[mallowdram]

Anyone who understands the development of intelligence and creativity is directly linked to the allocortex's ability to navigate freely, use vicarious trial and error, to invent novel short-cuts, built from both egocentric (landmark memories) and allocentric (extra body mapping) up until around the age of 16 in order to develop the basics of memory consolidation can take anecdotal evidence of kids that can't take a walk without a cellphone's help and extrapolate that these kids lack critical thinking skills.

It's elementary deduction from basic learning practices we've known since O'Keefe in 1973.

[bccdee]

Given that the current generation of kids missed out on several crucial years of socializing due to Covid and were forced to find community online, I'm skeptical of arguments that point to poorly-socialized kids and say, "it must be the phones." Even if this was based on real data and not a hodgepodge of anecdotes, the phones themselves would not be my #1 suspect.

> allocortex's ability to navigate freely

If your allocortex is navigating freely, something has gone badly wrong. Put it back under the neocortex where it belongs and seek immediate help from a neurologist.

[mallowdram]

Sorry, that's a narrative argument, lack of covid socializing, the sciences tell us otherwise. Phones correlate to cog decline.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-023-36256-4

[bccdee]

> Phones correlate to cog decline.

Do they? Let's check your source.

> To investigate this hypothesis, participants aged 20–34 perform a concentration and attention test in the presence and absence of a smartphone. The results of the conducted experiment imply that the mere presence of a smartphone results in lower cognitive performance, which supports the hypothesis of the smartphone presence using limited cognitive resources.

So, no. The presence of your smartphone on the desk in front of you is distracting, but that distraction goes away if you remove the smartphone. That's not "cognitive decline."

> Sorry, that's a narrative argument

No, that's me pointing out a competing plausible hypothesis. I'm not saying Covid is necessarily responsible for your anecdotal incidents; I'm saying that until you can prove Covid wasn't responsible, you have no standing to state conclusively that phones were.

[mallowdram]

We're in an attentional crises that isn't because kids didn't go to school for two years.

It's destroying their ability to experience reality as paths, free navigation, vicarious trial and error, all of this is fundamental to memory consolidation: the brain's fundamental unit: action-syntax in memory, is built from non-screen topological integrations of landmark and allocentric experiences. Phones destroy this.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6059409/

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-20922-0

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/brb3.70656

https://www.mdpi.com/2254-9625/15/6/98

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40255102/

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00246-025-03862-0

https://www.mdpi.com/2227-9067/12/4/503

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40172268/

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40173157/

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41390-025-04024-x

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00223...

“A growing body of evidence has found that children’s brains can structurally and functionally change due to prolonged media multitasking, such as diminished gray matter in the prefrontal cortex, where attentional control and complex decision making abilities reside, among other really important skills, like the development of empathy and understanding nonverbal social communication,”

[bccdee]

Your first study says smartphone use is associated with conduct problems and hyperactivity in 6-year-olds; no teens or stupidity in sight.

Other studies discuss distraction, cyberbullying, bad diet/poor exercise, toddlers' sensory processing abilities, anxiety, and lost sleep. None of this covers stupidity, and much of it is not about teens.

The most interesting study you cited finds structural brain differences in preschool-aged children who spent more time on screens. It's still a stretch to make claims about the intelligence of teenagers based on the fact that babies who spend too much time on screens are, at age 3, less developed.

There's also a magnitude problem. Even if we assume smartphones do have some cognitive effect on teens, how can we know it's the only or largest one? You can't attribute anecdotes about kids being dumb to the presence of smartphones.

[mallowdram]

The loss of attention, the erosion of reading and math skills as of 2025 are quantified, not anecdotal.

You keep ignoring: the basic science of creativity, imagination, learning all stem from free navigation and vicarious, trail and error path integration. It is deductive that devices that impair this impair learning. Learning is based on free exploration of space. Mammalian intelligence is way-finding that stitches together landmark and non-landmark space.

The idea you can't see a relationship between pre-school, three year-old impairment, short-form cyberbullying (in teens) and teen loss of learning, retention, attention-span, creativity, suggests you are the subject group. If you can't reason correlationally, than science is beyond your grasp. Your statements are only narrative and narrow, you pretend to grasp ideas and information, then make arbitrary statements.

That was the tip of the iceberg, that list.

Phones damage children's lives in multi-dinemsisons of emotional, memory, learning capability. You may be the study group's ideal subject. Face that possibility.