No, smartphones are not 'rotting your brain'
The supposed 'proof' that phones are damaging the brains of young people is actually a simple misunderstanding of the science.
If you’re reading this on a smartphone, you should be ashamed of yourself!
Because smartphones are bad for you, you see. They’re especially bad for children. And by using a smartphone so often, you’re not only doing yourself some serious harm, but also indirectly endangering children by setting a bad example!
Why not just inject neat vodka into your veins while driving driving a bus? A bus full of orphans. Orphans on their way to the Centre-for-curing-orphans-with-terminal-diseases-but-only-if-they-have-just-30-minutes-left-to-live. You selfish, reckless monster!
…just so we’re all clear, the previous paragraphs are ever-so-slightly hyperbolic. But even so, they’re not a million miles away from the tone of much of the current coverage around the subject of smartphones, social media, and how they impact children and young people.
We’ve had Australia banning social media for the under 16s, with calls for the same here in the UK.
We’ve had it discussed live on BBC One, with “concerned parent” campaigners butting heads with balding Welsh neuroscientists.
We’ve had the Channel 4 documentary ‘Swiped’1 about a school smartphone ban, hosted by a Emma Willis and her husband Matt, formerly of the band ‘Busted’.
The latter then inspired a Simon Jenkins article, about how the show reveals that the harm being done to children by smartphones is “undeniable”, and a ban is needed. Although far be it from me to suggest that actual laws and regulations shouldn’t be determined by Guardian columns, written by 81-year-old non-scientists (with a history of being laughably wrong about things), based on a sensationalised agenda-driven Channel 4 programme, hosted by a guy who once sang “Not much has changed, but we live underwater”2.
This is just the recent stuff. The further back you go, the more anti-phone coverage there is. And no doubt there’s much more in the pipeline.
The whys and hows and rationales and motivations for all this can (and will) be covered here eventually (I did just write a whole book about this subject, which you should definitely get), but in this post, I’m flagging something that seems to be driving a lot of the anti-phone discourse, but which doesn’t actually mean what those who enthusiastically cite it think it does.
The most recent and stark example of this is Sian Boyle’s Guardian article “Is doom scrolling really rotting our brains? The evidence is getting harder to ignore”, which did the rounds online not too long ago, as such pieces do with depressing regularity.
Among many observations and takes (most of which are questionable if you actually look into them, which I did), the ‘smoking gun’ for the claim that smartphones are legitimately harmful for the brain, is several neuroscientific studies which report that individuals with high levels of phone/internet use show “reduced grey matter”.3
Now, you’d be forgiven for thinking this is fairly conclusive. Actual scientific studies reveal that using your phone too much causes your brain to lose grey matter, the substance of the brain that does all the actual thinking? What else is there to say? Phones are undeniably damaging brains!
This would be a reasonable conclusion if the studies did indeed say that. But… they don’t.
Because it seems that many of those ‘raising the alarm’ around smartphones see the term reduced in studies like this, and understand it to mean “We scanned people and found that they’d lost important grey matter from their brains since they started using their smartphones too much”.
But this is wrong. What’s actually being said is “People who use their phones excessively have a reduced amount of grey matter in certain parts of their brain when compared to the typical brain, and/or the brains of those who doesn’t use their smartphone to excess”.
Some might argue that this is a pointless distinction, just splitting hairs, but it really isn’t. Because “people’s brains got smaller over time as they used a smartphone” strongly suggests that smartphones are causing this brain matter loss. But “people who use their phones too much have less grey matter in certain regions than those who don’t” means it’s much harder to be sure about the cause of this difference.
As the old maxim goes, correlation does not mean causation, i.e. just because some people who use their smartphones have less grey matter in key brain regions, it doesn’t automatically mean that these people have less grey matter in key brain regions because they use their phones too much.
It could just as easily be the other way around: they use their phone too much4 because they lack grey matter in certain brain regions.
I’d argue that the latter is in fact far more likely to be true, when you consider that reduced grey matter in brain regions responsible for things like focus and self-regulation (i.e. those ‘reduced’ in these studies) is a typical biological trait of ADHD, and ADHD is strongly linked to increased use of screens/phones.
And if you’re actively recruiting people for your study who use phones/screens more than the average person, you’re more likely to end up with people with some manifestation of ADHD (because it’s a lot more common than you think). It’s like if your recruiting people for a study into basketball skills, the average height of your subjects will likely be somewhat greater than the usual population, even though that’s not what you’re looking for.
So, rather than “Using a smartphone too much causes your brain to shrink!”, an alternative (and, I’d argue, more reasonable) interpretation of the research cited is “People with indicators of undiagnosed ADHD tend to use their smartphones more than the average person”. Which, you know… yeah? Makes sense.
Because when you think about it, a study which actively said “Using your phone too much makes your brain shrink!” would have to have scanned people’s brains before and after they started using their phone too much. Which would mean they would need to make people use their phone to an excessive (and, according to the hypothesis, dangerous) extent. And that’s a tricky sell, ethics wise.
Although I say that, a deeper dive in to the cited literature reveals a link to at least one study which did do this, after a fashion, by studying and scanning the brains of people with ‘internet gaming disorder’. But they also studied people who didn’t have internet gaming disorder, but made them mimic the behaviours of those who do. For six weeks.
The eventual result was that those who were made to behave like they had a gaming addiction, at the end of the study, showed signs of a reduction in the size of the left orbitofrontal cortex, a brain region heavily implicated in self-regulation, impulse control, and so on.
That’s not nothing, sure. Certainly a point to consider. But then, one could argue it’s ultimately saying “Brain region responsible for a function gets smaller if you stop it from doing that function”, which is how the brain tends to work anyway?
It also throws up another issue, which is that so much different stuff tends to get lumped together under the ‘phones are bad’ umbrella. As in, this study looked at Internet Gaming Addiction. Is that the same as scrolling Instagram a bit too often? I’d argue very much not, it’s clearly a different neurological experience. But if it happens via a screen, apparently it’s all the same to a lot of people. This generalisation muddies the waters further.
Here’s the thing, though. I may question or doubt the logic, intentions, or rationale of certain people who go all out to convince others that smartphones are inherently dangerous. I’ll also be the first to admit that it’s easy to be snarky or glib about people not grasping a subject that you happen to be proficient in.
But even taking all that into account, if someone reads a study, sees the phrase “reduced grey matter”, and thinks ‘this means whatever’s being studied shrunk the brain’, that would be very reasonable conclusion. That’s a valid interpretation of that sentence, in and of itself. It just doesn’t mean that in the wider scientific context, which is often harder to grasp for the lay person.
Indeed, if I hadn’t spent 24 years and counting reading neuroscience literature, I’d no doubt have read it that way myself. I don’t doubt that I’ve read material from other disciplines many times and come away with the wrong idea of what it actually means.
I like to think, though, that I wouldn’t be so confident in my interpretation of expert-level data from a field I have no experience in, that I’d base a whole article around it for a major media site. But that’s just me, I suppose.
This is why it would be so handy to have actual relevant scientists on hand behind the scenes, to run things by them, and spot misleading errors like this.
That’s assuming you’re actually concerned about misleading people, though. That doesn’t seem to be so much of a concern, lately. Although, that’s just my interpretation.
I cover this whole area in my latest kids book (which is actually suitable for everyone) Why Your Parents Are Hung-Up on Your Phone and What To Do About It
This isn’t really the most salient issue, but wouldn’t the most obvious link between ‘Smartphones’ and ‘swiping’ be… Tinder? Is it the best idea to label a show about schoolchildren with a term that readily invokes online dating and hook-up culture?
To clarify, “Young people incorporating smartphones into their daily lives in an increasingly digital world” = a significant problem that must be dealt with and reversed, “The transfer of human society to a subaquatic environment” = nothing to report. Makes sense.
Although credit must be given to Sian Boyle for actually finding and citing genuine scientific studies for her article. The one citation I could find in Simon Jenkins article for the claim that children who use phones too much have ‘deteriorating grey matter’ was a local news article about the documentary Swiped. Which stated what researchers were going to do. And none of it involved brain scanning, which you’d pretty much have to do to spot ‘deteriorating grey matter’. Some may consider a news report of research that hasn’t happened, and won’t do what you say it will when it does, to be sufficient evidence for a conclusion. I, personally, do not.
I keep saying ‘using their phone too much’, but that in itself is a largely subjective assessment. There’s no hard and fast rule about where the line is between ‘safe’ and ‘unsafe’ phone/screen use.