This article appeared in the Feb. 23, 2014 issue of The New York Times Magazine
The cognitive challenges of walking while texting are well known, both to scientists and to those of us who have ambled into a light pole or a fellow pedestrian or have been on the receiving end of someone else’s distracted movements. Strolling while talking on the phone — or, more particular, texting — ties up the brain’s relatively limited working attentional resources, most researchers would agree, much as those activities do when you are driving.
But walking is not driving. In some ways, it’s more demanding. You sit while you drive. Walking requires a multitude of orchestrated actions and reactions. But whether and how using a phone affects the physical process of walking and whether those impacts might have health costs have been little explored.
So researchers at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia, rounded up 26 healthy adults for a study, published last month in PLOS One, and sent them strolling repeatedly along a 28-foot stretch of hallway while cameras captured their steps. In one setup, the volunteers walked without a phone; in another, they read a long text on a phone’s screen; and in a third, they texted “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.” The volunteers were told to hold the phone and type as they usually would. They were also asked to try to walk as normally as possible.
As it turned out, texting significantly distorted their gait and walking form, whether they intended to contort themselves or not. Most noticeable, the volunteers began to walk with a more upright and rigid body position. Their heads froze into cocked and largely unchanging positions, eyes on the screen, chins bent toward their chests. Their necks and lower back joints had significantly less range of motion. They displayed “tighter mechanical constraint” in their upper bodies and midsections, according to the researchers; arms stopped swinging loosely and were bent and locked into place. The pelvic joints likewise stiffened, making leg motion jerkier. In general, the texters moved “like robots,” said Siobhan Schabrun, an honorary senior fellow at the University of Queensland, who led the study.
Simultaneously, their gait patterns changed. Texters took significantly shorter steps, and their pace slowed. They also “deviated more from a straight line,” the study’s authors wrote, meaning that with almost every step, they set their feet farther to the side.
These adjustments, although relatively slight, could result in both immediate and longer-term physical consequences, Dr. Schabrun said. In the short term, they increase the likelihood that you will trip, and not merely because you neglect to look where you are going while texting. “Previous studies, many in elderly populations, have shown that a more rigid posture, such as this, can put you at greater risk of falling,” Dr. Schabrun said.
Frequent peripatetic texting also may cause or worsen neck and shoulder pain, Dr. Schabrun suggested, by reducing the neck joint’s natural range of motion. If you walk and text, occasionally move out of pedestrian traffic and gently tilt your head forward and back, an easy exercise to combat neck stiffness.
This brief intermission from texting may also reorient your body’s relationship with space, Dr. Schabrun said. Normally, the body prioritizes maintaining balance over almost all other demands, she pointed out. But in perhaps the most significant implication of her study, her volunteers’ bodies and brains appeared to be “prioritizing texting.”