People that use smartphones may have less active brains, according to new research. Smartphone addiction has been found to impair various cognitive abilities. Researchers are now investigating the consequences of smartphone addiction on creativity and reduced brain activity.
When test subjects were asked to complete tasks that required creative thinking, researchers discovered that people with smartphone addiction (SAT) had less activity in their prefrontal cortexes and temporal regions of their brains compared to people with more healthy relationships with their phones.
Researchers say their findings “provide unprecedented neuroimaging evidence on the negative impact of smartphone addiction on creative cognition.” The research has been published in Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience.
Previous research has uncovered the negative influence of smartphone addiction on cognitive functions, such as attention, perception, and memory. Other research has even found gray matter reduction in the brains of subjects with SAT. Now with new neuroimaging evidence, impaired creative capacity and reduced brain activity can be added to that list.
Researchers describe creative cognition, or creative thinking as an “element that allows for daily flexible problem solving and the generation of new ideas. The main components of creative cognition are (i) overcoming the semantic constraints of existing knowledge, which involves goal-directed behaviour through cognitive control, and (ii) building unusual associations to expand the existing structure of knowledge, which involves the spontaneous and unconstrained generation of novel associations.”
Researchers found impaired abilities for creative cognition in people that had unhealthy phone addictions. Additionally, those with SAT scored worse on fluency, flexibility and originality. The imaging data revealed that those with phone addictions had less active brains in the prefrontal cortex and temporal areas. The prefrontal cortex is the brain’s center for decision making, planning, personality expression, and is the region of the brain most responsible for moderating social behavior. While the temporal lobe functions to process auditory information, visual perception and to encode memories. The temporal lobe is also believed to play an important role in processing emotions and language.
The researchers found deleterious effects on individuals’ advanced cognitive abilities all from the influence of phone addiction. The study concluded, “by manipulating the semantic constraints, we found that the smartphone addiction individuals exhibited reduced cortical activations and functional connectivities in the prefrontal cortex and temporal cortex, making it difficult to overcome semantic constraints and establish original associations during creative idea generation.” The researchers feel their study provides important additional evidence to our knowledge of how smartphone addiction negatively impacts cognition.