The answer to the dependence on the smartphone - a bad smartphone?

My smartphone has turned gray, and it's great.

To get rid of the smartphone addiction, I joined a small group of people who installed gray undertones on their screens: we removed the colors and use the hue range from white to black. The idea that has become popular due to Tristan Harris’s technological ethics is to make the sparkling screen less challenging.

I used the screen with gray shades for a couple of days, and it's amazing how much my nervous habit of grabbing the phone has decreased. What gave me the idea: perhaps one of the ways to break the attachment to a smartphone is to make it a little worse. As it turns out, we are simple animals that are excited by bright colors.

Silicon Valley companies like Facebook and Google are aware of this, and they are increasingly turning to applied neuroscience to understand how the brain reacts to colors in applications, which gives us pleasure and holds the eye. New research shows how important color is to our understanding of priorities and emotions.
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However, not everyone wants to be crazy about their screen. This week, two major investors, citing the threat to health in the long term, turned to Apple with a request to find out how you can help parents to limit children's use of iPhones and iPads. In addition, among some of the oldest employees of technology companies, a movement is gaining momentum that warns against the products they produce. And many consumers are beginning to think about how this affects our thinking.

Mack McKelvey, executive director of marketing firm SalientMG in Washington, says she is aware of the tricks that are used on phones so that you can use them longer and return to them as quickly as possible.



Phone author of the text in monochrome.

“You don’t buy black and white cereal packages for breakfast, you buy really stimulating color boxes. The creators of the app have developed really cool tiles, cool shapes, cool colors - everything is done to stimulate you, says McKelvey. “However, there is a living world outside, and my phone should not replace it.”

She also decided to switch to monochrome. However, it was more difficult than she expected.

“It took me about 40 minutes to figure it out. The developers hid this setting, says McKelvey. “You really need to want to do this” (if you want to try, here are a few tips ).

The person being referred to by Facebook and others is called Thomas Z. Ramsey, the executive director of Neurons, a company from Copenhagen that has been in existence for four years. His company uses brain scans and eye-tracking techniques to study applications, modernize and create technologies for the future. A company often measures the electrical activity of a user's brain when it is immersed in a phone, for example, messaging or scrolling through Facebook.

According to Ramsey, the purpose of a product is usually to inspire positive emotions and attract the attention of the consumer without irritating him. Over the past year, he says, Facebook has been the largest customer of his company, and the tech-giant has published part of this research . "We have so much work that we want to pinch ourselves," says Ramsay.

“Color and size are the cornerstones when it comes to capturing human attention, and attention is a new currency,” he says. “An interface that captures attention, but does not cause a disturbance, which deliberately does not intrude into someone else's space, is a fine line.”

According to Ramsey, grayscale returns the right to choose.

Companies use colors to indulge subliminal decisions, he says. (For example, I may have a desire to open mail, but I’ll get on Instagram when I see its colored button). Phone in shades of gray eliminates this manipulation. Ramsey says that this action revives “controlled attention”.

“This is a very good idea. You also need to turn off the sound, ”he believes.

Bevil Conway, a researcher at the National Eye Institute, studies colors and emotions, and says that for Silicon Valley companies one of the ways to reduce people’s dependence on phones is to use a more elaborate color palette.

“Color is not a signal for detecting objects, in fact it is something more substantial: it tells us what can most likely be considered important,” says Conway. - If you have a lot of colors and contrast, then you are in a constant state of attracting attention. Your attention system says all the time: "Look, look, look here."

Conway believes that just as people think about the color scheme when choosing an interior for a living room, they need to think about color when it comes to the phone’s home screen.

“If you had a color palette at your disposal, you would have a phone that looks nice and not addictive, it would have some focus, but, of course, no one wants you to do this,” he says. “Because they want you to look at the screen.”

Silicon Valley is fighting for our attention, and often I feel like the very last person with control over my own eyes. After I put the shades of gray on the smartphone screen, I did not become another person out of the blue, but I feel that now I have more control over the phone, which now looks more like a tool than a toy. If I remove the lock to write an email, it is less likely that I will forget my goal and click on the Instagram icon. If I stand in line for coffee, this gray box doesn’t look as exciting as it used to be.

Switching the screen of the smartphone allowed me to realize in quite a noticeable way that here I still have some choice.