Is my iPhone making me dumber?

No, it's not making you dumber.

However there are always two sides of a coin.

Here's what I mean.

On the one hand, you are becoming more resourceful, able to glean and dispense knowledge that you never were able to before. You can give directions, look up different foods, even consult a recipe on what you might use that mystery meat for, and make sure you have everything needed for that dish before you leave the store. It stops you from having to remember where your car is parked at that MLB game (obviously not trying to say why you SHOULD have an iPhone, we all know those reasons) etc etc.

However, the flip side, or crippling factor, is what are you WITHOUT that phone? You have to ask yourself what things the iPhone has made easier, and what mental functions the iPhone has replaced. Asking the butcher versus consulting your phone are one and the same thing, without your iphone you could still answer the question in your mind. Obviously, there are always things we are going to miss and not know naturally (streets and fish), and the iphone is great for that.

When we find the iPhone replacing our need to use our brain, when we start relying on having an iPhone, so we don't have to remember things/learn things, then yes, we are going down the wrong road.

Ultimately, we are one nuke away from not having the iPhone anymore. What then?

Here's a little anecdote you should take to heart.

One of Albert Einstein's colleagues asked him for his telephone number one day. Einstein reached for a telephone directory and looked it up. "You don't remember your own number?" the man asked, startled.

"No," Einstein answered. "Why should I memorize something I can so easily get from a book?"

In fact, Einstein claimed never to memorize anything which could be looked up in less than two minutes. It sounds to me like the iPhone lets us all be more like Einstein. I'd say that's a good thing!

Actually, my iPod Touch is making me if not smarter at least better informed - I read on it like crazy, from books to magazine and on-line articles (saved via Instapaper). I wrote a post on this topic just yesterday:

http://www.cloudyuseful.com/2010/05/can-idevice-improve-ones-attention-span.html

Speaking of which I still owe the beef guy some beer.

The phone number thing really shook me to my bones. When I was a child, I had probably 20 phone numbers memorized. Now, if I were without my phone (any phone since the day I got my first celly) and I was hurt in a accident, I would be unable to tell them how to contact any loved ones. If my celly didn't survive the accident, I would have no clue as to how to answer the question: "Is there anyone we should call?"

I'm sure if you didn't have your iPhone available at the time, it would have occurred to you to ask the fishmonger (butcher) about the fish. And I couldn't tell you the name of the street next to the one I live in, it's just not relevant to remember.

You chose the most convenient way in you to find information, wether it be from memory, a notepad, an iPhone or any other place information can be stored.

And, you made a better judgement turning to your iPhone for information about the fish. The fishmonger would have recommended the fish, as it was on sale, so clearly on he would have been ask to promote it. The internet however, would give a more unbiased response.

The problem with Scenario 1 had nothing to do with the iPhone. You simply didn't know where the park was, which was why you didn't know what street to direct the visitor to.

Tunnel vision isn't all that unusual; I suspect most of us navigate by landmark rather than mentally ticking off street names as we pass by them. And if a given park is not on your normal route, there's no way you can know how to get there.

Now, if your question is, "Is my iPhone making me lazy?" - the answer is, "maybe".

Bell: Rrrrriiiiinnnnnggggg!
Me: Let's see which class we have... *pulls out iPhone*
Classmate: We have history.

It didn't start with your cell phone:

"Theuth, my paragon of inventors, the discoverer of an art is not the best judge of the good or harm which will accrue to those who practice it. So it is in this; you, who are the father of writing, have out of fondness for your off-spring attributed to it quite the opposite of its real function. Those who acquire it will cease to exercise their memory and become forgetful; they will rely on writing to bring things to their remembrance by external signs instead of by their own internal resources. What you have discovered is a receipt for recollection, not for memory. And as for wisdom, your pupils will have the reputation for it without the reality: they will receive a quantity of information without proper instruc- tion, and in consequence be thought very knowledgeable when they are for the most part quite ignorant. And because they are filled with the conceit of wisdom instead of real wisdom they will be a burden to society.”

From Plato's Phaedrus, excerpted by Neil Postman.

http://www.sts.psu.edu/Courses/walton/readings/Post1.PDF

As beings who generally strive for self sufficiency, tools we use become extensions of ourselves and therefor part of ourselves.

But yes, you probably should have just asked the guy what basa was. :)