手机真的会榨干人类大脑吗？(上)

This is Scientific American’s 60-Second Science. I’m Shayla Love.

这里是科学美国人——60秒科学系列，我是谢拉·洛夫。

Tell me if this sounds familiar.

告诉我这样的场景是否听起来很熟悉。

You’re trying to get some work done, and you find yourself continually picking up your cell phone .

你正试图完成一些工作，却发现自己一次又一次地拿起手机。

In frustration, you might slam the phone down beside you and swear to leave it alone—theoretically allowing you to focus on what you’re doing.

懊悔自己受到手机干扰，你可能会把手机摔到一旁，发誓不再碰它，理论上，这能让你专注于你正在做的事情。

Right now my phone is sitting next to me untouched.

现在我的手机就在旁边，我一直没碰它。

But have I really protected myself from its distractions or its ability to impact my mind?

但我真的没有受到它的干扰吗？我真的挣脱了它对我思想的影响了吗？

The answer is no, according to a well-known study in the Journal of the Association for Consumer Research from 2017 entitled “Brain Drain: The Mere Presence of One’s Own Smartphone Reduces Available Cognitive Capacity.”

根据《消费者研究协会杂志》于 2017年发表的一项著名研究，答案是否定的。这项研究的标题为“认知流失: 仅仅是智能手机的存在就会降低可用的认知能力”。

Cognitive and social psychologist Adrian Ward and his colleagues proposed the “brain drain hypothesis” by showing that just having a phone next to you could impact cognition—specifically, working memory, or the mental system that helps us hold information about what we’re currently doing at a given moment.

认知和社会心理学家阿德里安·沃德和他的同事提出了“认知流失假说”，他们认为，只要把手机放在身边，就会影响认知能力，特别是对工作记忆的影响，工作记忆指的是帮助我们在特定时刻掌握当前所做之事相关信息的认知系统。

The way we measure it is by having people remember words and solve math problems at the same time.

我们对此的衡量方法是让人们在记单词的同时解决数学问题。

And the idea there is that those are two very different cognitive skills, word memory and math problems, but they’re tapping into that same general cognitive resource.

之所以这么设计的原因是，单词记忆和数学问题包含两种完全不同的认知技能，但它们正在利用相同的综合认知资源。

In those experiments, people either had their phones on a desk, in their pockets or bags, or in the next room.

实验中，人们要么把手机放在桌子上，要么放在口袋或包里，要么放在隔壁房间里。

The farther away a person’s phone was, the better they did on those tasks.

一个人离手机越远，这些任务就完成得越好。

Even when you’re not consciously thinking about your phone, the process of not thinking about your phone requires some cognitive resources.

即使你没有刻意想着你的手机，不去想手机也会消耗一些认知资源。

This was an intriguing, though slightly concerning, finding that triggered more studies on how the presence of our smartphones might be influencing how well we’re able to think.

尽管有点令人担忧，但这是一个有趣的发现，它引发了更多关于智能手机的存在如何影响我们思考能力的研究。

But in a new meta-analysis that looked at data from 27 different brain drain studies, the story of the brain drain hypothesis has gotten a little more complicated.

一项新的元分析中，研究人员对27项不同认知流失数据进行了分析，发现认知流失假说的故事变得有点复杂。

If it’s just sitting next to you while you’re working, is that a problem or not?

如果它只是在你工作时放在你的旁边，这会是个问题吗?

And I think that’s quite an important question to answer, to know more about.

我认为这是一个很重要的问题，需要回答，需要了解更多。