A new disease is here: Smartphone amnesia!

20th August 2015
A new disease is here: Smartphone amnesia!

Yet another  lifestyle disease  - and no, it isn't diabetes or the heart!

Mumbai, August 20 2015:  A study in India  by Net Security specialists, Kaspersky, reveals that many users transferred most of their  brain’s memory responsibilities over to their phones -- leading to a new sickness: Digital Amnesia.   
With  digital versions of our once entirely physical lives stored in a remarkable device called the ‘smart phone’, it is very important to limit ones dependency on it primarily because of its addictive properties, says Altaf Halde, Managing Director - South Asia, Kaspersky Lab:  "The mind is a muscle and it if it's not used for the reasons it was made, it will become lazy."
Kaspersky Lab conducted a research last month with a total of  1007 adults in India, that illustrates some truly shocking facts about the reliance on smart-phones amongst the Indian population. Now, although 7 out of 10 people could recall their partner’s/spouse’s phone numbers without any help from their phones, only 2 out of 10 could recall their child’s school’s contact number.
The trend of smart phone dependency seems to decrease as the age of the test group increased. That’s because smart phones have not been around for long enough to influence a 55 year old man/woman the same way it’s influencing a teenager. It also highlights the future for Indians, because reliance on smart phones is only going to get more and more severe.
Furthermore, 50% of the survey group treats the internet as an extension of their brain, and since 73% of them use their smart phones to connect to the internet, you can see how misplacing a phone can be a cause for serious concern amongst most Indians. Memory is first to get effected and since digital communication has become incredibly high with websites like Linkedin and Twitter, our minds can’t possibly store so much of information without some help. 
Almost 50% of Indians aren’t interested in remembering facts as much as they are interested in remembering the source for the facts (i.e. Google). The same can be said about the camera on a smart phone, that is slowly beginning to do more work than our own eyes, when it comes to storing human experiences.
Ironically, your own smart phone has applications that can help the user take some time off from the digital world. It is said that a week away from the Internet and smart phones is all your body needs to tune back into the frequencies of nature, sort of like a ‘digital detox’. Back in the 90s, there was no need for this kind of rehabilitation and unfortunately, as we go further into the future, a week of detox will not be sufficient.