When I think about the first few hours of my day, I picture myself getting up, making breakfast, picking out my outfit, and tidying my apartment. What I don’t often recall are the 30 or so minutes I spend doomscrolling on Instagram or playing video games as soon as I wake up. To be honest, that time barely registers as having existed at all.
In all likelihood, you have similar experiences in your day-to-day life.
This experience raises an interesting question: do we truly remember the time we spend on our phones, or does it merely create “cracks” in our real-world timeline? And what happens to the moments around our phone usage?
One issue with our reliance on devices is how they easily pull our attention away from other tasks. Over time, this constant switching makes it harder to maintain focus. As science writer Catherine Price points out, “If you’re not paying attention [to your everyday life], you’re literally not going to have a memory of it to remember” (). Price also hypothesizes that this task division takes up our brains’ time, preventing us from banking everyday moments in our long-term memory.
In other words, if you spend a minute checking your feed mid-lecture, it does not just cause you to miss that moment: you might also forget what came before it.
Frequent phone use also changes how we experience boredom. When we are so used to the fast-paced digital environment, going screenless. That’s why even twenty minutes of focused work feels so hard after Reading Week: your mind thinks it has been way longer. This perceived slowness is why we then reach for our phones, which feel far more interesting than our high-volume, low-reward textbooks.
Another interesting phenomenon is the shift of mental load from us to our devices. Remember how we used to easily recall each of our friends’ phone numbers, birthdays, and addresses? Nowadays, that sounds nearly impossible. Instead, our devices act as a “second brain” to store these one-off pieces of information. Asking Siri or Alexa for answers, while convenient, has reduced the need for active recall on a day-to-day basis. And, as with all information stored in our brains,. Without these mentally exercising moments, we lose access to this knowledge.
While all of this sounds scary (and researching this was a little overwhelming), it is not all over yet. ɬians are lucky to be in a truly rigorous academic setting; the memory, attention, and problem-solving skills involved in learning, research, and teaching as TAs and faculty provide us with abundant mental stimulation, helping keep our brains engaged.
Our smartphones are also not inherently bad; going tech-free is not as simple (or desirable) as one may think. Phones allow us to make connections around the world, navigate life more easily, and offload tasks so we can focus on what matters to us. Smart devices represent a massive step in human innovation, and the issue lies in their ability to affect our attentiveness and memory, rather than simply in their existence.
At the same time, it is important for us to set aside our phones from time to time and take on life “solo-brained”. As of ɬ’s Forgetting & Memory Lab notes, “hard things are good for you” (), and struggling with things like navigation, multi-step activities (like baking and crocheting), and other demanding tasks is great for our mental capabilities. When so much of our time is tied to screens, choosing to engage with the slow, difficult, and often boring moments may help our days feel ever-so-slightly more real.
Lia Erisson is a second year (U2) Computer Science & Economics student minoring in Physiology. She loves exploring the intersection of technology, wellbeing, and the human experience.
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