Mental Degradation: Multitasking

[Explor­ing Life]The extent to which we fall prey to our own delu­sions can some­times be quite sur­pris­ing. A delu­sion is a false belief that has been accepted as fact, and is quite resis­tant to rea­son or com­mon sense. Mul­ti­task­ing is both a delu­sion and a form of intel­lec­tual ero­sion; it is not a skill to be devel­oped nor a desired qual­ity of mind. While there may be sit­u­a­tions and cir­cum­stances that require a rapid shift­ing of atten­tion from one thing to another, chronic multi-tasking results in a degra­da­tion of the mind. That degra­da­tion is expressed as a loss in the power of con­cen­tra­tion and atten­tion.

What is Mul­ti­task­ing: Pro­fes­sor Earl Miller notes that mul­ti­task­ing is really rapid switch­ing from task to task, while the brain cre­ates the delu­sion that we are doing more than one thing at a time (see NPR: Think You’re Mul­ti­task­ing? Think Again). The real­ity of mul­ti­task­ing is that it is noth­ing more than a degraded form of atten­tion super­fi­cially placed on a vari­ety of things across increas­ingly short­ened time inter­vals. Mul­ti­task­ing is a form of self-induced hyper­ac­tiv­ity and atten­tion deficit behav­ior. In essence, mul­ti­task­ing is a form of distraction.

There may be spe­cific kinds of cir­cum­stances and sit­u­a­tions that require the rapid shift­ing of atten­tion across a broad range of tasks. In the midst of an emer­gency or cri­sis, for exam­ple, mul­ti­task­ing may be an essen­tial skill that can result in the preser­va­tion of life. When our instinct for sur­vival is acti­vated and we feel the chem­i­cal rush of fight or flight, mul­ti­task­ing is a desired qual­ity. How­ever, mul­ti­task­ing, like the fight or flight instinct, is not a state of body­mind that should become habit­ual or chronic.

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

What is the Ori­gin of 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 the word orig­i­nates in the field of com­puter sci­ence as a term to describe 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 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. The human mind and mul­ti­task­ing is an exam­ple of an insen­si­tive and mis­lead­ing adop­tion of tech­no­log­i­cal function.

Mul­ti­task­ing as Cul­tural Artifact: Mul­ti­task­ing reflects a cul­tural desire for pro­duc­tion and pro­duc­tiv­ity. In this sense, mul­ti­task­ing is an exten­sion of an unhealthy obses­sion with con­sump­tion. Not only is more bet­ter, 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 processes of liv­ing, most notably com­mu­ni­ca­tion. Per­haps we can per­form cer­tain tasks faster, and there­fore com­plete a series of tasks far more quickly. This does not mean, how­ever, that the qual­ity of our thought has accel­er­ated. 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, “That illu­sion of com­pe­tence is one of the things that worry schol­ars who study atten­tion, cog­ni­tion, and the class­room.” Exper­i­ments reveal the glar­ingly obvi­ous, and that is when peo­ple are mul­ti­task­ing their atten­tion is weak­ened and they miss things that hap­pen around them. Fur­ther, when mul­ti­task­ing becomes habit­ual the mind’s abil­ity to focus, con­cen­trate, and pay atten­tion becomes weak­ened. Again, glar­ingly obvious.

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.

When does lis­ten­ing to some­one talk equal learn­ing? Frankly, if the teacher is unable to talk in “rapt fash­ion” then they don’t deserve atten­tion. 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.

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, yet these terms are con­stantly used as if they exists some kind of con­sen­sus around them. The last place to seek a vibrant under­stand­ing of learn­ing is within the con­fines of educationism.

Mul­ti­task­ing is a Form of Men­tal Degra­da­tion: 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 become cel­lu­lar real­i­ties. In other words, thoughts not only mat­ter, thoughts aremat­ter. When a rapid shift­ing of atten­tion becomes per­sis­tent it results in the ero­sion of atten­tion and con­cen­tra­tion. 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 mul­ti­task­ing is not supe­rior out­put, it is an infe­rior mind. 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 inter­act­ing with the world around us. That which is short and quick become of the object of desire; that which is sus­tained and deep becomes the object of avoidance.

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 vir­u­lent feel­ings of anx­i­ety and inse­cu­rity. Per­haps sleep becomes dif­fi­cult. The end result is an increase in men­tal health dis­or­ders, dis­ease, and ill­ness. In real­ity, our minds can only focus on one thing at a time; mul­ti­task­ing, or the abil­ity to hold more than one thought in pre­cisely the same moment, is an impossibility.