The media has been making a big to-do about a study showing a correlation between cell phone use and brain activity:
I am completely underwhelmed. Besides the small size of the reported change (7% near the active phone), I am especially underwhelmed by the methodology: The subjects had a phone strapped to each ear, with the control case being both phones off, and the test case being one phone active. But "active" in this experiment meant *receiving* a (muted)
50-minute recorded message, not transmitting.Now, I am surely ignorant about the details of cell phone protocols, but I would imagine that in the receiving state there would be minimal transmitter activity by the phone... maybe some sort of occasional handshake or something, but basically not much. Is this mistaken?
If I am correct, then this study seems rather strange: Why not test with the transmitter active? With only the receiver active, why would we expect any difference compared to no cell phone at all? After all, we are all being exposed to normal RF from cell phones and all sorts of things.
This makes me suspect that the investigators may have been generally clueless about what they thought they were investigating.
And if they found a difference when *receiving* a call, doesn't it sound like this "effect" must be due to something trivial like added warmth from receiver circuit activity? (That would cause a small increase in blood circulation, which would account for the small increase in activity.)
Any thoughts?
Bob Masta DAQARTA v6.00 Data AcQuisition And Real-Time Analysis