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| ▲ | bccdee 3 days ago | parent [-] | | No, you're just saying that. There's no evidence that using phones makes teenagers stupid. | | |
| ▲ | mallowdram 3 days ago | parent | next [-] | | Anyone who understands the development of intelligence and creativity is directly linked to the allocortex's ability to navigate freely, use vicarious trial and error, to invent novel short-cuts, built from both egocentric (landmark memories) and allocentric (extra body mapping) up until around the age of 16 in order to develop the basics of memory consolidation can take anecdotal evidence of kids that can't take a walk without a cellphone's help and extrapolate that these kids lack critical thinking skills. It's elementary deduction from basic learning practices we've known since O'Keefe in 1973. | | |
| ▲ | bccdee 3 days ago | parent [-] | | Given that the current generation of kids missed out on several crucial years of socializing due to Covid and were forced to find community online, I'm skeptical of arguments that point to poorly-socialized kids and say, "it must be the phones." Even if this was based on real data and not a hodgepodge of anecdotes, the phones themselves would not be my #1 suspect. > allocortex's ability to navigate freely If your allocortex is navigating freely, something has gone badly wrong. Put it back under the neocortex where it belongs and seek immediate help from a neurologist. | | |
| ▲ | mallowdram 3 days ago | parent [-] | | Sorry, that's a narrative argument, lack of covid socializing, the sciences tell us otherwise. Phones correlate to cog decline. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-023-36256-4 | | |
| ▲ | bccdee 2 days ago | parent [-] | | > Phones correlate to cog decline. Do they? Let's check your source. > To investigate this hypothesis, participants aged 20–34 perform a concentration and attention test in the presence and absence of a smartphone. The results of the conducted experiment imply that the mere presence of a smartphone results in lower cognitive performance, which supports the hypothesis of the smartphone presence using limited cognitive resources. So, no. The presence of your smartphone on the desk in front of you is distracting, but that distraction goes away if you remove the smartphone. That's not "cognitive decline." > Sorry, that's a narrative argument No, that's me pointing out a competing plausible hypothesis. I'm not saying Covid is necessarily responsible for your anecdotal incidents; I'm saying that until you can prove Covid wasn't responsible, you have no standing to state conclusively that phones were. | | |
| ▲ | mallowdram 2 days ago | parent [-] | | We're in an attentional crises that isn't because kids didn't go to school for two years. It's destroying their ability to experience reality as paths, free navigation, vicarious trial and error, all of this is fundamental to memory consolidation: the brain's fundamental unit: action-syntax in memory, is built from non-screen topological integrations of landmark and allocentric experiences. Phones destroy this. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6059409/ https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-20922-0 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/brb3.70656 https://www.mdpi.com/2254-9625/15/6/98 https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40255102/ https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00246-025-03862-0 https://www.mdpi.com/2227-9067/12/4/503 https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40172268/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40173157/ https://www.nature.com/articles/s41390-025-04024-x https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00223... “A growing body of evidence has found that children’s brains can structurally and functionally change due to prolonged media multitasking, such as diminished gray matter in the prefrontal cortex, where attentional control and complex decision making abilities reside, among other really important skills, like the development of empathy and understanding nonverbal social communication,” | | |
| ▲ | bccdee 2 days ago | parent [-] | | Your first study says smartphone use is associated with conduct problems and hyperactivity in 6-year-olds; no teens or stupidity in sight. Other studies discuss distraction, cyberbullying, bad diet/poor exercise, toddlers' sensory processing abilities, anxiety, and lost sleep. None of this covers stupidity, and much of it is not about teens. The most interesting study you cited finds structural brain differences in preschool-aged children who spent more time on screens. It's still a stretch to make claims about the intelligence of teenagers based on the fact that babies who spend too much time on screens are, at age 3, less developed. There's also a magnitude problem. Even if we assume smartphones do have some cognitive effect on teens, how can we know it's the only or largest one? You can't attribute anecdotes about kids being dumb to the presence of smartphones. | | |
| ▲ | mallowdram 2 days ago | parent [-] | | The loss of attention, the erosion of reading and math skills as of 2025 are quantified, not anecdotal. You keep ignoring: the basic science of creativity, imagination, learning all stem from free navigation and vicarious, trail and error path integration. It is deductive that devices that impair this impair learning. Learning is based on free exploration of space. Mammalian intelligence is way-finding that stitches together landmark and non-landmark space. The idea you can't see a relationship between pre-school, three year-old impairment, short-form cyberbullying (in teens) and teen loss of learning, retention, attention-span, creativity, suggests you are the subject group. If you can't reason correlationally, than science is beyond your grasp. Your statements are only narrative and narrow, you pretend to grasp ideas and information, then make arbitrary statements. That was the tip of the iceberg, that list. Phones damage children's lives in multi-dinemsisons of emotional, memory, learning capability. You may be the study group's ideal subject. Face that possibility. | | |
| ▲ | bccdee 2 days ago | parent [-] | | Education has been under the axe for years. Declining test scores are more likely to be the product of No Child Left Behind than the iPhone. > You keep ignoring: the basic science of creativity "Basic science" is something of an oxymoron here. Measuring creativity is anything but basic. You're appealing to intuition—an intuition I share to some extent, but not one that we can call scientific > The idea you can't see a relationship between three year-old impairment and teen loss of learning I can see how there might be a relationship. There also might not be: Some kids are late bloomers, and the children in this study hadn't even gone to preschool yet. Where's the meta-analysis finding a causal link between smartphone use and impaired cognition in teens? If you want to talk about science, you can't extrapolate things like this based on how you figure they're probably working. Science is empirical. > Your statements are only narrative and narrow, you pretend to grasp ideas and information You're getting awfully aggressive¹ about this. Have you considered putting your phone down? [1]: https://www.mdpi.com/2254-9625/15/6/98 | | |
| ▲ | mallowdram 2 days ago | parent [-] | | Science isn't simply empirical. There are five other stages to theoretic knowledge and your reasoning suggests you don't know how to discuss ideas scientifically. You exclude statements to make claims. I said, attention erosion AND test score decline. You chose to make a narrative claim using No Child Left Behind, and picking one of the conditions. Yes there is a basic science of creativity (there is also a complex), we have indexes of creative erosion in the mid-20s. When you can revisit these ideas with a scientific manner, then I can respond. Until then you are just spinning narratives. | | |
| ▲ | bccdee 2 days ago | parent [-] | | > When you can revisit these ideas with a scientific manner, then I can respond. Ironic that you would level a criticism like this while touting "non-empirical science," whatever that is. > You chose to make a narrative claim using No Child Left Behind Do me the courtesy of paraphrasing my claims accurately. I said the drop in test scores you're attributing to phones could more plausibly be caused by NCLB, which is a carefully couched statement that doesn't actually draw any concrete conclusions. I'm gesturing broadly at the absence of conclusive evidence, and you're telling me you don't need conclusive evidence to make definitive statements. I'm hardly the one spinning narratives here. | | |
| ▲ | mallowdram 2 days ago | parent [-] | | There are few conclusions in science, you should know that, there's merely a next theoretic stage. We don't know the origins of the AIDS virus or SARS-CoV-2. It took 30 years to prove cigarettes definitively caused cancer after the first Doll & Hill 1956 study, but we could see the connections. Same here, we can see the connections beginning in 2017, and now we have over 200 studies that suggest and prove in parts and piecemeal like the Doll & Hill study that phones are bad for kids. Gesturing broadly at a lack of conclusive evidence is simply naysaying the connections that educators, child development experts, neuroscience researchers are detailing. If you can't counter their connections and simply sit on the ledge of denial, you ain't thinking, you're in denial. Stay in storytelling. |
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| ▲ | steezeburger 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | There is no evidence that using phones makes teenagers stupid? I see several studies. I feel like you're the one just saying things. | | |
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