If We'Re Using Smartphones, Who'S Using Our Brain?

My smartphone is by far my most touched object throughout the day for sure and it's as close to me as my fingers, if I can put it that way. I wouldn't go back to a Nokia 3310 and leave my current phone on a shelf because I like this piece of tech too much and I know that in some ways it makes my life simpler and easier, but is it always helping me?

I remember when I was to a book store in January to "buy myself some stories" that I was welcomed by an old lady at the small library and after I chose myself what I was going to read for a while I headed with the books to pay for them and the lady took out a piece of paper and a pen and manually calculated how much I have to pay.

It was a sight that I haven't seen for a while. And I am not referring only to the act of writing using a pen and a piece of paper. But adding and subtracting on that piece of paper was like traveling through time. I rarely use pens and paper and no matter how many numbers I have to play with I almost always use my smartphone's calculator app. I'm sure about it's result and it is always at hand as I mentioned above.

image source

I do realize something though from this story. The lady having well above sixty years old had probably a more active brain than myself. We might be as generations smarter than the ones before but lots of the things that we do nowadays are somehow taken care by microchips and we might have become a bit addicted of such daily comfort. Thus we don't "work the brain" too much in the productive way.

I am not saying that we've become vegetables scrolling on a smartphone screen but leaving too much work in the hands of computers where do our brain's resources go? In my case I have to say that very often flew to useless worries, anger, wild imagination, scrolling through social media and interpreting the content and so on. Tech has made anything easier and at hand for us but in some cases it took the fun of doing things also and some of our brain's tasks.

Nowadays google maps takes us everywhere, Facebook and Instagram shows us the perfect lives we will never have and recommends what we should buy next, Netflix tells us the history and TV News tell us "the truth" about what happens in the world. However all this tech has ON and OFF buttons and they're there for a reason. We live great times on this planet but at the same time we waste too much...

Thanks for attention and have a great day!
Adrian