Jan
03
OVERRATED: Multitasking
IF - Juggle, by gr33ndata
Multitasking – being able to juggle dozens of things at once – has always been admired (even before the word was coined). It’s now something we’re all expected to do in the modern world (just like our iPhones), and another thing that women can boast about to show their superiority to men. (“I can update my Facebook page, change the baby’s diapers and cook dinner at the same time! Men can’t do that.”) But as the smart people at Luminosity note, research suggests that multi-tasking is highly OVERRATED.
When people attempt to attend to several different tasks, they’re not actually working on all of them at once. “Multitasking,” as it’s used in common parlance, is somewhat of a misnomer: rather than performing multiple tasks simultaneously, the brain actually switches rapidly between tasks. And task-switching is an expensive habit for the untrained brain—the cognitive control required to flip back and forth gobbles up the brain’s limited processing power. The result: plenty of extra time and effort expended, usually rendering any attempt to “multitask” less efficient than simply concentrating on one task at a time.
What does this mean for those of us who are constantly plugged in, forever fiddling with a dozen things to see and do? The popularity of multitasking in modern culture has left its true detriments largely ignored. But it’s time to put down your phone—and your tablet, and your iPod, and your remote.
There is plenty of scientific evidence against multitasking. You can check it out here.
Hi, it’s my pleasure you used the illustration. What you wrote makes sense, even in computers, when there is a single processor, it just switches rapidly from one task to the other, only true multitasking is achieved when there are multi-processors in the computer. Hence, we need multi-brains
Tarek, that makes perfect sense. Apparently, 2.5 percent of people’s brains are geared to multitasking. That’s one in 40! So I guess that, while we all know a few multi-brains, we don’t know very many. (I’m pretty sure I’m not one of them. I was working and listening to music at the same time, but I couldn’t do it for long, so I had to stop working. That was weeks ago!)