Good news: Apparently neither Google nor smartphones are frying our brains

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Researchers look at how brain pow­er is affect­ed by dig­i­tal tech­nolo­gies (CBC News):

“…how much is our reliance on smart­phones as mem­o­ry aides affect­ing the way our brains work?

Two psy­chol­o­gists from the Uni­ver­si­ty of Water­loo — Evan Risko and Sam Gilbert — looked at the research that has been done in the field of “cog­ni­tive offload­ing”…Cog­ni­tive offload­ing is basi­cal­ly the idea that you can assign the duties of your brain pow­er onto a device, to save your brain space.

They found the research sug­gests this cog­ni­tive offload­ing can be both good, and poten­tial­ly bad, for our brains…

Should we be con­cerned about using smart­phones to remem­ber things? Prob­a­bly not. The real­i­ty is that it does free up cog­ni­tive real estate in our brains, and we can focus on more com­plex tasks like think­ing about our finan­cial plan, or where our next vaca­tion will be, or what­ev­er else you deem impor­tant in your life.”

Study: Cog­ni­tive Offload­ing (Trends in Cog­ni­tive Sciences)

• Sum­ma­ry: If you have ever tilt­ed your head to per­ceive a rotat­ed image, or pro­grammed a smart­phone to remind you of an upcom­ing appoint­ment, you have engaged in cog­ni­tive offload­ing: the use of phys­i­cal action to alter the infor­ma­tion pro­cess­ing require­ments of a task so as to reduce cog­ni­tive demand. Despite the ubiq­ui­ty of this type of behav­ior, it has only recent­ly become the tar­get of sys­tem­at­ic inves­ti­ga­tion in and of itself. We review research from sev­er­al domains that focus­es on two main ques­tions: (i) what mech­a­nisms trig­ger cog­ni­tive offload­ing, and (ii) what are the cog­ni­tive con­se­quences of this behav­ior? We offer a nov­el metacog­ni­tive frame­work that inte­grates results from diverse domains and sug­gests avenues for future research.

To learn more:

• What are cog­ni­tive abil­i­ties and how to boost them?
• Ten crit­i­cal ques­tions to nav­i­gate media cov­er­age of lat­est sci­en­tif­ic findings
• Study: High tele­vi­sion view­ing and low phys­i­cal activ­i­ty can sig­nif­i­cant­ly wors­en long-term cog­ni­tive function
• Check out the pre­sen­ta­tion Tech­nolo­gies of the extend­ed mind, by Dr. Peter Rein­er (start­ing with slide 70):