Smartphone addiction is making us dumber

SMARTPHONE owners — stop! Do you ever find yourself doing a U-turn and driving back home because you left your device on the kitchen table?

Have you ever experienced a range of emotions from mild dismay to fully adrenalised panic surges when you are away from home and your screen flashes up the ‘low battery’ sign?

When in a situation where the use of smartphones is socially unacceptable — theatres, funerals, during sex — do you find yourself sneakily checking your phone inside your handbag / under your coat / over your lover’s shoulder?

And if you ever end up somewhere entirely out of signal range — perhaps at a festival, or down a mine — do you have to breathe into a paper bag until your heart beat regulates itself? You may be suffering from nomophobia. It’s the social disease de nos jours, and is particularly prevalent amongst the younger demographic, but not exclusively so. Help is available, but like all socially-transmitted conditions, in order to address it, you first have to realise that you have it. Unlike these numpties below. Sorry, case studies.

Like the man on a London train who was recently arrested for “abstracting” electricity when he refused to unplug his smartphone from an onboard socket. Or the 19-year-old who climbed on stage in a New York theatre, in attempt to charge his smartphone from a socket which was not real, but a stage prop. Or most epically, the woman on a Hong Kong train who appeared to have an actual nervous breakdown on realising her phone was temporarily dead. Be warned. This makes for disturbing viewing — especially if you are sensitive to screamy outbursts of super-entitlement: http://exa.mn/ywm

As the above case studies show, nomophobia is not just a bunch of narcissistic idiots behaving badly in public spaces, but an actual thing.

It must be, because there has been research done on it — first from the University of Missouri, which showed that being separated from your smartphone can cause psychological damage, including impaired thinking.

You know, like climbing on a Broadway stage to try and stick your phone into a theatrical prop because you only have 5% charge left and “girls have been calling all day”.

Further — ahem — research from the University of Iowa identifies four aspects of nomophobia: being unable to communicate, being unconnected, being unable to access information, and being inconvenienced.

This research generated an ‘Are You A Nomophobe?’ questionnaire comprising 20 statements — such as, “If I were to run out of credits, I would panic”, and “If I didn’t have my smartphone with me, I would feel weird because I would not know what to do”.

This was tested on several hundred students, offering diagnoses of mild to severe nomophobia.

Obviously, this does not apply to anyone still smart enough to have a dumbphone — those phones whose function includes talking to other people and then hanging up and getting on with your day. I’ll end with a big shout out to anyone who still knows what ‘hanging up’ means.