Are Smart Phones Making Us Dumb and Distant?

My wife, Patricia, and I found an article on smartphones by Nicholas Carr in the Oct. 7 Wall Street Journal so thought-provoking and helpful, we decided to change some our ways. I am sharing a summary here.  
If you are typical, you find your phone so handy that you consult it 80 times daily. Why so often? Because we use it for everything, and according to a 2015 Gallup survey, half the iPhone users said they could not imagine life without it.
Despite all the services the phone provides, they also cause anxiety. Because of the overwhelming hold the phone has on our attention, it influences our behavior. What effect does this have on our minds and our perception? Scientists are now studying this question and what they are finding is both captivating and disquieting. The grip this device has on us exists even when we aren’t using it. Researchers believe that as we grow more dependent on this technology, our intellect becomes weaker.
For a decade, Adrian Ward, psychologist, and professor at the University of Texas has been studying the effect smartphones and the internet have on us. Based on his research and that of others, he is finding increasing evidence that just hearing the phone ring or vibrate creates distractions that affect our ability to focus.
In another study by professors from various universities, “Some of the students were asked to place their phones in front of them on their desks; others were told to stow their phones in their pockets or handbags; still, others were required to leave their phones in a different room. … the subjects whose phones were in view posted the worst scores, while those who left their phones in a different room did the best. The students who kept their phones in their pockets or bags came out in the middle. As the phone’s proximity increased, brainpower decreased. In subsequent interviews, nearly all the participants said that their phones hadn’t been a distraction—that they hadn’t even thought about the devices during the experiment. They remained oblivious even as the phones disrupted their focus and thinking.”
Yet a different study concluded that students without their phones with them achieved an entire letter grade higher than those who had theirs with them. And in a study of schools which ban smart phones, test scores increase markedly.
The negative impact extends to social relationships. “Because smartphones serve as constant reminders of all the friends we could be chatting with electronically, they pull at our minds when we’re talking with people in person, leaving our conversations shallower and less satisfying.” The sheer presence of a mobile phone negatively impacts personal closeness.
“The evidence that our phones can get inside our heads so forcefully is unsettling. It suggests that our thoughts and feelings, far from being sequestered in our skulls, can be skewed by external forces we’re not even aware of.”
There is another interesting finding which squares with my observation of myself: People don’t try as hard to remember things, knowing they can get back to the information readily on their phone. The problem is, “No matter how much information swirls around us, the less well-stocked our memory, the less we have to think with. …However, “when people call up information through their devices, they often end up suffering from delusions of intelligence.”
“Data,” the novelist and critic Cynthia Ozick once wrote, is “memory without history.” Her observation points to the problem with allowing smartphones to commandeer our brains. When we constrict our capacity for reasoning and recall or transfer those skills to a gadget, we sacrifice our ability to turn information into knowledge. We get the data but lose the meaning. Upgrading our gadgets won’t solve the problem. We need to give our minds more room to think. And that means putting some distance between ourselves and our phones.