2 Research Studies on Technology and the Brain
A couple of resources to help you better understand the effect of your phone on your brain
Introduction
With so much competing information out there on the effects of smartphones use, it can often be difficult to decipher the best way to interact with your favourite device. I’ve started looking into the (albeit limited) primary scientific research out there to help inform my decisions, in this article I’ve summarised a couple of studies I came across.
Study 1: Smartphone addiction, daily interruptions and self-reported productivity
Aim
In this study Éilish Duke and Christian Montag of the Department of Psycholog, University of London & Ulm University, Germany seek to invesigate if there is a link between smartphone use and productivity.
Experiment
605 participants applied to take part in the study, advertised on a website promoted through German TV and media. 379 participants met the criteria for inclusion in the current study — being in employment, over the age of 14 and owning a smartphone.
The participants were then given two questionaires. One to seek to understand smartphone addiction, the other to understand their productivity. To measure smartphone addiction The smartphone addiction scale was used, this is a 10 point questionaire that hopes to understand a users relationship with their smartphone. To measure productivity a separate set of questions was asked, which included ‘to what extent their health problems have affected productivity at work’ and ‘how many minutes each day can you work without digital interruptions’
The data was cleaned (by removing obvious troll answers) and a correlation between smartphone addiction and the productivity questions was calculated.
Results
Interestingly there was moderate relationship was shown between smartphone addiction and the number of work hours lost to smartphone use, the weekly minutes worked without interuption from smartphones and how much smartphone use affected productivity while working.
Conclusion
From the study it would appear that those who more frequently engage in smartphone use — those with the higher SUS score, are more likely to become distracted by their smarphone, this in turn would make it less likely for that person to reach a ‘flow state’ in their work, as doing so requires uninterupted concentration. This lack of a flow states could be one of the contributing factors to the reported loss in productivity of workers who report a higher level of smartphone addiction.
Regarding thought on the actual study, although the sample size is large I would take the data with a degree of caution, as all the questions were self reported. With app usage tracking features so prevelant on phones today, it would be great to see a similar study done using the actual data of smartphone interaction, rather than just the self reported claims of the particpants.
Study 2: Effect of duration of smartphone use on muscle fatigue and pain caused by forward head posture in adults
Aim
In this study Seong-Yeol Kim & Sung-Ja Koo of the Department of Physical Therapy, Kyungnam University, investigate the effect of smartphone use on muscular fatigue and pain.
Experiment
34 adults with forward head posture (bad posture) were divided into 3 groups. 1 group used a smartphone for 10 minutes, 1 group for 20 minutes and one for 30 minutes. Pain was measured using the self reported visual analogue scale before and after the experiment, while muscular fatigue was measured using Electromyography (EMG)
Results
Reported pain for all 3 groups increased after smartphone use. Muscular tension results can be seen below:
These results show that there were significant muscular fatigue differences in the left cervical erector spinae and the left and right upper trapezius muscles in the group that used the phone for 30 minutes, but no significant differences were found in the 10 or 20 minute group.
Conclusion
Personally, I don’t find the study massively useful. While it’s good to know you shouldn’t use your smartphone for more than 20 minutes without a break, I don’t think this study accurately replicates how people actually use smartphones. People interact with smartphones constantly, for shorter periods, pulling their phone out on the train, while walking or just waiting in line at a shop. It would be great to see, over a longer time period how these shorter, but more frequent interactions would affect posture.
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