Earlier research asked whether digital screens damage the brain or breed addiction; the answers were mixed.

A new framework proposes that the real change is in how we value effort, not in what our brains can do.

Noticing the shift and building small frictions back in can protect deep and sustained work.

I have written twice before about what our devices might be doing to us. In "Rewired," I looked at evidence that heavy use is linked to fragmented attention in the young and, intriguingly, to sharper decision-making in older adults who search online, a genuinely two-sided story. In "Neuroimaging the Effects of Smartphone Use and Overuse," I walked through magnetic resonance imaging scans suggesting that problematic use resembles behavioral addiction, while cautioning that the findings were correlational and far from settled.

Both essays, I now see, were asking the same question. Is the device harming the brain's machinery? A new paper in Nature Human Behavior by Wisnu Wiradhany, Douglas Parry, and Jaan Aru suggests that this may be the wrong question altogether.

The Concept of Brain Recalibration

The result of their work, which they call brain recalibration, is a novel concept. The trouble may not be that screens weaken what your brain can do. It may be that they change what your brain is willing to do.

Cognitive........

© Psychology Today