I do not want to regurgitate Christine Rosen’s article on The New Atlantis about “The Myth of Multi-tasking“. But, this post has some notes for myself. One of the reasons why people have to multi-task is that great publications like this one are quite long. All those names, affiliations, times and quotes distract the reader’s line of thought. How about just cutting out the quotes and providing the names, affiliations and times in a reference section like they do in technical publications? If I really want to pursue a particular reference I can as easily look it up! ?
Check out the important choice decision at the bottom after reading the interesting bits from the article below:
“Workers distracted by e-mail and phone calls suffer a fall in IQ more than twice that found in marijuana smokers.”
“workers took an average of twenty-five minutes to recover from interruptions such as phone calls or answering e-mail and return to their original task”
“estimated that extreme multitasking—information overload—costs the U.S. economy $650 billion a year in lost productivity”
“functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scans to determine that when people engage in task-switching — that is, multitasking behavior—the flow of blood increases to a region of the frontal cortex called Brodmann area 10. (The flow of blood to particular regions of the brain is taken as a proxy indication of activity in those regions.) This is presumably the last part of the brain to evolve, the most mysterious and exciting part,”
“evidence of a response selection bottleneck that occurs when the brain is forced to respond to several stimuli at once. As a result, task-switching leads to time lost as the brain determines which task to perform.”
“rather than a bottleneck in the brain, a process of adaptive executive control takes place, which schedules task processes appropriately to obey instructions about their relative priorities and serial order,”
“with training, the brain can learn to task-switch more effectively, and there is some evidence that certain simple tasks are amenable to such practice.”
“multitasking contributes to the release of stress hormones and adrenaline, which can cause long-term health problems if not controlled, and contributes to the loss of short-term memory.”
“Even if you learn while multitasking, that learning is less flexible and more specialized, so you cannot retrieve the information as easily.”
“people use different areas of the brain for learning and storing new information when they are distracted: brain scans of people who are distracted or multitasking show activity in the striatum, a region of the brain involved in learning new skills; brain scans of people who are not distracted show activity in the hippocampus, a region involved in storing and recalling information.”
Techno-social Darwinism: “it is likely that brains that are more adept at media multitasking will be passed along and these changes will be naturally selected” VS. Attention-Deficit Recession: “media multitasking kids might become adults who engage in very quick but very shallow thinking.”
“The faculty of voluntarily bringing back a wandering attention, over and over again, is the very root of judgment, character, and will.”
“Further research could help create clever technology, like sensors or smart software that workers could instruct with their preferences and priorities to serve as a high tech ‘time nanny’ to ease the modern multitasker’s plight.”
Now, is the time to decide:
“Would you like to assume that humans are not capable of multi-tasking and hence just try to develop the faculty of bringing back your wandering attention to focus on single-tasking?”
OR
“Would you like to make a concious effort to start developing the part of your brain for selective multi-tasking so that you can pass on to the next-generation a better set of genes that can eventually evolve into a well-developed multi-tasking system?”
