[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.

[bccdee]

Education has been under the axe for years. Declining test scores are more likely to be the product of No Child Left Behind than the iPhone.

> You keep ignoring: the basic science of creativity

"Basic science" is something of an oxymoron here. Measuring creativity is anything but basic. You're appealing to intuition—an intuition I share to some extent, but not one that we can call scientific

> The idea you can't see a relationship between three year-old impairment and teen loss of learning

I can see how there might be a relationship. There also might not be: Some kids are late bloomers, and the children in this study hadn't even gone to preschool yet.

Where's the meta-analysis finding a causal link between smartphone use and impaired cognition in teens? If you want to talk about science, you can't extrapolate things like this based on how you figure they're probably working. Science is empirical.

> Your statements are only narrative and narrow, you pretend to grasp ideas and information

You're getting awfully aggressive¹ about this. Have you considered putting your phone down?

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

[mallowdram]

Science isn't simply empirical. There are five other stages to theoretic knowledge and your reasoning suggests you don't know how to discuss ideas scientifically. You exclude statements to make claims. I said, attention erosion AND test score decline. You chose to make a narrative claim using No Child Left Behind, and picking one of the conditions. Yes there is a basic science of creativity (there is also a complex), we have indexes of creative erosion in the mid-20s.

When you can revisit these ideas with a scientific manner, then I can respond. Until then you are just spinning narratives.

[bccdee]

> When you can revisit these ideas with a scientific manner, then I can respond.

Ironic that you would level a criticism like this while touting "non-empirical science," whatever that is.

> You chose to make a narrative claim using No Child Left Behind

Do me the courtesy of paraphrasing my claims accurately. I said the drop in test scores you're attributing to phones could more plausibly be caused by NCLB, which is a carefully couched statement that doesn't actually draw any concrete conclusions.

I'm gesturing broadly at the absence of conclusive evidence, and you're telling me you don't need conclusive evidence to make definitive statements. I'm hardly the one spinning narratives here.