Do smartphones dumb us down beyond the evil dopamine trope?
Old rotary phose on a wall. Source: www.mylusciouslife.com
Can excessive smartphone use deprive us of willful thinking by disrupting the equilibrium between breathing and focus?
The idea is reasonable as it reflects how we read aloud, first by glancing at the sentence, then reading its content, and finally pausing over its meaning.
Without the two complementary functions to intuit and comprehend, the mind becomes like a weather vane seeking the most likely word to produce next. Thinking becomes a mechanical prayer wheel.
Let me explain how the situation presented itself to me. All Roman, Eastern, and Orthodox Catholics share a prayer bead practice known as the Rosary, which also doubles as a road map for healing trauma. True, other religions have traditions and protocols to deal with the contrarian violence of nature, but I can only speak of what I know.
The Rosary is a conversation; it demands sincerity and self-awareness. On every one of 50 beads, one says a prayer consisting of about three to six sentences, not in a mechanical way but preempting each thought, letting it blossom into words, and holding it in one’s mind. The first and last are crucial to self-awareness and the so-called discernment of spirits. My practice became immensely more strenuous during the COVID-19 lockdowns. Perhaps I caught the disease unknowingly, knowingly got older, or hastily ate too many unbalanced meals. Yet, two things stood out during that period: far too few face-to-face interactions and my uncritical binging on online videos too often.
Taking back the practice felt like the first day at the gym after years without doing push-ups, and it took time for my mind's core to react positively.
What if excessive use of smartphones, irrespective of content, could turn us into walking Chat-GPTs where a string of thoughts or words generate the next most likely thought, making us lose our willful contrarian thinking? And what would happen to public discussions?
What if dopamine was merely the cheese on the mouse trap?
I am no neuroscientist, so take this video with a grain of salt, and please post a comment, especially if you come from another tradition.
Cheers!
Joel Malard, Ph.D. McGill University
