How long could you go without texting? A day? A week? In an experiment performed by researcher Sergey Golitsynskiy and his colleagues, students who were asked to go without their cell phones for 24 hours reported the experience as one of the "most horrible experience many of them had ever in their life." So terrible, in fact, that 70 percent of them dropped out of the experiment.
"They felt a tremendous amount of boredom. They were bored without it," explained Golitsynskly in a CBS News article. "They felt emotionally detached from the rest of the world."
Estimates suggest that the average 18 to 24 year old sends and receives around 3,200 text messages a month.
This worries some psychologists and researchers, who fear that we are being driven to distraction by technology and losing our ability to converse with the people around us.
"It begins to crowd out all the quieter, calmer moments, when you might engage in reflection or introspection or contemplation," suggests technology and culture writer Nicholas Carr.
Obviously, not everyone thinks all this technology is a bad thing. According to Gary Small, a neuroscientist from UCLA, using technology can have a positive cognitive influence in some cases.
"We took a group of older people, and many of these people had never searched online before. And we just had them search online for an hour a day for a week. And we saw significant increases in brain activity, especially in the frontal lobe - the thinking brain," he explains.
So what do you think? Is our so-called "addiction to technology" influencing how we relate to other people in our immediate environment?
Read more: Texting: Can We Pull the Plug on Our Obsession?
Image by Florin Ungureanu
Comments