THE FUSE

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.