Phones are turning students into zombies

Here is a disturbing essay on today's college students by a tenured professor at a regional public university that caters to very typical, very average American college students.

The gist:

Most of our students are functionally illiterate.... Students are not absolutely illiterate in the sense of being unable to sound out any words whatsoever. Reading bores them, though. They are impatient to get through whatever burden of reading they have to, and move their eyes over the words just to get it done. They're like me clicking through a mandatory online HR training. Students get exam questions wrong simply because they didn't even take the time to read the question properly. Reading anything more than a menu is a chore and to be avoided.

They also lie about it. I wrote the textbook for a course I regularly teach. It's a fairly popular textbook, so I'm assuming it is not terribly written. I did everything I could to make the writing lively and packed with my most engaging examples. The majority of students don't read it. Oh, they will come to my office hours (occasionally) because they are bombing the course, and tell me that they have been doing the reading, but it's obvious they are lying. The most charitable interpretation is that they looked at some of the words, didn't understand anything, pretended that counted as reading, and returned to looking at TikTok.

The author says that students don't bother reading even for electives. He can't assign papers because students will just turn in ChatGPT-generated content. Colleagues who teach math report a similar lack of capability and willingness to try. And although college has been a transactional process for most students throughout his career, there is no longer the willingness to even try to learn. Students treat class as optional, don't bother communicating with the professor about absences or make-up work, disappear entirely without formally dropping the class. This paragraph was just stunning:

They can't sit in a seat for 50 minutes. Students routinely get up during a 50 minute class, sometimes just 15 minutes in, and leave the classroom. I'm supposed to believe that they suddenly, urgently need the toilet, but the reality is that they are going to look at their phones. They know I'll call them out on it in class, so instead they walk out. I've even told them to plan ahead and pee before class, like you tell a small child before a road trip, but it has no effect. They can't make it an hour without getting their phone fix.

They don't want to take notes in class or take responsibility to get notes from a fellow student if they miss class. Or they might pretend to take notes on their laptops, but really they're using it to watch videos or scroll through social media. So why not ban laptops in class?

I hate laptops in class, but if I try to ban them the students will just run to Accommodative Services and get them to tell me that the student must use a laptop or they will explode into tiny pieces. But I know for a fact that note-taking is at best a small part of what they are doing.

They are indifferent to their missed work and can't be bothered to talk to the professor about making it up. (This professor does not delve into the immense problem that Gen Z has with actually talking to adults, making phone calls if necessary, to face up to a problem of their own making.)

This seems to be at the heart of the problem:

It's the phones, stupid. They are absolutely addicted to their phones. When I go work out at the Campus Rec Center, easily half of the students there are just sitting on the machines scrolling on their phones. I was talking with a retired faculty member at the Rec this morning who works out all the time. He said he has done six sets waiting for a student to put down their phone and get off the machine he wanted. The students can't get off their phones for an hour to do a voluntary activity they chose for fun. Sometimes I'm amazed they ever leave their goon caves at all.

The prof says it isn't the fault of the K-12 schools, and it's not a matter of raising standards -- there are just too many students who don't care.

This is a matter of the future of civilization. This is a matter of national security and economic capacity. Phones are making people stupider.

Forget about DEI and air traffic control. Do you want the people keeping planes from crashing into each other to be incapable of watching the radar for more than 30 seconds without looking away to their phones?

Professor Bookbinder links to Ted Gioia writing about zombie students, starting with a TikTok video from a worried school teacher:

First of all the kids have no ability to be bored whatsoever. They live on their phones. And they're just fed a constant stream of dopamine from the minute their eyes wake up in the morning until they go to sleep at night.

Because they are in a constant state of dopamine withdrawal at school, they behave like addicts. They're super emotional. The smallest things set them off.

And when you are standing in front of them trying to teach, they're vacant. They have no ability to tune in if your communication isn't packaged in short little clips or if it doesn't have, like, bright flashing lights.

It's actually the way harder part for me than just the outright behaviors, is just being up at the front, talking to a group of kids who have their eyes open, they're looking at me, but they're not there. They're not there.

And they have a level of apathy that I've never seen before in my whole career. Punishments don't work because they don't care about them. They don't care about grades. They don't care about college.

It's like you are interacting with them briefly between hits of internet, which is their real life.

Gioia comments:

They just care about the next fix--because that's how addicts operate. They have no long term plan, just short term needs.

They can't get back to their phones fast enough.

Even when they know that their phones, YouTube, and social media are getting in the way of accomplishing their goals, these students resist and work frantically to bypass any obstacle keeping them from their dopamine hit. It's terrifying.

Gioia points to research, some of it sponsored by the tech companies themselves, showing that they know, just like the tobacco companies knew, how addictive their products are.

He says that the reaction to zombie culture is happening away from the centers of power, and tech companies may feel they can continue to purchase politicians who will look the other way. Gioia calls on parents and other concerned citizens who work for the tech behemoths to speak up and push for reform and responsibility in their own companies.

On X, Jonathan Haidt, author of The Anxious Generation linked to a couple of recent articles showing, "Brain rot is real, hitting adults, too."

Jon Burn-Murdoch writes in the Financial Times about research showing that "across a range of tests, the average person's ability to reason and solve novel problems appears to have peaked in the early 2010s and has been declining ever since." Results for PISA, the international benchmark test for 15-year-olds in reading, mathematics, and science, fell further between 2012 and 2018 than during the COVID years. (Emphasis added below.)

So we appear to be looking less at the decline of reading per se, and more at a broader erosion in human capacity for mental focus and application.

Most discussion about the societal impacts of digital media focuses on the rise of smartphones and social media. But the change in human capacity for focused thought coincides with something more fundamental: a shift in our relationship with information.

We have moved from finite web pages to infinite, constantly refreshed feeds and a constant barrage of notifications. We no longer spend as much time actively browsing the web and interacting with people we know but instead are presented with a torrent of content. This represents a move from self-directed behaviour to passive consumption and constant context-switching.

Research finds that active, intentional use of digital technologies is often benign or even beneficial. Whereas the behaviours that have taken off in recent years have been shown to affect everything from our ability to process verbal information, to attention, working memory and self-regulation.

A study published in the February 2025 issue of PNAS Nexus, the journal of the National Academy of Sciences, shows "Blocking mobile internet on smartphones improves sustained attention, mental health, and subjective well-being."

Recent experiments provide preliminary evidence in support of these hypotheses. Lab experiments focused on cognitive functioning have shown that hearing smartphone notifications impairs performance on attention-demanding tasks and that simply having one's smartphone present and visible can impair working memory and sustained attention. Although these mere presence effects do not always replicate, meta-analyses conclude that they are small but significant.

Beyond the lab, field experiments suggest that reducing smartphone notifications and receiving smartphone notifications in batches, rather than continuously throughout the day, can improve self-reported attentional functioning. And in a field experiment focused on mental health, participants who were asked to limit their smartphone use for 1 week reported decreased symptoms of anxiety and depression. These and other studies have explored both the acute effects of smartphone-related distraction and short-term effects of modifying smartphone use on mental health. What is missing from the empirical record is a longer-term experiment that changes the nature of the smartphone itself and objectively measures participant compliance and cognitive performance.

This particular study had 467 participants install an app called Freedom "that blocked all mobile internet access (including Wi-Fi and mobile data) from their phones for 2 weeks." They were able to measure compliance objectively, evaluated subjects using standard psychological diagnostic tools for mental health conditions (e.g. depression and anxiety), asked for assessments of subjective well-being, and looked at both self-reported and objective measurements of attentional awareness.

But most of the participants were too phone-zombified to comply with the experiment they had volunteered for:

Complying with the intervention was evidently difficult for participants: of the 467 who committed to blocking mobile internet for 2 weeks, 266 set up the app required to do so and 119 (25.5% of those who committed) met our preregistered definition of "compliant" (having the block active for at least 10 of the 14 intervention days, as recorded by the Freedom app).

The researchers found "significant improvements for [subjective well being], mental health, and the objectively measured ability to sustain attention. Even those who did not fully comply with the intervention experienced significant, though more modest, improvements. These findings suggest that constant connection to the online world comes at a cost, since psychological functioning improves when this connection is reduced."

These improvements were found to correlate with four specific mechanisms: Time usage (more time in the offline world, less time consuming media), social connectedness, feelings of self-control, and sleep. People who suffer FOMO (fear of missing out) anxiety benefited the most by missing out on knowing about the things they were missing out on.

Many legislatures, including Oklahoma's, are considering phone-free school laws, partly in response to the zombie-student phenomenon. Some of my libertarian and conservative friends object strenuously to this. Some see phones as a kind of cop body-cam, allowing evidence collection when school violence breaks out or when the blue-haired, gauge-gouged math teacher decided to discuss gender instead of geometry. Then there's the worry about an inability to communicate in the event of an emergency. And some object to any one-size-fits-all rule with uniform compliance, on the grounds that the parent ought to be able to decide whether her child can have a phone for class.

But I don't see how we can address this problem of phone zombification without a societal response, which would include real, unhackable parental controls on phones and tablets, max screen time limits, notifications off as the default, and lengthy, enforced pauses that interrupts doomscrolling through an infinite social media feed. At some point, we need to reach the End of the Internet and get back to real life.

Thanks to our friend Sue Stenberg, bookseller and proprietor of BiblioMania Homeschooling Materials (now in its new location at 9113 E 11th St. in Tulsa, just east of Eastwood Baptist Church), for calling Hilarius Bookbinder's essay to our attention.