This is Scientific American 60-Second Science. I'm Shaila Love.

Tell me if this sounds familiar. You're trying to get some work done and you find yourself

continually picking up your cell phone. 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.

Right now, my phone is sitting next to me untouched, but have I really protected myself from

its distractions or its ability to impact my mind? 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.

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. The way we measure it is by having people remember words and

solve math problems at the same time. And the idea there is that those are two very different

cognitive skills, right? Ward memory and math problems, but they're tapping into that same

general cognitive resource. In those experiments, people either had their phone on a desk,

in their pockets or bags, or in the next room. The farther away a person's phone was, the better

they did on those tasks. Even when you're not consciously thinking about your phone, the process

of not thinking about your phone requires some cognitive resources. 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. 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. If it's just sitting next to you while you're working,

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