With everything from refrigerators to yoga mats getting “smart” these days — and. of course. our reliance on smartphones — there has been concern that we’ve become too reliant on tech.
But researchers from the Universities of Cincinnati and Toronto say they’ve found that smart devices don’t make us dumb, after all.
In fact, the opposite may be true, explains University of Cincinnati’s Anthony Chemero, Ph.D., addressing findings that were recently published in the journal Nature Human Behavior.
The researchers found there’s just “no clear evidence for detrimental lasting effects of digital technology on cognitive abilities.”
Chemero notes, “What smartphones and digital technology seem to do instead is to change the ways in which we engage our biological cognitive abilities. These changes are actually cognitively beneficial.”
The researchers say that tasking your smart devices to make calculations, keep track of phone numbers, directions, schedules and other things we used to do ourselves actually conserves our mental horsepower for more complex tasks.
“You put all that together with a naked human brain and you get something that’s smarter, and the result is that we, supplemented by our technology, are actually capable of accomplishing much more complex tasks than we could with our un-supplemented biological abilities.”
So make a note of it. In your Notes app.