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?"

Comments

Yes, we are paying less attention

[Todd Knarr]

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).

Human multitasking is a myth

[sl4shd0rk]

"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

which is funnier

[gEvil (beta)]

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.

Wish I could mod Slashdot stories themselves

[93 Escort Wagon]

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.