A study has found that constantly talking on your cell phone could actually make you even stupider than you look and sound doing it.

A warning may soon be printed on phones reading: "CAUTION: Mobile phone use may cause a slowing of brain activity. But if you are reading this warning you probably can't understand it, so carry on."

It seems obvious that anything you do obsessive-compulsively will eventually have an adverse effect. The real question is: So what? I mean, how fast does your brain really need to work anyhow?

"In Alzheimer's dementia you also find a severely slowing of brain activity," said Martijn Arns, the main investigator for Brainclinics Diagnostics, in a statement. "However, the slowing found in this study, with mobile phone users, can still be considered within 'normal' limits."

When dementia is your baseline, you've got some wiggle room.

Still, somehow it's good to know that annoying behavior is actually bad for you. My hunch has always been that things that seem really annoying when people do them are probably not advantageous to the species as a whole. That's why we evolved this reaction in the first place. Widespread annoyance is the psychological equivalent of a stomach ache. It's the organism's way of saying, "I need to throw up!" And we all know that things that make you throw up are things you avoid ingesting in the future.

The problem is we all like talking on our cell phones, we just don't like it when other people do. It's not annoying when it's us, only when it's them. I have even seen people on cell phones glaring at and complaining into their cell phones about other people glaring at them and complaining about them into theirs.

The long and short of it is: the addling process is so far advanced in our society that it may be irreversible. Just wait until people start having phone chips implanted and everybody's walking around babbling to the voices in their heads all the time. Then you really won't be able to distinguish what's "normal" from dementia.