen and paper does have its advantages. But for pure text, typing is just much more convenient, clean and professional (if not romantic).

[mayana]

Its a good thing i never got used to texting the way other people texts. They really shorten the words na halos ang hirap ng basahin, minsan nga mali pa ang basa natin, or pagka-intindi. Turn off ako sa mga tao na nagtitext ng ganito: Kmusta n U? Or, Hnd ME blah, blah, blah... Waaa! Utang na loob...