Andrew Huberman· PhD
Having your phone on your desk or in your pocket undercuts cognitive performance - even if you don't use it.
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The evidence is convergent. Multiple independent sources reach the same conclusion, the underlying mechanism is well-characterized, and even the field's most cautious voices treat it as worth doing.
Having your phone on your desk or in your pocket undercuts cognitive performance - even if you don't use it.
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just having your phone in the room where you are trying to learn something significantly diminishes your performance on things like mathematics and the learning of other topics
if the phone is completely outside of the room improvements in working memory are statistically significant in other words get the phone completely out of the room it's not sufficient to have it next to you turn face down or even in your backpack behind you it needs to be in a completely separate environment in order to maximize this effect
it suggests that some component of our neural circuitry is operating in the background thinking well I guess something could be on there maybe I got a text or maybe there's a tweet I should look at or an Instagram post
So there's-- I'm hitting with a lot of data here, but it's well known now that if you give students a test and their phone is in their bag in the room, they perform less well than if their phone is in their bag in another room. This is true for adults, too.
It's one of the reasons I love this podcast more and more with every passing
And cognitive ability, there's this really I don't know if you've seen the study, it's pretty cool. They uh they looked at cognitive performance in people that had the phone upside down on the table in their backpack beneath their chair or in a different room. And only by having it in a different room, um do you see the normal level of cognitive focus, not even an improvement.
You know, they put their phone on the table and there are data showing that even if you have all your notifications turned off, the simple presence of the device is enough to uh impair the interaction in some way to have an discernable impact.
There is clear scientific evidence that even having your phone in your pocket or on your desk reduces your cognitive capacity.