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Multitasking Makes You Stupid and Slow
Reverse Gear recommends a long and interesting article over at The Atlantic in which Walter Kirn talks about the scientific results that support his claim and his own experiences with multitasking: that it destroys our ability to focus. "Multitasking messes with the brain in several ways. At the most basic level, the mental balancing acts that it requires — the constant switching and pivoting — energize regions of the brain that specialize in visual processing and physical coordination and simultaneously appear to shortchange some of the higher areas related to memory and learning. We concentrate on the act of concentration at the expense of whatever it is that we're supposed to be concentrating on... studies find that multitasking boosts the level of stress-related hormones such as cortisol and adrenaline and wears down our systems through biochemical friction, prematurely aging us. In the short term, the confusion, fatigue, and chaos merely hamper our ability to focus and analyze, but in the long term, they may cause it to atrophy."
I always thought multitasking made me slow, but more able to see alternative solutions. Sometimes a solution for task A comes from task B.
Just about every freekin job add I see requires the ability to multi task. I used to say that I can't do it. Now, I just say that I'm as good at it as any other human. Most of the gung ho corporate types insist that they can multi task wonderfully and trying to reason with them is pointless.
I prefer Flambe as apposed flamebait.
I think it depends on what you're doing and how you define "every so often".
Doing something different every couple of hours for a little while provides a mental break from the task at hand. Having to constantly switch between things, on the other hand, causes you more stress and makes you less effective as a general rule.
Everything I need to know I learned by killing smart people and eating their brains.
First, I have yet to meet a human that does not massively multitask all of the time. Even while sleeping, your body and brain are doing lots of different tasks at the same time.
Second, There is a reason that people would call other people dumb by saying "He can't walk and chew gum at the same time." long before 'Multitask' became a common word.
While a task that takes all of your though to accomplish might take a hit if your doing two of them, the majority of tasks that people preform in a day do not take even a small fraction of our mental capabilities. Such as... walking and chewing gum. By saying that multi-tasking makes you worse at what you are doing, you are also saying at the very least, you cannot walk as well if you are chewing gum.
I don't know about you, but I really can walk and chew gum at the same time.
I agree with the author (Walter Kirn) of the article. Multitasking is so time consuming that the brain relies on the cerebellum (little brain) to handle a lot of routine tasks (maintaining posture, walking, standing, blinking, etc...) while the conscious cognitive areas of the cerebral cortex focus on an important task (e.g., talking, thinking, reasoning, planning, etc...). People with cerebellar lesions are known to speak in a halting stacatto-like manner. The reason is that Broca's area (the part of the brain that produces speech) is constantly being interrupted because the brain's motor cortex has to momentarily stop what it's focusing on in order to attend to the routine tasks that a healthy cerebellum would handle automatically. So multitasking is such a big problem that the cerebellum contains more neurons than all the other areas of the brain combined but it cannot do everything because it's a direct sensori-motor automaton. That is to say, it cannot plan or predict phenomena, so it is limited. Only the most primitive animals lack a cerebellum.
An IQ of 159 means that out of a random sample of 100,000 people, you have 8 people who share your intelligence, and maybe 4 or 5 who exceed you.
I've taught about 20 students with similar IQ levels. To you, and them, this article probably doesn't apply. Your minds are making unbelievably fast connections with little effort - so what to you is really just fast processing and quick changes is a neurobiological impossibility to others.
I always ask my students, "What will you do with the abilities and opportunities you are given?"
As defined by psychologist Mihály Csíkszentmihályi, flow is the mental state of operation in which the person is fully immersed in what he or she is doing, characterized by a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and success in the process of the activity... what Csíkszentmihályi calls "optimum performance."
In my own view (and experience), it is closely related to "happiness."
Charles Kingsley wrote "We act as though comfort and luxury were the chief requirements of life, when all that we need to make us really happy is something to be enthusiastic about." Enthusiasm is obviously related to flow.
And multitasking is compatible with neither.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
I don't know about you, but there are times when the phone ringing while I'm working can make me jump or at least flinch. The thing is that people DON'T call me when I'm just sitting there waiting for something to compile. They invariably call when I'm focused on something (or so it seems). And then there's email. Being a slave to your inbox and compulsively reading ever new message that comes in will definitly cut down on productivity and cause stress. I don't know about elevated levels of cortisol or epinephrin, but I think there is something to the idea that multitasking is stressful. I know I'd feel a lot more relaxed and focused if I could just turn off my phone and email for hours at a time without worry.
The study may have been a little extreme. But I think it still might have some truth to it.
-matthew
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
That's time-slicing tasks, and it isn't what the article is talking about. Time slicing would mean you'd drive the car, notice the phone went off, pull over, then handle the phone call, then drive off again.
Multitasking in terms of the article is having two resource intensive tasks happening at the same time. Think about running two tasks that would each require 60% of the CPU on a computer at the same time to react in real-time - instead the tasks run slower, reaction time drops or quality of response is lowered (e.g. skipped frames in a video), and so on.
Listening and understanding and forming responses is a resource intensive task for the brain (if it's not all, like, yeah, yeah, really she did that did she?) as is driving, or walking across a tightrope, and so on. Ever noticed how talk radio presenters speak smoothly, slowly and with clear enunciation so that the listeners in cars aren't distracted - you notice it more as a passenger, and I suspect that drivers listen to talk radio a lot because subconsciously it is a lower load on the brain. As you do a task more (like learning to juggle) the more you can handle at the same time (conversations, or more balls) - it's like the repetition JIT-compiles the actions into a more efficient format for the brain to handle.
>> Perhaps it's more a combination of multitasking and immediate gratification.
Or perhaps some peoples' gratification comes in small doses? I always found the "time management" kind of managers very annoying, regularly distracting me from concentrating on my work just because they had a deep belief in making everything subservient to the clock, their organizers, and their arbitrary day schedules.
>> When you get everything you want quickly, there's no need to ever learn patience or persistence.
Well they were past masters at persistence, but only a couple learned that patience was a virtue, and that it got them better results. You really can't be distracted in the middle of a core dump analysis say, not without starting from scratch anyway. And there are many similar kinds of task in the general field of computing, where human multitasking doesn't pay.
OTOH, machines don't have that frailty, and as long as they complete their concurrent tasks without intrusively interrupting us, we're peachy.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
As I'm sure some of you know well, the mark of a skilled programmer is a peculiar kind of multitasking -- the ability to maintain several 'stacks' of instruction and code in your head, representing the internal state of what you're working on at any given time. This can often encompass multiple path of execution. On the other hand, these are all facets of the same task; and perhaps not truly different/qualifying as multitasking.
In my personal experience of meeting various interesting people, I feel that learned behaviours have a lot to do with how one's mental skills are shaped, and hence how the person is perceived by others.
One friend of mine had a very bad childhood. She learned to escape inwardly, by concentrating on books, study, escaping physically to a library any time she had the chance. Now, she is a doctor. She also has a photographic memory and can "re-read" pages she has scanned. People might perceive her as "high IQ". However she has trouble reading people, and cannot pick up more than the basics of computers, as she gets frustrated and bored easily. You could say she's a bad multitasker.
If an IQ test was based on mechanical cognition, she wouldn't rate very high. If it was memory-based, she would excel. If it was dependent on multi-tasking, she would also struggle.
Briefly, I'm the opposite. Multi-task all the time, rarely bored, but my visual memory sucks. I'm good at judging people's moods, but terrible with faces and names. I grew up slightly hypervigilant, and for some reason need to swap tasks to keep my brain ticking over, like those old watches you had to shake to wind up. I'm good at remembering practical and mechanical skills, of which I class programming as one. Which is funny, others I've spoken to class programming as technical, or mathematical. To me, it's mechanical, like a watch.
If I sat an IQ test which required visual memory, I'd fail. If it relied on drawing meaning from literature, or reading body language I'd do well. If it required multi-tasking (like the classic male-secretary-in-busy-office experiment) I'd breeze.
My point is, learned behaviours can sometimes be extreme, leading to some amazing skillsets while impairing other skillsets. So what does a measure of multi-tasking ability or IQ really mean, in terms of gauging "intelligence"? Nothing, in my opinion.
To me, intelligence, simply means we function well in our environment. As modern humans, we tend to pick our environments so that our learned skills are most applicable. That's "comfort zone". Sometimes dysfunctional, but always dependent on the skills you have learned therefore, ideally, the place where you are most "intelligent".