. A full 89% of college students now report feeling "phantom" phone vibrations, imagining their phone is summoning them to attention when it hasn't actually buzzed.
cientists have known for years what people often won't admit to themselves: humans can't really multi-task. This is true for almost all of us: about 97.5% of the population. The other 2.5% have freakish abilities; scientists call them "super taskers," because they can actually successfully do more than one thing at once...Our brains can only process so much information at a time, about 60 bits per second.
Last year, psychologists and computer scientists found an unusual and potentially troubling connection: the more tapping, clicking and social media posting and scrolling people do, the "noisier" their brain signals become.
Checking Facebook has been proven to make young adults depressed. Researchers who've studied college students' emotional well-being find a direct link: the more often people check Facebook, the more miserable they are. But the incessant, misery-inducing phone checking doesn't just stop there. Games like Fortnite or apps like Twitter can be addictive, in the sense that they will leave your brain craving another hit. https://www.businessinsider.com/what-your-smartphone-is-doing-to-your-brain-and-it-isnt-good-2018-3
A lot of the concern around the health and safety risks of mobile phones centres on the radiation emitted. Mobile phones release radiofrequency energy, or radio waves, that can be absorbed by bodily tissues. In the past, studies have linked heavy mobile phone use to certain brain tumors. But according to Martin Röösli, head of the Environmental Exposures and Health Unit at the Swiss Tropical and Public Health Institute, the type of radiation emitted by a mobile phone is nothing to be alarmed about.
But that doesn't mean mobile phone radiation has no effect on the brain at all. Previous research has found evidence that it can change our brainwaves. And now, a new study co-authored by Röösli has found a link between mobile phone use and adverse effects on young people's memory retention. ..
The study, published in Environmental Health Perspectives, found that one year's worth of exposure to mobile phone radiation could have a negative effect on the development of memory performance in specific brain regions in adolescents. Here exposure' almost exclusively refers to phone calls.
"80 percent of the absorbed radiation comes from holding the phone to the head," Röösli noted. Interestingly, they found the brain's memory function was more vulnerable to the negative impact of radiation when the phone was held to the right hand side of the head. That's where the areas of the brain related to memory are located.
"Basically what we saw was the higher the absorption of radiation [by the brain] the more likely the development of memory in one year wasn't as good as those who didn't absorb as much," Röösli told DW. The researchers also emphasised that more research needs to be done to rule out other factors, including puberty, which could impact both mobile phone use and cognition.
https://www.dw.com/en/is-your-mobile-phone-damaging-your-brain/a-45020000As for other smartphone uses sending text messages, taking photos, using apps these involved "almost no [radiation] exposure to the brain." https://www.dw.com/en/is-your-mobile-phone-damaging-your-brain/a-45020000
Hope this helps.
Helps? My gosh, you just about wrote the book for me.
Thank you very much. These studies are invaluable. Can I ask what your background is? I mean, you have already on your own researched this a ton.