The researchers found that participants with their phones in another room significantly outperformed those with their phones on the desk, and they also slightly outperformed those participants who had kept their phones in a pocket or bag. The findings suggest that the mere presence of one’s smartphone reduces available cognitive capacity and impairs cognitive functioning, even though people feel they’re giving their full attention and focus to the task at hand. —The University of Texas at Austin
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I posted this on my FB page when Nora Ephron died in 2012. Five years later I am definitely at the “Google stage” myself (though I prefer DuckDuckGo as a search engine 🙂). One of my favorite Nora Ephron passages (from _I Remember Nothing_ )
————————————————————————————————
I am living in the Google years, no question of that. And there are advantages to it.
When you forget something, you can whip out your iPhone and go to Google.
The Senior Moment has become the Google moment, and it has a much nicer, hipper, younger, more contemporary sound, doesn’t it? By handling the obligations of the search mechanism, you almost prove you can keep up. You can delude yourself that no one at the table thinks of you as a geezer.
And finding the missing bit is so quick. There’s none of the nightmare of the true Senior moment – the long search for the answer, the guessing, the self-recrimination, the head-slapping mystification, the frustrated finger-snapping. You just go to Google and retrieve it.
You can’t retrieve your life (unless you’re on Wikipedia, in which case you can retrieve an inaccurate version of it). But you can retrieve the name of that actor who was in that movie, the one about World War II.
And the name of that writer who wrote that book, the one about her affair with that painter.
Or the name of that song that was sung by that singer, the one about love.
You know the one.
Multitasking is a myth.