Curbside Consult with Dr. Jayne 9/8/25

Several readers have reached out about my recent piece that mentioned cell phone bans in schools. One reader shared an article that cites outcomes data from high school that had a previous ban in Texas, which has banned phones for all public and charter school students this year.

That school saw increased student participation and reduced student anxiety, in part due to students not being “afraid of being filmed at any moment and embarrassing themselves.” As a proud member of Generation X, I’m glad that our failures and missteps weren’t captured for wide digital dissemination and that those awkward moments passed fairly through the word-of-mouth rumor mill compared to the permanent records that young people can be stuck with now.

Still, there are concerns about enforcing the bans, especially if not all teachers are on board. It reminds me of the many work environments I’ve been in where personal cell phone use is supposed to be banned, but where compliance is minimal. It creates a different power dynamic asking healthcare workers to police each other versus in a school, where teachers are clearly the authority in the classroom.

Personally, I’d rather see a lot less use of cell phones in most environments, whether it’s having staff in the emergency department who are too engrossed in their phones to respond quickly to rapidly changing situations or whether it’s people who nearly walk into you on the street because they’re heads-down on their phones.

One of the key reasons that parents oppose cell phone bans is their inability to reach their students during the school day. Although I’m tempted to cite my own bias in that millions of us survived not being reachable 24×7 by our parents (and actually enjoyed that freedom), I can see the point that parents are trying to make. One reader shared a savvy way of avoiding the ban by creating a shared Google document with their child, where the parent and child were effectively messaging back and forth all day since the student’s school encourages nearly all work to be done on school-issued Chromebooks.

Another reader shared an article written by a physician-professor who banned cell phones from the classroom. I found it interesting that the author is a professor of medical ethics and health policy, areas where there is usually a lot of deep reflection on whether or not we “should” do various interventions and also on whether certain interventions should be required. Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel teaches a course to undergraduate, MBA, medical, and nursing students and has been doing so for 10 years. Last year was the first with a cell phone ban, however, and Dr. Emanuel notes that course evaluations were better than previous years.

I found it interesting that it wasn’t just cell phones that were banned. Students couldn’t use computers to take notes unless they were using a device where they would write with a stylus. There was an exception for students who might be waiting for a critical phone call, but otherwise, phones had to be out of sight.

Additionally, the classes were recorded, and transcripts were accessible to students in addition to their personal notes. At the beginning of the semester, Dr. Emanuel presents data comparing notes taken by hand to notes taken by computer and how handwriting your notes forces the writer to mentally processing which elements are worth writing down, which improves retention.

As you might expect, this made me think about ways that might parallel what we’re seeing with AI, whether doing the research helps your brain build better patterns for information retention than if you just ask a question and get the answer via AI. (I won’t go into the potential risk of using AI to get a wrong answer and baking that into your mental model.)

There is also discussion of how cell phones can be distracting even if they’re face down. I’ll admit that I wasn’t familiar with that research. I’m not one who typically leaves my phone on the desk, but I can see how it could be distracting, and the literature backs that up by showing that students whose phones were out of sight performed better on memory and attention testing than those who had phones visible. Those who performed best had their phones in a separate room.

Another reason cited with data is the ability of smartphones to negatively affect in-person social interactions even when not in use. I’ve certainly experienced that and dread having to meet with relatives that are constantly on their phones or staring at them on the table.

Dr. Emanuel mentions the bans at the primary and secondary school levels, but found only one college that had an institution-wide phone ban, going on to note that “while most college students are legal adults, neuroscience teachers us that they are not biologically adults. Their prefrontal cortices, the part of the brain that controls planning, executive functioning, and risk taking aren’t fully developed. They sometimes exercise poor judgment, act impulsively and make decisions that damage their social relationships and learning.”

Recent studies have looked at whether “AI is making us dumber.” I would be eager to see one that examines different age bands within the young adult population to see whether certain groups are more negatively impacted.

At the University of Pennsylvania, where Dr. Emanuel teaches, students in the religion class “Living Deliberately: Monks, Saints, and the Contemplative Life” are asked to give up their phones for a month as part of the curriculum. I certainly appreciate the value of being off the grid and do it regularly when I’m hiking or camping, but that would be a pretty significant sacrifice for the average college student.

Having been on the bleeding edge of healthcare IT for more years than I care to count at times, I’m not a Luddite by any stretch of the imagination. Still, as someone who values evidence-based medicine and understands the importance of a well-crafted clinical trial, I can’t help but think that recent increases in technology and social media use are putting us in a position where we’re essentially subjects in a large, uncontrolled trial.

Unfortunately, there’s no institutional review board or other governing bodies looking out for our well-being. Plenty of entities with a lot of funding have a vested interest in trying to make us behave in a certain way. I’d love to be an anthropologist one hundred years in the future to see what they think about humans in the early 21st century.

With the exception of patient-related communication devices, does your employer have a ban on cell phone use in the workplace? Is it something that should be considered? Leave a comment or email me.

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