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The Epidemic of Digital Distraction
asto21 writes "Almost no one does just one thing anymore. The screens won't let us. And in an incredible burst of human evolution, our minds have grown accustomed to monitoring multiple inputs at once. Yeah, you're reading this post. But we're nearly three paragraphs in. So if you're anything like me, it's about that time to check Twitter, count the additions to your Google Plus circles, read a handful of new incoming email messages, and chime in on a couple of ongoing instant message conversations. But are we paying less attention to important details?"
I saw none in that article.
I think the author was trying to show us that we could follow multiple storylines, ie multiple inputs, but I got confused very quickly. I guess I'm just not fully "evolved" yet to process multiple inputs.
All the world's a CPU, and all the men and women merely AI agents
But are we paying less attention to important details?" Yes, i was working before hiting TFA. serious business.
The screens won't let us?
Yes they will. Seriously! Just close all the windows you have open to things that distract you. The screens won't open them back up! I promise!
Read my blog.
Quick, someone make a reply claiming they don't suffer from this type of thing, but then pretending to get distracted by something else part way through typing it! It will be hilarious, and not at all obvious!
(I wonder how long until someone replies point out that my post is also a rather unoriginal thing to say...)
"Multitasking".
But I was too busy posting cute cat pictures on FaceBook and--omg check the latest Justin Bieber tweet! Crap, did I just post that online?
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
We used to call this condition, having our attention hopping from one thing to another to another in quick succession, "running around like a chicken with it's head cut off". You deal with a lot of things, but you don't have time to really pay attention to any one of them because your attention needs to hop to the next. You waste time shifting mental gears, and more time picking up your train of thought for this item. In computer science we call it "thrashing", and it's something to be avoided because the overhead of context-switching eats up cycles that could be used for actual work. In extreme cases it gets so bad the system's doing nothing but thrash, no actual work gets done because all the cycles are eaten up by swapping and context switching. Humans are vulnerable to the same thing.
That's why geeks value being "in the zone" so much. It's nothing mysterious, it's just the condition of being able to focus on one specific thing without interruption, and it makes you so much more productive (hence why geeks seek it out).
When children do this, pharmaceuticals encourage us to pump them full of medication. When adults do it, it's art (or possibly evolution).
"People can't multitask very well, and when people say they can, they're deluding themselves," said neuroscientist Earl Miller. And, he said, "The brain is very good at deluding itself."
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=95256794
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'So if you're anything like me, ...'
Thank Vishnu I'm not.
Great minds think alike; fools seldom differ.
I have three friends who are accomplished novelists. Two of them have cut off all Internet access to their homes. The other leaves his devices behind and sits in an unconnected cafe with a pen and a stack of paper for several hours a day. They know that even their impressive abilities to concentrate can't compete with a connected computer.
This guy comes up with a preposterous thesis and declares anyone who doesn't fit in with his world view is a loser. "If you're not trying to do 5 different digital things at a time, it's because you've given up, not because you actually want to concentrate on a single task."
He also ignores all the evidence that we aren't as good at multitasking as we thing we are.
But I accidentally typed the response as a tweet to my Azharbaijani circle of friends and posted the goat pron link meant for the Azhars in my FB wall.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
I barely believe any of you exist. Why would I care what you post?
What I CAN do is do one task then jump to another task while I wait for review/inputs for task 1, and so on, and fit trips to slashdot and reading email and websurfing in the gaps too. All done one at a time, with my full attention on that task at that time.
Can we please keep the pointless posts to a minimum?
Multitasking is fine, as long as none of the tasks really requires 100% of your attention. /. and listening to music and playing roguelikes, but when I'm working on a tough bit of program logic, I can't stand to be interrupted for anything. That's when I hide all the other windows so I can concentrate.
I can switch off surfing blogs and
I prefer ADHD
But we're nearly three paragraphs in.
I'm not sure which is funnier -- that the sentence was left in the /. summary, or that it appears in the fourth paragraph of TFA.
This guy's the limit!
This one deserves "-1, self-delusional" if anything does.
People haven't evolved to efficiently handle multiple inputs at once. The linked story certainly makes that statement, but provides absolutely no supporting evidence. If anything, it demonstrates the opposite with lines such as this: "It's getting harder to concentrate on anything, even the stuff that's clearly the most important." The poorly-written anecdotes don't show the author or his friends dealing well with all these inputs - they demonstrate the difficulty all parties are having coping. Another example is the part about his novelist friends who've removed all internet access from their homes because otherwise they can't concentrate on their work.
Frankly, most of the article reads like - at best - a Readers' Digest submission. But it is Gizmodo, so there you go.
#DeleteChrome
This article is crap. The human mind is typically able to manage 7 pieces of information at once. The difference now is that we're given more than 7 pieces of information to pay attention to at once, so the mind prioritizes what information is most important to it and that's when details are dropped.
When I need to do something important, I focus. No distractions, just pay attention.
Now, when goofing off, it's OK to multitask, but not when it's important to get it right.
It may just be a young people's problem. Us old farts know that if you want to do something right, you need to pay attention.
It would take a week for someone to get me a message from the coast by way of the mail car on the train. Now with these "telegraph" lines everywhere I get bombarded with messages sent directly to me almost every dang day. It's like being surrounded by silent screams all the time. I barely have time to watch the crops grow after I plant them. I say, if it can't be communicated by smoke signal (which ensures the message is important enough that the sender take the time to build a fire) then it's too far away from me to be of any import. And you're on my lawn...
Sorry about the mess.
The article may be anti-multitasking, but there is a definite streak of resignation.
"Almost no one does just one thing anymore. The screens won't let us."
His friends "can't compete with a connected computer," no one can avoid multitasking, " the screens won't let us."
You show you're anti-multitasking by not multitasking, not by multitasking but complaining about it.
I have three friends who are accomplished novelists. Two of them have cut off all Internet access to their homes. The other leaves his devices behind and sits in an unconnected cafe with a pen and a stack of paper for several hours a day.
Years ago, Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle had taken an advance on a book, and were getting very close to deadline with not much written. So they went off to an isolated cabin to write. They each wrote for half the day, taking turns; one sleeping during the day. The resulting book was reasonably good, and finished on time.
asto21 writes:
I'd blow my brains out before that ever happened.
I am still capable of reading "three paragraphs" without the need to "check Twitter, count the additions to Google Plus circles, read a handful of new incoming email messages, and chime in on a couple of ongoing instant message conversations".
For one thing, "instant message conversation" is an oxymoron.
You are welcome on my lawn.
tl;dr
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
I should be working on a problem with our backup system and yet here I am reading /.
could you repeat that?
Never say never. Ah!! I did it again!
So do the pharmaceutical companies!
Multitasking is controlled ADHD.
Singletasking, as in the dogged focus on one damn thing at a time, can be as big a problem as out-of-control ADHD.
No, you're learning what the important details actually are.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
Even if you buy into the idea that somehow our brain chemistry has changed because of our environments such that we have gotten better at multitasking, it isn't evolution. Evolution would require that the ability to multi-task increased the odds of having viable offspring so that genetic tendencies to increase this ability would be selected for over generations of breeding.
Yes, distractions are everywhere these days. What I wonder is, will the new generation see this as "normal" background distraction? We have an entire generation now that don't remember a time before cell phones and the WWW. Presumably they are comfortable with this level of distraction, but does anyone have data on how this affects job performance?
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve your problem, you're not using enough of it. --AC
We don't! We may have 3 IMs, 4 new emails, 12 tweets, and a Facebook message to read, but the reality is, we don't read them all at once. It may be shortsighted, but I've always considering multitasking to be an illusion. We may be rapidly shifting focus, but we're never really focused on more than one thing at any given time.
I've learned over the years that prioritizing, and putting items/tasks/people on "the back burner" (even if for a few minutes) has resulted in an increase in quality of work, and overall sanity. Focus on a task. Only shift gears if absolutely necessary (priorities will always do this), or when there is a lull of activity (waiting on approvals, server builds, etc.).
Don't lie to me! You know when you're answering 2 IM conversations with a phone in your ear, you're cutting corners, missing information, and just trying to shut someone the hell up, so you can slow down and take a breath.... so politely put them off.
Yeah, right. "evolved" - in less than one generation. Someone here desperately needs to go back to evolution 101 and figure out what the term means.
So you really mean "adapt", yes? Maybe you should do less Twitter checking while you're writing blog postings. Because so far, all the studies that I have read or read about strongly indicate that so-called multitasking is highly detrimental to all the covered tasks. Flow and concentration remain as powerful tools as they are, because - surprise, surprise - the human brain really hasn't changed all that much in the last 1000 or so years. It is, however, much more adaptable than we thought for a long time, and if you give it the same tasks over and over, it will learn to cope with them. Somehow. That doesn't necessarily mean good.
Oh, and then there are all these little psychological facts that we've uncovered over the past century or so, that all indicate that one of the strongest and most reliable powers of the brain is the ability to delude itself. It is more than fascinating what people believe inside their heads and how little that sometimes has to do with outside reality. Book hint "Mistakes were made (but not by me)".
So you may think that your brain has evolved to cope with the demands of modern multi-channel communication. Now be scientific and make the test whether
a) anything critical really is different in your brain compared to someone who doesn't do this kind of attention-hopping
b) what you believe about yourself and your ability to handle multiple inputs simultaneously or in rapid succession is at all true
check your assumptions first. Then, and only then, write something that requires them to be true in order to make any sense at all.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
We dealt with multitasking here before, and how badly people do it. Empirically, those who rate themselves good at multitasking are usually worse at it than those who rate themselves poorly.
It's not called "distracting" without reason.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
This has been discussed already. If you want it in a straight talk article rather than this dramatized fluff piece, I recommend an article that appeared in Datamation back in 2008 called "Hard Work is Dead. Call It 'Work Ethic 2.0'" in which Mike Elgan asserts that the ability to focus on a task and avoid distractions is now a more important skill than the ability to simply work hard. It's a good read.
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No.
That reference comes from a paper written by George Miller covering a memorization study he conducted, that was mostly about memorizing random facts. The 'rule of 7' that was pulled from it has been misapplied to everything under the sun.
In Miller's words:
http://members.shaw.ca/philip.sharman/myth.html
"Sacrifice for the good of The State" - The State
http://www.amazon.com/Mistakes-Were-Made-But-Not/dp/0151010986
To second that book recommendation. Great post.
See also:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illusory_superiority
"Illusory superiority is a cognitive bias that causes people to overestimate their positive qualities and abilities and to underestimate their negative qualities, relative to others. This is evident in a variety of areas including intelligence, performance on tasks or tests, and the possession of desirable characteristics or personality traits. It is one of many positive illusions relating to the self, and is a phenomenon studied in social psychology. Illusory superiority is often referred to as the above average effect. Other terms include superiority bias, leniency error, sense of relative superiority, the primus inter pares effect, and the Lake Wobegon effect (named after Garrison Keillor's fictional town where "all the children are above average")."
A complementary regression-towards-the-mean effect is that the most really competent people tend to overestimate how competent their peers are relative to themselves.
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Thank you for the correction. The actual number is currently believed to be 3-4. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/piq.20099/abstract;jsessionid=FEA7D98A86323E4886495C333ADED5A5.d01t01
I know this is completely off topic, but pretentious assholes like this writer are the reason people hate you Apple Fanboi idiots.
When I woke up this morning, I was just a writer and tech investor, tucked behind the warm glow of my 27-inch Apple monitor.
Did you really need to specify it was a 27" APPLE monitor? Did it add anything to that sentence, other than to underscore you're a prick? No, it didn't. The author could just as easily have said "the warm glow of my monitor." and had the same effect. But instead he had to underscore it was an APPLE monitor... like it was something SPECIAL and UNIQUE! Like he was COOL for having an Apple.
On a recent morning, my wife was busy with several work related tasks on her Macbook Air when our two year-old daughter
And the author does it again... couldn't just say "Laptop" or "Computer," but had to say Macbook Air! Again, like it was unique or special. News flash! Lots of people have those things and they can be acquired by anyone wishing to do so by traveling to your nearest web browser, Apple Store, Best Buy or other purveyor of overpriced shiny shit.
So just a note, it's exactly this kind of shit that makes people who haven't fallen under the spell of bullshit that Jobs has convinced hipster idiots that Apple products are so cool that they need to be identified separately from everything else. You are unique for using Apple Products, just like the other ten million (or however many) people who use the exact same product.
I was gonna make a joke about your Turtles but then I had to check Wikipedia to remember the other half of your reference.
Google says Wikipedia's entry of the Pangu creation myth has Turtles in there so I went to look at that.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pangu
"In some versions of the story, Pangu is aided in this task by the four most prominent beasts, namely the Turtle, the Qilin, the Phoenix, and the Dragon."
Then the reference to Phoenix distracted me because that's the Chinese one, not the Egyptian one.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Geeks like to be in the zone to do their work, but other people want their answers NOW.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
This is what is wrong with everyone! They work at their jobs doing the workload of 50x people from the 1930s-1940s-1950s and don't have any time for compassion in their descision making processes.
Say for example if someone is tied down at work, they can't feel compassion for something that their teenage daughter or son is going through, so they just say the standard robotic response, just like in that movie "Click".
Imagine if everyone were like this, oh wait, I don't have to, because thats what the modern world is, a bunch of uncompassionate robots.
No wonder positions of power have no compassion and are rife with corruption.
What if we had 3 months to think about the budget crisis instead of just a few days?
People everywhere need to slow down and smell the roses!, employers need to stop loading on the work onto one single person and spread it across multiple people, and pay them more for the job, the cost of products and services need to increase for this, and people will have the money to purchase those products because they are getting employment and more income.
INSTEAD the world is tightening their belts, laying off people and replacing them with robots, WHY? Why do we have to go down this road? Why can't we make descisions for ourselves and slow the hell up?
It doesn't matter if that new thing on the market comes today or tomorrow, it will get here eventually, within our lifetimes.
Then maybe we can have understanding for the true needs in our lives, like space exploration, instead of screwing each other over for a percentage of fake wealth and fake money here on earth.
Evolution does not move that fast, nor does it work that way. The basic currency of evolution is offspring and mutation. I am willing to admit that it is possible that there have been one or more mutations in genes that are "for" multitasking in humans. However, do the individuals with those genes have more offspring than the ones who do not? Have there been enough generations since the advent of computers for those genes to increase in frequency in the gene pool to equate to "an incredible burst of human evolution?" No. No way, Jose.
If there was some sort of environmental pressure such as a predator that kills and eats people who can't multitask when they are children, then that would put selective pressure on humans and possibly drive evolution.
Essentially multitasking doesn't get you laid more than not being able to do it, so you're not going to tip the gene pool.
Is already upon us. Ever try to walk down 34th street in Manhattan while everyone else going the other way is engrossed in their smartphones? They're not trying to eat your brain but they're equally brain-dead, lumbering, and clumsy.
I can only imagine what it's going to be like when augmented reality hits the mainstream.
As a huge tech booster, participant, and builder, I gotta say there's a time and a place, people, a time and a place. If you're running into things or walking out into the middle of Broadway against the light because you can't bear to pause Angry Birds, it means that is neither the time nor the place.
Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.
Hippies called them "uppers" and "downers".
Today we have big-gulp sized energy drinks, zoloft, and ambien ... and nearly everyone I know that works in tech is consuming all three (or similar compounds of varying legal status). So they can be hyped up all damn day and cut it off like a switch when they want to sleep. There is non-obvious collateral damage to that lifestyle, and as my generation hits our mid 30's a lot of us are feeling the consequences (myself included).
The human mind has indeed NOT evolved to deal with our numerous always-on distraction engines. ... get out side, get some exercise, get some fresh air at least 30 minutes a day.
Let this be a warning to the up n' coming "geeklings"
Lay off the stimulants.
Your future self will thank you for it.
Nothing interrupts my daily dose of Slashdot.. Nothing
Were they the first ones with the Crawl at the bottom of the screen?
Sorry, what now? I was distracted.
Cool post bro, highfive \o