Can Cell Phones Increase Brain Power?
June 16, 2000 — Do cell phones cause brain tumors? Can they interfere with your pacemaker? In this day and age, when questions about the health effects of cell phones border on the sensational, the findings of the latest study are somewhat reassuring, if not amusing. In fact, they sound almost too good to be true: Using a cell phone may actually improve certain aspects of your memory. But that is exactly what Finnish researchers found. “There is concern about the health effects of cellular phones because so many people are using them now,” lead researcher Mika Koivisto tells WebMD. “We didn’t study the health effects of cell phones; we studied the short-term effects on brain function and cognition.” Koivisto is from the Centre for Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of Turku, Finland. Koivisto and his colleagues tested 48 volunteers for speed and accuracy by having them perform certain computerized memory tasks. The subjects, who wore a phone mounted on their head, were tested tw
