I’m old enough to have avoided smartphone addiction – my habits were set in stone before they were invented – but I’ve commented along with everybody else that these phones are altering homo sapiens before our very eyes, turning us into nearsighted, tiny-attention-span hunchbacks.

But that’s not very scientific. What evidence do we have they are affecting our thinking? And how would we know?

A psychology professor at SNHU tackled that question. My column today is about his three-year research, which faced a difficult problem: It’s very hard to get people to change their cellphone habits as part of a test. (8 of 58 subjects in a month-long test couldn’t stand it and dropped out.)

You can read the whole thing here. Or you can listen to me talk about it for a few minutes on the Granite Geek podcast.

(As a side note, I’ve written many stories about SNHU over the decades but they’ve all been business stories about its growth and online approach and general success. This is the first one dealing with research at the school.)