College students who frequently text message during class have difficulty staying attentive to classroom lectures and consequently are at risk of having poor results

reading traditional print media exposes people to variety and creativity in language that is not found in colloquial peer-to-peer text messaging

“Our assumption about texting is that it encourages unconstrained language,” Lee argues, “but the study found this to be a myth.”

most college students believe they are capable of performing multitasking behaviors (such as texting) during their classroom learning, but research does not support that proposition.

Out of a study of 700 youths aged 12-17, sixty percent don’t consider electronic communications such as messaging to be writing in the formal sense; 63 percent say it has no impact on the writing they do for school, and yet 64 percent report that they inadvertently use some form of shorthand in their formal writing

scientists found that kids who sent three or more text messages a day had significantly lower scores on literacy tests than children who sent none.

Search engines

changing the way we use our memories

lower rates of recall of the information itself and enhanced recall instead for where to access it.

It’s good to know where to find the information you need—but decades of cognitive science research shows that skills like critical thinking and problem-solving can be developed only in the context of factual knowledge. In other words, you’ve got to have knowledge stored in your head, not just in your computer.

Email

those who divided their attention between email and other tasks experienced a 10-point decline in IQ.

Their decrease in intellectual ability was as great as if they’d missed a whole night’s sleep

scores on a test of general knowledge were highest among people who read newspapers, magazines and books, and lowest among those who watched a lot of TV.

Watching television, they noted, is “negatively associated with knowledge acquisition” — except when the TV watching involved public television, news, or documentary programs.

In contrast, texting is associated with rigid linguistic constraints

for texters, word frequency is an important factor in the acceptability of words.