Psychology Today41%
Cognitive Effort Just Got More Expensive 66%
By Shirley M. Mueller M.D.0%
7/14/2026, 4:43:18 PM
BS Summary: This article contains 31 faulty reasoning types, including Negativity Bias, Hasty Generalization, and Indoctrination, with Biased Writer Voice as the most egregious example at 25.3% saturation with 203 hits. Analysis detected 2,116 faulty-reasoning hits from 803 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 60.2% and a BS Rank of 66% (7,218 of 21,180 articles). This article is worse (more manipulative) than 65.90% of the article peer group.
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 effort is metabolically expensive, and we are built to spend it carefully, preferring the reward that costs us the least.
Every design feature you know—the infinite scroll, the autoplay, the little red badge—lowers the friction, the small effort or resistance that normally slows us down, to almost nothing.
Do that ten thousand times, and the brain updates its internal exchange rate.
Work that requires effort has not gotten harder.
It simply becomes more expensive to choose.
Here, a piece of behavioral ecology helps.
Researchers who study foraging animals ask a deceptively deep question.
When should you leave a berry patch?
You stay until it thins out enough that the expected haul somewhere else is worth the walk.
Now, think of your phone as an infinite orchard that puts you one thumb-swipe away, so the signal to abandon the current patch fires almost instantly.
The student does not give up on the hard chapter because she cannot read it.
She quits because leaving has never, in all of human history, been so cheap.
And so does the collector who closes the reference book to check her feed.
This reframing does something the older studies could not.
It solves a puzzle that has plagued the field for years.
In the laboratory, the measured effects of heavy media use on thinking tend to be small and inconsistent.
Yet people insist that their concentration is not what it was.
Effort recalibration reconciles the two.
In a lab, with a task in front of you and stakes on the line, you can exert the effort and perform fine.
In ordinary life, with no one watching and a phone within reach, the cost-benefit math tips the other way a hundred times a day.
Your capacity is intact.
Your willingness to spend it is what has moved.
Return to our collector and generalize her decisions.
Learning a mark on a piece of porcelain the slow way requires high effort now for durable knowledge later, which is exactly the sort of work the digital environment teaches us to decline.
Snap a photo, ask an app, receive an answer, and you have offloaded the effort entirely.
The app has not made you less able to learn.
It has made learning feel like a poor investment.
Multiply that across a year of small refusals, and the difference shows up not in what your brain could do, but in the expertise you never built.
This is why the same logic now shadows generative artificial intelligence (AI).
When a machine drafts, summarizes, or reasons on demand, the felt value of doing it yourself quietly falls.
## Combatting the Effects Through Awareness and Building Friction
None of this is a counsel of despair, however, and the authors are careful to say so.
We are not passive victims of our devices.
We are agents who have been handed a rigged price list.
The first defense is awareness.
Notice the moment a hard task turns tedious and your hand begins to drift, because that moment, not any failing of your brain, is where mastery is won or lost.
The second is friction.
Silence the badges, close the extra tabs, and give a demanding task a protected stretch of time so its slower reward has a chance to arrive.
The authors even suggest that platforms could build helpful friction back in, a small act of design conscience that would serve users far better than another frictionless feed.
The screen was never really stealing your intelligence.
It was changing the price of using it.
For anyone who cares about deep knowledge, whether of porcelain or any other collectible, or of a language, or of a single difficult idea, that is the more unsettling thought, and also the more hopeful one.
Prices, after all, can be renegotiated.
Speakers
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Analysis
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