It’s bad enough that attention spans have atrophied to the point that reading an entire book is as daunting as swimming an ocean, but when half of us have trouble sitting through a television show without turning to something else, we know we are in trouble.
Our habit of multi-tasking is making us fidgety, and it may be that doing many things at once is not only making us, in the end, less productive, but is altering how our brains work – and not for the better.
According to one United States study, the activities people now cram into a single day would have taken 31 hours to complete a decade ago. For this we have many “time-saving” electronic devices to thank. Researchers also discovered that, when plopped in front of the tube, about half of television viewers also text friends on their cell phones or update their Facebook profiles or check E-mail on their BlackBerries. What an antsy bunch.
There’s no doubt that ubiquitous Internet access enables us to do more things during waking hours. But the catch is that we are doing those things poorly. The human brain is not wired for multi-tasking. Unlike computers, which can run multiple processes concurrently, our brains prefer to perform tasks sequentially.
When we switch back and forth between different activities, much of our mental energy is spent transitioning instead of understanding. Processing television images activates a different part of the brain than does processing information from text. Add conversation to the mix and the brain is in a constant state of flux.
A group of researchers conducted an experiment in which they asked participants to sort index cards, first in silence, then while listening for a specific tone in a random series of sounds. Participants sorted the cards with equal speed in both cases, but difficulty remembering what was on the index cards when distracted with the second task.
The researchers found that when a brain performs multiple tasks, activity shifts from the hippocampus, which is responsible for the memory, to the striatum, which is responsible for repetitive activities. Simply put, multi-tasking forces our brains to behave more like computers – blindly processing information without considering context. Multi-tasking makes us dumber and more forgetful.
Some studies have shown that obsessive multi-tasking also releases stress-inducing hormones that can lead to fatigue and confusion. More worrisome, repeatedly attempting to do too much at once may permanently inhibit our abilities to focus and analyze information.
Technology is not the enemy. Many of today’s high-tech devices make our lives safer, more convenient and more fun. The danger is that instead of controlling these tools we are allowing them to control us. We have bought into the false notion that getting stuff done is more important than doing stuff well.
A writer of maxims from the first century B.C. once noted: “to do two things at once is to do neither.” Wise words. Chances are he didn’t write them while riding his chariot.
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