Look here! Look here!

 While taking time to read this blog post I challenge you to this, you can’t look at your phone once and yes checking the time is cheating. Ready, set, GO! Our phone have personalities of their own these days it seems, like tiny humans resting in our pockets always shaking our legs and yelling at us for attention similar to a toddler. We have become accustomed to this constant attention and even feed into it; the more we check our phone there is an increase of pressure to check it more. How is this effecting our brains and learning today?

                We are all victims of our phones daily,  they chime and we go to them like servants at every notification, even the ones from apps we don’t use anymore. You have often heard people feel "naked" without them. Our brains  have associated a bell or vibration with a positive feeling of want. Our apps need our attention or our friends are texting us requiring a reply. I will admit, even writing this paper I have already checked my phone five times. We are all well aware of the distraction it causes and the procrastination it creates, but will that stop us from still bending to our phones every will, absolutely not. Like the experiment of Pavlov’s dog and classical conditioning, Pavlov would feed the dogs then record the amount of salivation the dogs produced, but throughout his experiment he noticed that the dogs began to salivate whenever something happened that they associated with food for example, the footsteps of the assistant. So, Pavlov took a tuning fork, something the dogs didn’t associate with food and then began to use it during food placement. After a while, the dogs associated the tuning fork with a positive feeling, food, which then triggered the reaction of salivation. How does this apply to our phones though? Believe it or not we preformed this experiment on ourselves. Our endorphin levels rise whenever we check our phone because we assume that whatever we are checking will have a positive outcome, like our game lives refilled or the shirt we wanted went on sale. We then associated notifications with these positive feelings, so over time we trained our brains to associate notification sounds and vibrations with this rise of endorphins which leads to check our phones even more. See the connection? We are like dogs, impatiently waiting for our next meal even though we might as well be fat with our screen time. For example, Instagram has a great way of keeping us coming back for more with the "_______ started a live video" or "______ posted for the first time" which trick us into thinking that these posts are somehow more important than any others ones. They suck us back in to going on the app and then once we are there the scrolling race continues. Our apps have excellent ways into tricking us into  being their slaves for all eternity. 

                As our brains become more trained this affects our learning and our learning capacity. We have as a society become dependents of distraction. People thrive off of the reward system. As children, we are often bribed by our parents and teachers with more material items like toys and stickers, but this continues into our adult lives. We become rewarded less often, for example with our grades. In college, we are only given our grades every three weeks, but if we see we have a good grade on like a daily assignment we are motivated to continue to do well whereas, if we get a bad grade, we are trained to give up. Another example is paychecks, most of the time paychecks are given out bi-weekly to motivate employees to continue working and I know personally I would work harder knowing I would get a paycheck at the end of the week instead of the year.   We have become so used to immediate satisfaction, we are more prone to give up in frustration when we can't figure out a problem right away.  We go to our phones for everything, because we literally have a computer in our pocket. Math teachers would always tell us about how we would never have a calculator at all time which is why we had to learn the long way of doing calculations, jokes on them. With the internet available to us at all times, we don’t have to retain as much information as before. If you wanted to search the most recent world population count right now, you could with a few clicks. An example of this is phone numbers and recipes. Families used to keep recipe books and contact books lying around the house, but now they are near non-existent. With the invention of the smart phone, our phone numbers are saved at all times. Heck, for the longest time I probably couldn’t recite my own phone number without looking for it on my phone. For another example, birthdays can be hard to remember, but with platforms like Facebook to remind us there is no point in storing that information in our brains any more. Why would I bother trying to remember my obscure second cousin's twice removed birthday if Facebook can give me a reminder the day of?  This also goes for students, we feel less obligated to remember information because we have it at the touch of a finger which affects our school work and motivation. I’m sure by having this information readily available has driven more students to academic dishonesty. Our learning capacity has decreased and with advancing innovation our society only become less intelligent as our phones do all the work for us.

                I bet you forget the challenge from the beginning of this paper. So how did you do? Did you check your phone? I can bet most of you did because of the pressure to check it every 10 minutes or so, but for those of you who did, congratulations! You successfully fought against your instincts to learn a little bit about how your phone is your overlord. Hopefully, this post persuaded you that  to increase your learning capacity and give your brain a rest you may consider less screen time.