[Exploring Life] Multitasking is a Delusion: The extent to which we can sometimes become a victim of our own delusions can be quite surprising. A delusion is a false belief that has been accepted as fact, and is quite resistant to reason or common sense. In other words, delusions are remarkably resilient and durable. They originate in our mind and have the power to condition our thought and behaviour. In this sense, a delusion is a form of theatre, a dramatization of illusion under the guide of reality.
Multitasking is a form of mental degradation; it is merely a means to rapidly shift our attention ever so quickly across a variety of tasks. The delusion is that we accomplish more and that the mind can handle more than one task at a time. We do not accomplish more, nor are we able to do more than one thing at a time. That is to say, from the perspective of the development of the mind, multitasking is a problem to be overcome. Those that lay claim to being effective “multitaskers” are embracing a habit of mind that only serves to fragment their concentration, attention, and awareness.
Multitasking Redefined: The World English Dictionary defines multitasking as: “to work at several different tasks simultaneously.” Think about this for a moment – several (more than two) tasks (any pieces of work) simultaneously (at precisely the same time). Now imagine any single moment in which you actually hold or work on more than two pieces of work in precisely the same moment. The World English Dictionary has provided a definition of something that does not exist. However, dictionaries do not typically concern themselves with the validity of a word only its use, in other words, dictionaries sometimes provide definitions that are indefinite.
The definition of multitasking cannot be an ability to work at several different tasks simultaneously. I propose that a more accurate definition might be:
Multitasking is a rapid shifting of attention across several different tasks that creates the illusion of simultaneity and heightened productivity.
Experiment with your own experience. Identify three distinct tasks. Imagine that these tasks must be done simultaneously and relatively quickly. Now attempt to do all three in the same moment. You quickly discover that it isn’t possible. Using our own common sense and a little bit of personal experimentation we now know that the original definition of multitasking is incorrect and impossible. You might also begin to sense that the energy you are using to switch between tasks in quite significant; multitasking requires more energy and is far less efficient than concentration.
However, using the term multitasking to describe the rapid shifting of attention across a variety of tasks is a valid use of the the term and it is in this sense that I will use it for the balance of this article. There is nothing wrong with rapidly shifting our attention in situations that require it. Mental degradation, however, begins to occur when this rapid shifting of attention becomes a common mode of interacting with the world around us. The quality of our mind (our thoughts, perceptions, comprehension, apprehension, ideas, imagination, and creativity) degrades as essential capacities such as awareness, discernment, focus, concentration, and contemplation fragment.
Chronic Multitasking Degrades the Normal Functioning of the Brain: Within the embrace of multitasking lies an abhorrent addiction to speed and quantity, which are, in some mercurial way, linked to vacuous notions of achievement and progress. Out modern approaches to living have become desperately short-sighted, crass, and self-centred. We have created a society that is addicted to the intersection of speed and quantity, and has no apparent regret in sacrificing quality, imagination and creativity. We have lost our sense of artistic presence in the world, and this is why everything has become a material matter of economy and function in he absence of spirit and form. This serves to create a basis for a collective mental degradation in which our experience of life is increasingly fragmented, shallow, taut, agitated, and fearful.
Brain science reveals that the ways in which we choose to interact with the world around us has a direct physical impact on the physiology of the brain. That is to say, the brain literally changes in response to our experience and how we think about our experience. In fact, the brain is not able to distinguish between a thought and the actual experience itself. To the brain both constitute reality, and both cause changes in its structure of neural pathways. When the rapid shifting of our attention across more and more “things to do” becomes chronic it degenerates the normal functioning of the brain. This means that multitasking does have the potential to degrade the normal functioning of the brain.
Over the last twenty years, Meyer and a host of other researchers have proved again and again that multitasking, at least as our culture has come to know and love and institutionalize it, is a myth. When you think you’re doing two things at once, you’re almost always just switching rapidly between them, leaking a little mental efficiency with every switch. Meyer says that this is because, to put it simply, the brain processes different kinds of information on a variety of separate “channels”—a language channel, a visual channel, an auditory channel, and so on—each of which can process only one stream of information at a time. If you overburden a channel, the brain becomes inefficient and mistake-prone.
Read more: The Benefits of Distraction and Overstimulation — New York Magazine
Multitasking, or rapidly shifting our attention across various tasks, is not a desired quality of mind, though it clearly has a place in emergency situations in which we are required to rapidly shift our attention in order to survive. Multitasking as an emergency response engages our fight or flight response, and therefore stimulates the production of hormones that ready our body for emergency action. While there may be emergency situations that out of necessity require a rapid shifting of attention from one thing to another, chronic multi-tasking results in the body maintaining a fight or flight response for too long leading to anxiety, nervousness and exhaustion. That degradation leads to a decline in basic capacities of mind such as concentration, focus, clarity, perception, attention, awareness, comprehension and apprehension.
Through a biological process called neuroplasticity, the brain creates pathways that trigger certain thoughts and reactions. The more we think a certain thought or have a specific kind of experience the stronger the associated neural pathways become eventually becoming so ingrained they are habitual. Chronic multitasking means that the brain has literally become hard-wired to rapidly and superficially shifting attention across a range of tasks. In other words, the physiology of our brain begins to support chronic multitasking as a habitual if not addictive way of being in life.
Wilful Blindness: Perhaps one of the most obvious social problems created by multitasking is the use of cell phones while driving. Notably, people that believe they can text and drive at the same time. First, whatever it is that is being texted simply isn’t that important. We have come to believe that because we can now communicate more voraciously that what we have to say actually matters. Communication technologies have increased, it seems, a false sense of self-importance, and for someone to be texting while driving is obviously stupid and arrogant. Second, it is absolutely impossible to remain aware of our driving while attempting another task. The brain simply cannot achieve this.
It’s madness of course. Our belief that somehow we can drive and talk, drive and surf, drive and text is just another form of willful blindness.
- Maraget Heffernan in Why Multitasking Makes Us Stupid
Multitasking may be thought of as a form of information overload, a phenomenon that clearly degrades our mind. However, I like Margaret Heffernan’s description of multitasking as wilful blindness since it places the responsibility on each of us.
Who Invented Multitasking?: The word multitasking is a combination of multi with task. Random House defines multitasking as: –noun Computers – the concurrent or interleaved execution of two or more jobs by a single CPU. Thus it is a word originating in the field of computer science as a term used to describe parallel functions of computer processors.
The human mind is not a computer processor; it is something far superior, but more importantly is something significantly different.
Technology a result of human thought, not a model of it. We have allowed the language of computer technology to invade physiology. We refer to computer processors that multitask, and then embrace the term as if it were also a function of the human mind. Computer memory has very little in common with human memory. Yet, for some reason, we tend to embrace if not attempt to adopt functions that are technological in origin as if they were a part of our own physiological being.
Technopomorphism is a creative twist on the word anthropomorphism, which means to attribute human qualities to other animals or inanimate objects, or to interpret non-human experience and phenomenon as if it were human. Anthro means human, and morph means form. Anthropomorphism is a form of bias in the sense that it creates a perspective in which everything we perceive around us is imbued with human qualities. Techno comes from techne meaning procedures and methods. The word technology does not refer directly to hardware and software, it instead refers to the procedures and methods that serve to create the hardware and software. Technopomorphism is therefore, like its brother anthropomorphism, a form of bias that imbues human beings with the methods and procedures at the heart of technology.
Multitasking originates in technopomorphism and therefore bias.
Far too much of our experience has become biased and tainted by the signs and symbols of new technologies as well as business. While the technologies may offer some advantages, we should be careful to use language in a manner that equates the human to the machine. Words and the meaning we assign to them are quite literally the “stuff” of thought. Embracing language that is meekly constructed within a particular expertise and using it to describe experiences and phenomenon beyond that realm as if it were true only serves to denigrate thought.
Multitasking as Cultural Artifact: Multitasking reflects a misguided cultural addiction for production, efficiency, and progress. In this sense, multitasking is really nothing more than a direct extension of an unhealthy with consumption. Not only is more better, so we are to believe, multi-tasking invites the grammatically offensive notion of wanting more better faster. Speed and the desire to increase the speed of production and productivity is a banner for progress as collective insanity. New technologies have obviously accelerated many of the process associated with work, most notably communication.
Multitasking does not mean, however, that the quality of our thought has accelerated or improved. It may may that our individual quality of thought has suffered in the midst of our collective addiction to speed.
In Divided Attention David Glenn notes that, The illusion of competence is one of the things that worry scholars who study attention, cognition, and the classroom. Experiments far too often reveal the glaringly obvious. We need to return to first principles and investigate ideas and phenomenon within the context of our own experience and not rely on bland generalized academic research that all too often misses the mark. We own our own experience and we can investigate that experience authentically. The real classroom is always immediate; the real teacher is always within. It is also interesting to note that scholars can barely define and locate attention, let alone describe how it is divided. Yet we can all experience it authentically for ourselves.
Once common sense is confirmed by research a wide range of bizarre conclusions are often formulated: “debate about whether laptops should be allowed in the classroom.” Only in education would a debate this vacuous take place; laptops have nothing what so ever to do with the constant degradation of attention ins schools. Here is the most bizarre conclusion in the article:
If you want to create the best environment for learning, I think it’s best to have students listening to you and to each other in a rapt fashion. If they start taking notes, they’re going to miss something you say.
The assumption that listening to someone talk equals learning is false. Frankly, if the teacher is unable to talk in “rapt fashion” then they don’t deserve attention, and if they talk for too long students should be allowed to get up and leave. In this sense, divided attention is required for intellectual survival. Unfortunately the article itself only continues to get itself lost and confused by mapping out a vacuous debate about laptops in the classroom, and loses its original focus – divided attention. Being able to divide our attention between a laptop and a boring long-toothed lecture may in fact be an act of survival.
Another problem confounding academic research is an inability to clearly define what it is they are researching. For example, learning, memory and intelligence lack a coherent and shared definition nor do they have precise physical locations within the human body, yet these terms are constantly used as if some kind of consensus exists.
Chronic Multitasking Degrades Experience: Our minds are the space of thought, imagination, ideation, improvisation, wanderings, musings, intuition, feelings and emotions. The mind is intimate with the body, and the body with the mind. In the world of the bodymind, thoughts have cellular presence. In other words, thoughts not only matter, thoughts become matter. When a rapid shifting of attention becomes persistent it results in the erosion of attention, concentration, focus, comprehension, apprehension, perception, imagination, and ultimately creativity. Eventually our mind loses its capacity to focus on anything with depth and clarity, and we become addicted to shallow and superficial forms of interaction with the world around us. This shallowness and superficiality is mirrored in the body as nervousness and anxiety.
We feel how we think; we think how we feel.
The end effect of chronic multitasking is not superior output, it is an inferior mind. The exterior effect of chronic multitasking is a lack of presence. By this I mean that we struggle to maintain our presence in simple and everyday situations and circumstances. Eventually, under the pressure of chronic multitasking, the mind grows weak and ineffectual. Core capacities such as concentration, attention, focus, and discernment become frail and brittle. The habitual rapid attention changing behavior morphs into an addiction then eventually becomes the norm for personal interaction with the world around us. While their are situations that certainly warrant the need for short-term multitasking, but these situations are under normal circumstances far and few enough that multitasking should never become chronic.
Chronic multitasking invades our everyday experience and even the simple act of watching a movie or reading a book becomes a monumental effort in attempting to keep the mind focused and the body quiet. I have even noticed people that seem to struggle to maintain a conversation. You can see in their eyes and facial expressions that their presence is haphazardly moving in and out of the moment. I have noticed this in myself, especially when I feel as though other matters are pressing. Regardless of the reasons, however, we need to preserve our ability to be present and understand that a great deal of our rapid attention shifting is perhaps wasteful.
Some of us pride ourselves in multitasking, or getting as many things done as possible in the least amount of time. However, we constantly overestimate our own abilities to manage and cope with the increasing levels of complexity we manufacture for ourselves. We also significantly underestimate the virulent effects this has on our brain and mind. What begins as an inability to concentrate slowly morphs into subtle yet disturbing feelings of anxiety and insecurity. Perhaps sleep becomes difficult.
In reality, our minds can only focus on one thing at a time.
[Revised March 2011]
Related Articles
- Rewired: The Psychology of Technology – How technology influences family life, education, the workplace, and every waking moment of our lives.
- NPR: Think You’re Multitasking? Think Again
- ABC News: 8 Ways to Improve Your Memory
- How Not to Multitask
