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."

Comments

Dating

[Tablizer]

Us geeks realized that we couldn't both date girls and create a Nobel-winning thesis.

Re:I'd half agree

[gstoddart]

Now Windows can do multiple things at a time and look what happened to it. This clearly supports the article's contention that multitasking makes you slow and stupid.

And, yet, UNIX machines have been doing multiple things at a time for decades; and manage to be neither slow nor stupid. :-P

Cheers