Slashdot Mirror
Life Interrupted
sch7572 writes "Seattle Times carried this story which may be of interest to those addicted to checking Slashdot for new stories every minute. Scientists are concerned that the Information Age is nurturing 'cognitive overload,' an umbrella term for the malaise people feel as a result of distraction, stress, multitasking, and data congestion related to increasingly sophisticated technologies. People multitask because it is expected, encouraged, and considered vital, yet cognitive scientist David Meyer reports that truly effective multitasking is beyond people's capabilities."
Can't...handle...another...story...about how modern society and technology is stressing us out...too much stress...ughhh...must wrap head in duct tape before it explodes...
I'm NOT checking every minute, just discovered this site.
i tried to RTFA, but between my e-mail, the internet radio i'm listening to, ESPN.com, and my actual work, I didn't have enough concentration...
"Facts are meaningless. You could use facts to prove anything that's even remotely true." - Homer Simpson
I caan read sleashdot storees, louk at pron and recompile mi kernel ot the same tyme. no porblemms heere.
MABASPLOOM!
"David Meyer reports that truly effective multitasking is beyond people's capabilities"...
I wish he had some time to come over and talk to my employers.
cognitive scientist David Meyer reports that truly effective multitasking is beyond people's capabilities
Not yet, but I think eventually it might not be beyond our capabilities, just like learning how to produce heat from wood, and now from splitting atoms.
I don't see this as a problem. I can remember all the IP numbers of our servers and almost everyone's password... dammit I forgot to wear pants again to work.
hack a day
For a while now I've been anti-interruption. I shun any kind of unsolicited alert about events such as new email arriving, a friend signing on to an IM network or the phone ringing. I find I enjoy activities a lot more now that I can see them through to completion without beeping and flashing alerts interrupting me at arbitrary moments.
Really? I can usually handle walking, chewing gum, talking and breathing all at once pretty well.
Right now I'm at work, downloading porn through p2p, hiding from my boss, checking slashdot, posting, eating breakfast, and I'm chatting with a buddy on an instant messenger program. And I'm chewing gum!
But all those moms in SUVs with cell phones glued to their ear while they whack their kids scare me!
I spent some time working in the support department for one of my previous companies. After a full day of answering phones, answering questions, problem solving, and tracking things down, I would come home and be absolutely exhausted. All of the constant context switching was very bad for my mental health. Sure, I was able to do the job, but it totally numbed my brain out and made me a tired, frustrated person.
Now as a software engineer I try to work on only one thing at a time. If I try to do more than that then all of my efforts fall behind. If I can focus on one task though, it gets done and done right.
42 - So long and thanks for all the fish.
I don't multi-task because I HAVE to, but often because I WANT to. I monitor a couple of dozen sites and I enjoy reading them. I like learning new stuff, constantly expanding my understanding of the world and of myself. Maybe it works for some and not others, but I wouldn't have it any other way. It just seems boring to me to do one thing at a time, not to mention a complete waste of precious time.
A blog like any other.
People multitask because it is expected, encouraged, and considered vital, yet cognitive scientist David Meyer reports that truly effective multitasking is beyond people's capabilities."
I suspect this is where the problem lies. The difference between "effective multitasking" and "bumming on the internet" is the crucial point. Both are attempting jumping from one task to another, the first for a pupose say doing your job. The second doesnt have a purpose or a structure so it has no more purpose than doing it itself.
It is almost as if you are addicted to performing a task (browsing the internet) and the performing of the task becomes the goal, instead of working towards, something at the end.
Net Online Anime Gallery's
At least, I assume that's what the article says - I would have RTFA, but then I might miss the next comment posted here.
In fact, multitasking -- a computing term that involves doing, or trying to do, more than one thing at once -- has cemented itself into our daily lives and is intensely studied. Research has shown it to be consistently counterproductive, often foolish, unhealthy in the long run, and in the case of gabbing on the cell phone while driving, relatively dangerous. Yet it is also expected, encouraged and basically essential.
Amen. Now we need the actual studies so that we can cite them for our bosses and clients so they can stop expecting it.
Once you have some sympathy from your PHB: The best defense, in this case, is a good offense. Declare office hours. Partition your time into usable, contiguous chunks dedicated to single tasks, and stick to the plan. You'll be glad you did.
I find it interesting that, at least in the studies I've read about this, that it affects mostly adults, and younger people are largely immune to it.
The young techno-elite grew (and are growing) up immersed in this sea of information, and are adapting to it. The older generations, having grown up in a much slower-paced environment, have difficulty adapting to the rapid change in the information channels available to them.
Personally, I love having this information available. I crave it. I'm constantly aware of the state of the world around me. When something of note happens to one of my friends, that knowledge circulates throughout our social circle almost immediately.
For anyone who's read Snow Crash, there are people referred to as "Gargoyles." They are connected to the net 100% of the time, interacting with it through wearable computing and visual overlays, streaming and feeding information as fast as possible concurrently with their physical life.
The idea might scare some people, but I find it fascinating.
I suppose it's simply that older people, not being used to this mass of information, are not ready to cope with the fact that most information is useless. Part of the ability to accept the input is the ability to filter the wheat from the chaff.
I read slashdot several times a day, but I don't read every comment or every article. I read the ones that will be useful to me in some way. I'm connected to the net most of the time, but I ignore an incoming IM if I'm busy doing something else.
People who aren't used to this environment have trouble ingoring things. You know the type. People who insist on answering the phone no matter how busy they are at that moment. People who check their email immediately whenever they reveive a "new mail" notification. These people can't cope with the available information, and are overwhelmed by it.
GeekNights!
Late Night Radio for Geeks!
Have been effectively multitasking for years. Unless of course they are addicted to crack.
My cup is empty , I am bereft, my coffee, my sanity, I have none left.
Sigs. We don't need no steenking sigs.
If you knew how to manage your base while fighting, you would be more effective in battle. This carried over to Starcraft and Warcraft3 where I was vastly superior to other players. Its critical to multitask in games like that, but its helped me learn how to multitask other things.
One thing multitasking isn't good for is programming complex things while doing other things. When we're programming, we need to use our memory to keep track of all the variables and threads going on. If we start doing others things, we can be distracted because our brain has trouble with the memory and it impairs our coding.
Another thing that's not good to multitask is driving with a cell phone. If you get too caught up in the conversation, your attention can be diverted from the road. You can normally drive like a zombie, but in times of emergency response you could be screwed. Also if someone does something stupid to cause a wreck, people may blame your cell phone even if you weren't at fault.
God spoke to me.
is that I can see the fnords!
I think it was Stephen Hawking that said he's not sure the human mind can really understand black holes and such.
that's just astro-physicist speak for "I bet you a cup of coffee that you can't write a p2p client in less than 5 lines of perl"
It's not like we read the stories...
Just look at the comments people leave. It's pretty obvious that the average Slashdotters attention span is about that of a -Oh look a bunny!
I think the article is generalizing too much. Firstly, multi-tasking is the wrong word to use as we're not simultaneously doing two or more activities, but are doing it in a round-robin, pre-emptive, or time-sharing kind of way. Again, one's ability to successfully pull this off depends on one's temperament, prioritization ability, and the kind of work involved. Repetitive work can easily be done in this way, for example, simply because after sufficient practise, the work itself becomes mechanical and doesn't need any cognitive ability. On the other hand, work that requires genuine thinking effort is done best without interruption, especially when one is in the "flow" or "zone". Again, if a person has the mental discipline to ignore other interruptions or re-priorotize the distractions, it's not too much of a problem.
In another vein, we've always had distractions, and the ones posed by technology are just a new form of it. What separates an efficient individual from an inefficient one is the ability to block out these distractions when needed, and only focus on the goal at hand. The rest is all FUD that these so-called cognitive experts throw in to justify their existence. I'm fedup of these experts extrapolating some extreme cases and generalizing them to create non-existent issues.
Cognitive overload. Bah. We've always had cognitive overload. Only the jingo is new. I think i should change my profession and start bullshitting my way into some real money.
This is nothing more than an urban legend. It's kindof like saying "most people only use 1% of their hard drive" because you have this empty space that is used as a swap file, only a small portion is written to or read from at time, etc.
The human brain is a huge energy suck and if we didn't need it, it would be got rid of very quickly. True, there are some parts which can be electrically stimulated which don't produce hallucinations, but what does that prove?
___
It's the end of my comment as I know it and I feel fine.
Ah but are you truly watching the TV and listening and typing?
Try to sing a song while you type something completely unrelated and then tell me what the guy on TV was saying while you were doing it.
Most of us probably feel that way, but the larger question is why do we want to multitask so much, and when we do multitask are we actually losing something in the process? Looking back on the time in my life before I became jacked in to the Net (my teens and early 20s), I realize that I spent a lot more time actually *thinking deeply* about things than I do now. These days I am aware of a broad range of interesting and useful information, and I consider myself fairly capable of filtering it well.
But even with filtering, the sheer mass of information moving through my consciousness is enough to keep me from sitting for any length of time and truly pondering something in detail. The times when I am able to unplug and think are the times I feel the most relaxed and at peace.
That's one reason some people cling to analog methods - they want to maintain a sense of cognitive equilibrium. Although I'm immersed in the Net almost every day, I prefer paper books to eBooks for the simple reason that I can detach from bits and pixels. Outdoor exercise does the same thing for me, and although I love my iPod, I don't use it when I'm out enjoying nature.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
It leads to wasted effort and stress, which leads to sloppy work.
Work hard, play hard, but not simultaneously.
When I'm working, coding or debugging or whatever, I'm like a dog with a bone, and I don't leave the task at hand until it's done. If anyone comes into my office and asks me for something, I tell them "when I'm done".
I accomplish a whole lot more this way, the code I write is better, so I spend less time debugging and testing, and in turn spend less time supporting it in the field (small company, we all wear lots of different hats).
One of my colleagues is the opposite, he tries to do 100 things at once. He's always stressed out, one of those "the sky is falling!" idiots. The work he does is invariably half-assed.
Also, since I'm always focused on one aspect of a system at a time, I wind up with a much, much better understanding of the ins and outs of our software than he has. I pretty much know the name, scope, and purpose of every variable, class, function, constant or subroutine in the code.
The other guy wastes tons of time looking up the same thing over and over again. He constantly pesters me with the same questions. "What does the AddressParse class do?" And I have to say: "it parses addresses you fucking chimp".
The rub is, he always looks like he's really busy because he's so stressed out, which is why he's still here. Whereas I'm generally pretty relaxed and laid back, and don't get upset about anything that happens at work, it just isn't worth it.
I get more work done, and of a better quality, but to a couple dopes around here, the fact that I'm not yanking my hair out with stress equates to me being lazy or slacking off, or whatever.
I'd never survive in a big corporate setting for that very reason. PHB's think that if you're not giving yourself an ulcer you aren't working hard enough. Fuck 'em, I'm not going to shorten my life for their bottom line.
Luckily it's a small company with common sense. I've unofficially become the lead developer, while he's unofficially been relegated to answering the phones and doing support.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
People have known about this for a long time, and it's been studied to death. I know that for those that see my posts I often mention aviation, but here we go again;
During flight training, one of the first things that you're taught is to focus on the important stuff first, and prioritize. Don't let an interruption from air traffic control interrupt the flow involved in actually flying the plane... don't let an attempt at navigation/location get in the way of flying the plane... in fact set your priorities so that you will be SAFE above all. I guess my training was a bit of a reality check for me... it taught me that "cognitive overload" can actually kill me quicker than you might think. As a result I focus on one task at a time until I complete that task. If workload is too high (say multiple interruptions at once), always remember to AVIATE, NAVIGATE, then COMMUNICATE. Anything else is fluff.
After I'd finished learning to fly, I found that I was unconsciously doing the same thing in my day-job. Although an email promising larger genitalia and better stock market tips might annoy on occasion, it isn't likely to kill me in that job. I took the principles of flying a plane and turned them to my day job (systems engineering, development etc.) At first it was tricky since everyone around me was attempting the same "multi-tasking" tricks that I had done before... on occasion it seemed that I was falling behind. Once I got into "the groove" so to speak I found that I completed projects more quickly, more accurately and actually found that I was happier with the results.
Maybe I should require that employees take flight training to ensure they prioritize and focus correctly...
I guess my point is; learn to prioritize those things that matter. If you have multiple projects that need completed, then prioritize those too. Work on one at a time... don't jump around and try to finish them all at once. You won't. I've seen too many people burn out early because they try to do everything at once... a lot of them are younger than me... and I'm not exactly old either!!!!
I cant speak for everyone with ADD. But as someone who was diagnosed in the 5th grade. I must say that if I am not doing atleast 3 things at once my brain shuts down. If I am doing only one thing I get really bored and quit. I function best when I have a ton of things going on. Email + refershing 3 different forums + irc + /. + gaim + groklaw(loading it always takes forever) + purevolume(playing a band) + RSS feeds coming in + emerge -u world on test machine. My machine doesnt go 20 seconds without some sort of noise/alert going off. And I love it that way!
I've told management: "I don't want to run an instant messenger, it hurts my productivity and is very stressful"
They replied: "It's the way we're doing business as a team"
Now I'm looking for a job elsewhere, because exactly as described in the article, I'm exhausted at the end of the day, I have a backlog of projects like you wouldn't imagine, it's stupid.
I've found myself reluctant to focus on complex tasks because I expect to be interrupted. Interruptions from instant messaging are often emergencies which occupy a whole day with stupid little updates and inappropriate prioritization. It seems the A-hole bugging you on IM is more important than the person silently and patiently waiting for the scheduled deadline.
I forget things, I can't read a document to completion or properly compose replies to email. Infact... right now, I'm avoiding a complex task... my IM will crackle to life any second with some stupid emergency. It feels futile to even get started when it takes an hour just to set things up to start working on it. Four times in the past two weeks, my instant messenger has dragged me into some emergency which has prevented me from working on it.
I'm trying to push management back to a usenet-style system for "I need help!" emergencies and a careful analysis of timelines and responsibility (i.e. fault and impact) before anyone picks up a phone. There's nothing wrong with interrupting people if there's an emergency, but management should be able to prevent it from reaching that point.
(Hey look, I got an instant message! and it should only take about two hours to deal with. Glad I didn't get started on that project.)
If you had RTFA you would know that you are a dellusioned individual. You "WANT to" because you are addicted to the dopamine that is released each time you learn "new stuff" or "expand [your] understanding of the world".
Tell me, do you feel down, or groggy, or in any way sad, when you do not monitor your couple of dozen sites? What happens when you go for a day or two without internet access? These would be withdrawal symptoms.
So, you show a prime example of the problem -- no, in fact your are the very epidome. You think you are using every conceivable second of your life to the fullest. You have this push to experience everything immediately and constantly. But for what reason? Why do they have to all occur simultaneously? More importantly, how did you come about the decision that doing only one thing at a time is "complete waste of precious time"!?
Logically following your views to their conclusion would mean that the moment you focus on anything it becomes a waste of time. This is so absolutely flawed, I am now speechless.
Please take an objective view of yourself, and discover what your motives (if any) are for feeling the way you do. Then please respond and tell me how they are not in any way related to your dopamine addiction.
Around Spring of 2003, an article came out showing that people who multi-task are actually less efficient then people who do not multi-task. A number of tests were done and what it boiled down to is that every time you switch from one task to the next your brain has to reorganize. This wastes (noticeable) time. Also, even though you might be able to start working - your brain may not be finished reorganizing itself so you may not remember everything you do at the start.
I kind of agree and use some real life examples. For those of us who program - you sit down, you get in your grove and you start to code. Then someone calls. I generally have to unfocus from what I am doing and take a couple of seconds before I can even understand what the person wants. Then, when I am finished with the call, it takes me a few seconds to get back into my work (and hell I might of lost my grove).
I mod down so you can mod up. Your welcome.
an RSS feed will do the job nicely; you're using firefox* of course?!
at the slashdot home page, just click on the orange rectangle on the bottom status bar and add the RSS feed to your bookmarks toolbar folder.
*thunderbird also supports RSS, but I'm not impressed with it too much. Opera's RSS client is also quite reasonable. If someone knows of a *free* RSS client for Palm, I'd be grateful to know, I haven't found one yet.
I'm reminded of a note on Dr. Donald Knuth's web page. Dr. Knuth apparently ditched e-mail in 1990 after 15 years of use.
Email is a wonderful thing for people whose role in life is to be on top of things. But not for me; my role is to be on the bottom of things. What I do takes long hours of studying and uninterruptible concentration.
Poor grammar? Incorrect assumptions? I will take offsense to this as my grammar was sound, and I made no assumptions. Everything that I stated was gleened from your post. Everything else were just questions.
Please show me specific examples.
Also, as for my "uninformed kind", you are grossly mistaken. I have been reading and posting to slashdot much longer than you have. Although I hate to compare UID, I will in do so in this case.
One more thing... How can you doubt that I read the article? I stated very specific information as written in the article, relating it what you wrote in your post, with some +1 Insightful added in for good measure.
... which was published in the October Readers' Digest.
Q: "How many ADD kids does it take to change a lightbulb?"
A: "Let's go ride bikes."
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens.
Speaking as a psychology student who has recently taken a few classes in cognitive psyc. Humans are very bad at multi tasking. Alot of research points to this. The majority of these studies examined humans driving and talking on the cell phone at the same time. Let me just say, NEVER do that. Its a good way to die.
.. or top for you linux guys). Your main cognitive energies are then used for talking on the phone. Now this is fine as long as the road is straight and nothing happens. Throw a deer jumping onto the road, or a car ahead of you suddenly swearving into your lane and its over.
Now before you say "What? I can multitask like nobody's business! I can drive and talk on the cell phone no problem!", what you are really doing is relying on automacity. You are so practiced at driving that it takes less room in your cognitive processor (think task manager in xp
I have something better: Terminal Ennui . There's cognitive overload, but that's not the real problem. The real problem today is that because of cognitive overload, we're made too objectively aware of the world. The traditional motivation to struggle to become the best at something is basically short-circuited today, as well can instantly see not only many other people doing the same things we're doing, but maybe better. Or, we can all too well see it having *already been done*. Leaving the sensation that there's no point in trying to do much of anything at all. Cognitive overload is just a precursor. Terminal ennui.
Being on the leading edge of the boomer generation I grew up in the 50's. My early childhood was spent hanging with the kids in the nieghborhood. I can remember when the first TV showed up. It was this huge cabinet and a small round screen. There was only one TV station at the time. Through most of my childhood we had only 3 stations and by my teenage years there were a handful more.
Fast forward to the 70's I was taking advantage of the GI bill (thanks to being drafted) and getting a master degree in clinical psychology. I used to wonder why I could drive a car, remember the roads I was on, overlay that with the topography of the city I was in and use that to find alternate routes. This is a practice I still use today. In retrospect I would infer that from the article that I had the ability to multitask.
Fast forward again to the late 80's. I was a firefighter who in the early 80's got interested in computers as a hobby. I ended up at one of the top ten CompSci schools and got my degree at the age of 44.
Being a firefighter I learned not to be stressed because not only is your life on the line but the lives and welfare of your co-workers and the victims of the current crisis depends on you making the right choices. I found this to come fairly easy for me.
Now my present job as a senior programmer I find that doing multiple tasks is not that big of a deal. I've got time for this post because I'm compiling the application I work on and it takes about 20 minutes to run the ant scripts on my machine.
The observation that I'm trying to make is that some people just have a knack at doing many things at once and I'm fortunate to be one of those people. Based on my 58 laps around the sun I would say that most people do not have this ability. I think that this is what the article is trying to get at.
When our technological dreams began becoming reality, some pundits predicted we would be swamped by leisure time. That didn't happen. We're working longer and harder, and seem more stressed over downsizing and outsourcing and expectations than ever.
But why should that be so? The answer is not "globalization", which is just the latest leftist term for "capitalism." (I guess "neo-liberal" is an even newer term, since this is the first time I've seen it used.) The answer is much simpler: taxes. All productivity gains, and then some, are eaten up by excessive taxation.
In Canada, almost 50% of every dollar we make goes to the government. (The U.S. is in a similar, although slightly better, situation.)
It's simple math that explains why families changed from single-parent earners to double-parent earners. If you take away half of a family's income, then twice as many people in that family have to work. (Theoretically, one person could work twice as many hours, or get paid twice as much, but those alternate solutions are very unlikely.)
Stop blaming Wal-Mart, Boeing, McDonalds, etc. for the problems that are actually caused by the government, and we can start finding actual solutions to our problems.
Mike van Lammeren
It will challenge your head, your brain, and your mind.
This is slightly off topic, but there was a line in the article about getting customized news: if all your information is tailored to what you want to know, you may miss that which you don't know you want to know, and should. I often worry about this from reading slashdot too much. (Am I really becoming just a paranoid liberal geek?) The problem that I have is that I can't find news sources that are evenly balanced. All of the news sources seem to be so focused on telling people what they want to hear that you can't find out what you should be hearing. Wether it's conservative vs liberal, Microsoft vs Open Source, this company or that company. Every news source seems to have an agenda and I have to pick my sources based on the least of all evils or read 10 different sources to get the news. It may be lazy, but I shouldn't have to work this hard to get a balanced source of news.
Anyway, anyone else feel this way and have some options?
THIS SPACE FOR RENT
It kind of makes sense, as our brains are programmed for task switching at an early age with most kids being babysat by the TV and commercials being 30 seconds in length.
:)
That explains why I can focus for long periods of time, and in fact it seems that unlike everyone else, I have a hard time multitasking.
I preferred public television as a child.
"No problem. I have the capacity to do infinite work so long as you don't mind that my quality approaches zero."-Dilbert
Ermmm... and what does the government do with that money? Make a huge stash and burn it?
Of course not. It returns to your pocket, indirectly. In forms of unemployment/health benefits or pensions, or highways, or public transportation systems, or protection against crime or fire., or..
And to boot, it might be a better allocation of resources. In Stuttgart, Germany, where I live, I can take of one the 20 underground lines, or rent a city-owned car or van wherever in the city (to haul stuff around, when the underground isn't enough). I can dash through the Autobahn or ride the high-speed train to go to other European cities. I can go anywhere, but I do not need to own a car.
And you know what? All of this wouldn't have happened without taxes! If taxes were lower, a city of 500,000 would not have been able to afford 20 underground lines and a fleet of public cars. If taxes were lower, there would be no ICE or TGV. If taxes were lower, I would have to own a car - a family would have to own two cars - like in the US.
Higher taxes? I'm actually saving money!
Look, I know where you are coming from. I had much the same ideas 10 years ago. I hardly know where to start with my reply to you, as it took me 10 years to unlearn all that crap I ingested.
One viewpoint might be to try and see govt as a machine. There are many types of machines, and in my life I have studied, operated and designed many types of machines,from nuclear power plant, to cars, to analog and digital circuits to software systems. Sometimes machines need to be complicated if we want to be able to accomplish a goal.
Another perspective might be to understand that culture may be evolved and formed through outside forces, and that there are forces in this world which may in general gain if you and I lose.
Here ya go. Read these:
one
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
eat shiat and bark at the moon
He reads TFA, that means he should get an offtopic or redundant mod. Sheesh, some people never get it right!