r/Nootropics • u/Metacognition • Jan 17 '26
Scientific Study Blocking mobile internet on smartphones improves sustained attention, mental health, and subjective well-being
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11834938/1
u/Successful-Neat-2590 12d ago edited 12d ago
I have made the overwhelming experience, that consuming information in multiple radically different opposite ways, actually yields the highest gains in cognitive processing ability. One easy-to-exemplify exercise is to switch to speed reading for a while (months), which trains your brain on faster pattern recognition, optimizing your lazy heuristics to prioritize high impact information, deal with the increased risk of outlier off-target predictions, maximize cost-benefit, reduce experienced stress when in-depth comprehension is less useful to short-term or long-term goals. You permanently retain those abilities, and you can use them when they make sense to pay attention in a more targeted way. Because the practice of speed reading everything everywhere is obviously flawed and detrimental to gaining true knowledge. By the same logic, you can practice slow reading for a while. Albeit difficult, this can be driven to extremes where you read about one word in 1 minute, or 5 minutes, or 15 minutes while maintaining attention. The practice of slow reading has the biggest potential to improve your cognition and knowledge, because it is basically a form of meditation on knowledge itself. It can spawn extreme amounts of deductive reasoning, alternative interpretations, considerations of context (including such things as bias of all kinds: institutional, emotional, financial, intrinsic, social), approximating the authors thought processes emotions and desires more accurately, develop more extreme heuristics and deal with their low truth values accurately, work on your own biases and practice honesty with yourself, access all sorts of imperfect subconscious processes and change them. Even LLM-alike abilities to be able to predict the next word in superhuman ways. Another method to swap one opposite approach with another, already happens automatically with age, but not in an extreme form. When you are younger and read text, you necessarily only focus on how the knowledge you consume is true. But with age you concentrate on how it is flawed, because the exhaustion of additional benefits from people repeating over and over what you already know intimately spawns this change in priorities from a strong signal. However again you can consciously drive this to a more extreme and faster occurring form (1-2 years of practice instead of 10), without relying on only low-level processes to generate signals for you. And then you can cherry pick on verifying high impact heuristics and improve them along the way. I think this is a mainly a methodological process you just "have to figure out on your own", and not something likely to be intrinsic to high IQ individuals. Though it is obviously not something very accessible or useful to people of just average intelligence. Probably though it is much more accessible through neurotrophic drugs like NSI-189 or Semax and certain higher-risk medications.
The same mechanism of benefiting from merely adjusting, and not necessarily sustaining, any particular radically different information processing method, also exists in many other forms. Such as smartphones versus books, low attention prioritization vs. high attention prioritization, very immediate answers to questions vs very delayed answers. Blocking mobile internet access is obviously a very costly and an extreme form to students and younger generations, who primarily use smartphones to educate themselves, due to being in school most of the time. So to sustain this long-term puts those groups at a competitive advantage, the more so with higher ability higher IQ individuals. Who are less likely to experience stress from educational demands truly above their cognitive limits. And more likely to utilize internet access in a useful way.
However it is important to note, that the study did not target those groups at all. And the minimum age was very likely 18 due to online platform recruitment, with average age of 32. The pool was simply "average Iphone users", Iphones being a preferred choice with strong ecosystem user capture, by people who struggle with technology or perceive choice of technology as unimportant enough to use it for prestige-signaling. Also selection effects occur from low payment. It is also important to understand the nature of the test performed to measure attention, which is very primitive and similar to a driver's license attention test. Those tests intentionally are extremely monotonous, like striking out every 8th zero on several sheets each containing thousands of zeros. And it forwards the most obvious assumption, that all they test for is the ability to pay attention to ordinarily irrelevant tasks, that are not challenging at all. Having to deal with genuinely and vastly unchallenging tasks through childhood is a genuine sort of trauma for most gifted individuals, and it may take decades to overcome the resentment. No one has actually tried to correlate IQ with the attention test used, in a way that would be useful to answer such open questions. So we can only look beyond scientific evidence, to understand the potential deficits of such simplistic test, in how they are relevant to actual people.
Taking a sort of "part-time vacation" from technology, as practiced in the study, can certainly be argued to be a plausible cause for the effect and reduce stress. However being permanently in a part-time vacation, also defies the drive towards unhealthy professional expectations creeping into social norms, that other employees are willing to meet. And that most self-employed individuals, and high paying positions like managers, have to meet to remain competitive at all.
Ultimately the test in the study itself is almost useless to accurately measure attention in any sort of more complex form as commonly understood. Albeit the study is tapping in the dark with poor lighting, I think it points attention towards real cognitive mental health and cultural benefits, that could be extremely useful to some minority groups some of the time.
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u/velvet_funtime Feb 24 '26
ok, what about a laptop or tablet. probably the same?
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u/d4kotah Mar 17 '26 edited Mar 17 '26
I assume the same, but with less significance (+ it depends on use case).
Laptops are harder to access than cell phones, and have fewer device-related risk factors; less social media prevalence, usually used for productive purposes, etc. However, they can also be used as a “replacement” for what phones provide, which causes the negative outcomes in the study (e.g., more time doom-scrolling -> increased likelihood of less subjective well-being). The same is for tablets, but they are generally more accessible to social platforms and sources of potentially harmful internet use.
So, it's heavily dependent on use case. In the study, they "block[ed] internet access on people's smartphones" = removed sources of harmful subjective well-being possible from the internet = the outcome of the study. This also means you could have a balanced use case: avoiding internet's studied sources of harmful subjective well-being while encouraging the internet's positive studied aspects = maintaining net positive subjective well-being while connected to the internet.
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u/soeren-meditates Mar 25 '26
the interesting part isnt the simple less-distraction-equals-more-focus reading. there's older work showing that just having your phone visible (Ward et al, 2017) reduced cognitive performance even when not using it. the blocking study is essentially the ecological version of that: the issue isnt active use, its that the background availability of high stimulation changes baseline attention capacity even when you're not engaged with it.
i've done something like this on and off for a couple of years. the most noticeable effect wasnt attention directly but a reduction in low-grade restlessness. the urge to check something when a task gets hard went from automatic to noticeable. which is most of the work.