your brain needs a break - multitasking not good!
September 27th 2010 20:44
Signature Tune
1) "Multitasking" is largely an illusion. The brain is designed to focus on just one problem at a time. When you split your attention between multiple tasks, your performance at each one suffers immensely. It’s a bit like putting in a full workday on just four hours of sleep. You can do it, but you won’t be aware of how severely you’ve been handicapped.
2) Distraction is a feature of our OS, a bit of legacy code designed to keep us alive as cavemen. We were smart enough and creative enough to figure out how to turn a chunk of volcanic glass into an axe head, but we’d get killed if we got so wrapped up in the creative process that the sound of a hungry growl from the nearby bushes failed to instantly command our full attention.
So in a way, every time there’s something clamoring for our attention in our peripheral perception — be it a sound or something visual — some old part of our brain processes it as a downscaled version of a panther attack.
3) There's a difference between having an experience and truly learning.The brain needs some time, free from agendas, to fully process an experience or a piece of information so that we can fully benefit from it in the future.
4) One possible side-effect of continually checking email, Twitter, Facebook, et cetera is that it might provoke a "drug addict" response. When we started to engage in this kind of behavior, finding a good email in the Inbox (like an unexpected party invitation) made us feel great. After regular repetition over time, though, we now get bored unless we find good email, or a funny Twitter post. So we might unconsciously keep checking those sites semi-obsessively, like a rat in a lab experiment who keeps pressing a lever in the hopes of getting a food pellet and a rush of dopamine.
Richtel's tone was decisively non-alarmist; he made it clear that the neurological effects of all of this stimulation provided by computers, phones, and other devices is a complicated interaction, and that it's the subject of ongoing research and debate. By allowing us to offload trivial tasks to our phones (such as “Where is my next meeting, and how to I get there from the train station?”), perhaps it leaves our thoughts uncluttered for more important things, like remembering not to laugh at the CTO’s ridiculous hair transplants.
Still, found the discussions so interesting that I decided to try a casual experiment. I created a few new Mission Rules and Best Practices for myself:
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