How high-tech phones make us dim, by brain scientist

EXCESSIVE use of smartphones risks making people dimmer, a top neuroscientist has warned.

Susan Greenfield said growing use of technology is reducing the need for today’s generation to work out problems and accumulate knowledge.

The research fellow at Lincoln College, Oxford University, said remembering names and dates is no longer vital as they are there at the click of a button.

However, brains have a ‘use it or lose it policy’ so the ability to store facts ‘risks being diminished’ through lack of practice.

Baroness Greenfield yesterday addressed the House of Lords about the case for improved digital understanding at all levels of UK society.

She said that time spent in a screen-based world displaced time spent ‘learning, playing and socialising in the real world’.

Baroness Greenfield attacked the growing trend to outsource thinking to smartphones. She believes the relatively innocuous shift to technological dependence for information could have profound effects on how we routinely make sense of complex arguments.