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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.
Oh, wait, hold on a minute... Hey! move it! the light's green, you jerkwad... That's it, right foot is the gas... Pay attention to what you're doing for once, huh? Jeez.
OK, sorry, where were we?
Insightful and funny are really the same thing, except one has a punch line.
Absolutely ... they were so focused on mating and finding food and stuff that they totally forgot to watch out for asteroids.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Seems more likely that switching between tasks just distracts you from noticing how poorly you're working.
I find my IQ of 159 to aid me in multi tasking like playing multiple ogame.org strategy games in differant alliances, and it keeps me sharp to keep doing many things. If i sit there and do nothing. I feel lazy, slow and ....well STUPID. Like i should be doing something. Who did htey test on this a bunch a retards?
I've always kind of laughed at the "must be able to multitask" requirements.
Ask yourself why they want that. In a lot of cases, it's because they want people to do the job of more than one person. It's the same reason they try to get people to work 70 hours a week (and, sadly, some of the people that work for them fall for it and even think it's "macho" to trade their entire waking life for a paycheck).
Everything I need to know I learned by killing smart people and eating their brains.
... but the story looks too long and I know I'd lose focus. Computers have ruined my life and my brain. What's considered multi-tasking anyway. Listening to music and typing? is that too much?
The guy who modded that Flamebait was balancing his checkbook at the time.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
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.
I've always fund the habitual multi-taskers leave in their wake a series of tasks almost finished.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
Not me. I multi-task all the time, and finish everything I start. Just proof this
Great Intellect...
Of course, multitasking in motor skills is a completely different matter than multitasking in higher cognitive functions. Completely different parts of your brain are used.
I was driving around the bypass in Columbus the other day... driving in the next to fastest lane maintaining a speed about 70 mph which is what the traffic was flowing.
I could see in my rear view mirror a SUV that was cutting in and out of traffic moving very fast. I respect others that are in a hurry... happens to all of us at times... anyway the SUV was ready to pass me and suddenly it slowed to match my speed exactly right beside me... thus blocking any escape path i might need.
I looked over to see why a person would slow from 85 to 70 so quickly and here she was pulling out a cell phone and looking at it to dial.
I laid on my horn, holding it down and it so startled her that she dropped the phone and she looked over at me and I pointed my finger at her and she took off at 85 again.
Two point to make:
1: her driving concentration fell way low as she was messing with the cell phone.
2: I realized that I could multi-task by driving and pointing at the same time
And in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make
Well the average "multi-tasking" that I have encountered in the modern workplace is not of the type you describe.
.1ms, but even for trivial tasks (like I'm cooking spaghetti sauce in this pan, *INTERRUPT--The water is boiling* CONTEXT SWITCH, put noodles in water, lower heat, *INTERRUPT--Sauce simmering too vigorously* CONTEXT SWITCH, stir sauce) Even something simple like that the context switches will take 1-5 seconds, many thousands of times slower than a CPU, and those context switches have next to zero data overhead associated with them. Context switching is not cheap in silicon, and it is a lot less cheap in my experience in carbon.
Currently I am a member of 4 dev teams, working on 4 different products. It is 100% ineffective frustrating, and stressful (but so management has decided to structure the teams, most of the devs here are on at least 2 or 3 teams). Sure, at any one time I'm only working on 1 thing, because you can't physically type in 4 different windows at the same time. However, it is extremely difficult to get ANYTHING done. On a day where I have zero interruptions, and am able to focus and work on a single product all day, I can probably produce 1-2k lines of working code (given that the features are just in need of coding, and there isn't a lot of "ok let me think about this for 3 hours to figure out the best way to do it", if there is design/algorithm work obviously not as much code gets written, but this is even harder work to context switch on). However, I get a day like that maybe once a month, and its usually a saturday. On a regular day, even with prioritized task lists, when I have to touch 2 of the 4 products in single day, I probably can only produce 5-600 lines of working code total, it cuts my productivity in half, just the 1 context switch. Most days (probably 4 of 5) I touch all 4 products each day... Under these circumstances, I can only produce 1-200 lines of actual working code.
Context switching in software development is EXTREMELY expensive. Just like in this guy's driving example, what he is describing while his car careens off the road and he's still thinking "where did the phone go? I wonder if it was a nude pic?" is a context switch. Context switching even in SMP machines is expensive and they are designed for this purpose. It is the reason why there are limits to improvements you can achieve through parallelism. For some processes/tasks sure you can fully parallelize them, but there are plenty of tasks, and I'd argue the majority of creative type work (programming, system design, network design, research, book writing, painting, song writing, etc) are of the type which cannot be context switched easily.
Sure I can pay my bills and book a vacation online at the same time, but programming in parallel is a big no no. Our brains were not designed as and are not SMP computers, they aren't even very good preemptive multitasking machines (a single processor computer). A decent CPU can probably context switch in
I would add the following: Given that at the time the Buddha statues were first built, people had no idea that the brain is the organ responsible for thinking (rather than the heart, or the stomach, or the soul etc), it's therefore revisionist nonsense to claim that the Bodi-Tree is a symbol for the cerebellum.
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".
But he...he was told that he could watch the television at a reasonable volume... Well, he...he...he told Bill that if... if Sandra's going to listen to her headphones while she's...while she's filing, then he should be able to watch the television while he's collating... so I don't see why he should have to turn off the television, because he enjoys watching at a reasonable volume. and according to...
Worst. Signature. Ever.