The Effects of Multitasking and the ‘Digital Overload’
From Wired Science came 2 great articles, one current and one in their archives that I found as a result of the first. Both stories were written by Brandon Keim and deal with the effects of our increasingly digital lives on our brain. The current article addresses the effects of multitasking, often citing a recently published study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by Nass and Stanford psychologists Anthony Wagner and Eyal Ophir (Citation: “Cognitive control in media multitaskers.” By Eyal Ophira, Clifford Nass, and Anthony D. Wagner. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Vol. 106 No. 33, August 25, 2009. ) They surveyed 252 students on their media consumption habits, with the 19 students who multitasked the most and 22 who multitasked least singled out. Those students took two computer-based tests, each completed while concentrating only on the task at hand. In a third test, a different group of 30 high- and low-multitaskers were asked to identify letters on a screen. In every test, the students who spent less time multitasking (reading email, surfing the web, watching TV, and talking on the phone) performed best. I wanted to single out an interesting quote from Wagner as food for future thought -
“The causality question is enormous here,” he said. “There’s a lot of social pressure to multitask. You’re getting tweets, e-mails, IMs from multiple people at once, and the web offers unbelievable opportunities for text and video. It may be thrust upon you.”
The earlier article written by Keim back in February is an interview with author and journalist Maggie Jackson regarding her latest book Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age. Jackson paints a grim picture of the effects of “our high-speed, overloaded, split-focus and even cybercentric society” on our ability to concentrate and think creatively.
“The telegraph might have done just as much to the psyche [of] Victorians as the Blackberry does to us,” said Jackson. “But at the same time, that doesn’t mean that nothing has changed. The question is, how do we confront our own challenges?”
Their discussion centers around the psychological studies and research that have been done regarding this subject and what general steps could be taken to prevent this situation. My interest was in how the opportunities provided to us by technology are undermining our attention span, and thus our abilities to problem-solve, relating, and deep thinking. Especially because in essence, those are what separate us from the technology in the first place.
[ Multitasking Muddles Brains, Even When the Computer Is Off ]
[ Digital Overload Is Frying Our Brains ]