[Nfbf-l] The Myth of Multitasking

[Alan Dicey]

The Myth of Multitasking
In one of the many letters he wrote to his son in the 1740s, Lord 
Chesterfield offered the following advice: "There is time enough for 
everything in the course of the day, if you do but one thing at once, but 
there is not time enough in the year, if you will do two things at a 
   time." To Chesterfield, singular focus was not merely a practical way to 
structure one's time; it was a mark of intelligence. "This steady and 
undissipated attention to one object, is a sure mark of a superior genius; 
as hurry, bustle, and agitation, are the never-failing symptoms of a weak 
and frivolous mind."

In modern times, hurry, bustle, and agitation have become a regular way of 
life for many people - so much so that we have embraced a word to describe 
our efforts to respond to the many pressing demands on our time: 
multitasking. Used for decades to describe the parallel processing 
abilities of computers, multitasking is now shorthand for the human  attempt 
to do simultaneously as many things as possible, as quickly as  possible, 
preferably marshalling the power of as many technologies as  possible.

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, one sensed a kind of exuberance about the 
possibilities of multitasking. Advertisements for new electronic gadgets - 
particularly the first generation of handheld digital devices - celebrated 
the notion of using technology to accomplish several things at once. The 
word multitasking began appearing in the "skills" sections of résumés, as 
office workers restyled themselves as high-tech, high-performing team 
players. "We have always multitasked - inability to walk and chew gum is a 
time-honored cause for derision - but never so intensely or self-consciously 
as now," James Gleick wrote in his 1999 book Faster. "We are multitasking 
connoisseurs - experts in crowding, pressing, packing, and overlapping 
distinct activities in our all-too-finite moments." An article in the New 
York Times Magazine in 2001 asked, "Who can remember life before 
multitasking? These days we all do it." The article offered advice on "How 
to Multitask" with suggestions about giving your brain's "multitasking hot 
spot" an appropriate workout.

But more recently, challenges to the ethos of multitasking have begun to 
emerge. Numerous studies have shown the sometimes-fatal danger of using cell 
phones and other electronic devices while driving, for example, and several 
states have now made that particular form of multitasking illegal.  In the 
business world, where concerns about time-management are perennial, warnings 
about workplace distractions spawned by a multitasking culture are on the 
rise. In 2005, the BBC reported on a research study, funded by 
Hewlett-Packard and conducted by the Institute of Psychiatry at the 
University of London, that found, "Workers distracted by e-mail and phone 
calls suffer a fall in IQ more than twice that found in marijuana 
   smokers." The psychologist who led the study called this new "infomania" 
a serious threat to workplace productivity. One of the Harvard Business 
Review's "Breakthrough Ideas" for 2007 was Linda Stone's notion of 
"continuous partial attention," which might be understood as a subspecies of 
multitasking: using mobile computing power and the Internet, we are 
"constantly scanning for opportunities and staying on top of contacts, 
events, and activities in an effort to miss nothing."

Dr. Edward Hallowell, a Massachusetts-based psychiatrist who specializes in 
the treatment of attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder and has written a 
book with the self-explanatory title CrazyBusy, has been offering therapies 
to combat extreme multitasking for years; in his book he calls multitasking 
a "mythical activity in which people believe they can perform two or more 
tasks simultaneously." In a 2005 article, he described a new condition, 
"Attention Deficit Trait," which he claims is rampant in the business world. 
ADT is "purely a response to the hyperkinetic environment in which we live," 
writes Hallowell, and its hallmark symptoms mimic those of ADD. "Never in 
history has the human brain been asked to track so many data points," 
Hallowell argues, and this challenge "can be controlled only by creatively 
engineering one's environment and one's emotional and physical health." 
Limiting multitasking is essential. Best-selling business advice author 
Timothy Ferriss also extols the virtues of "single-tasking" in his book, The 
4-Hour Workweek. Multitasking might also be taking a toll on the economy. 
One study by researchers at the University of California at Irvine monitored 
interruptions among office workers; they found that workers took an average 
of twenty-five minutes to recover from interruptions such as phone calls or 
answering e-mail and return to their original task. Discussing  multitasking 
with the New York Times in 2007, Jonathan B. Spira, an  analyst at the 
business research firm Basex, estimated that extreme  multitasking - 
information overload - costs the U.S. economy $650 billion  a year in lost 
productivity.
 Changing Our Brains
To better understand the multitasking phenomenon, neurologists and 
psychologists have studied the workings of the brain. In 1999, Jordan 
Grafman, chief of cognitive neuroscience at the National Institute of 
Neurological Disorders and Stroke (part of the National Institutes of 
Health), used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scans to 
determine that when people engage in "task-switching" - that is, 
multitasking behavior - the flow of blood increases to a region of the 
frontal cortex called Brodmann area 10. (The flow of blood to particular 
regions of the brain is taken as a proxy indication of activity in those 
regions.) "This is presumably the last part of the brain to evolve, the most 
mysterious and exciting part," Grafman told the New York Times in 2001 - 
adding, with a touch of hyperbole, "It's what makes us most human." It is 
also what makes multitasking a poor long-term strategy for learning.  Other 
studies, such as those performed by psychologist René Marois of Vanderbilt 
University, have used fMRI to demonstrate the brain's response to handling 
multiple tasks. Marois found evidence of a "response selection bottleneck" 
that occurs when the brain is forced to respond to several stimuli at once. 
As a result, task-switching leads to time lost as the brain determines which 
task to perform. Psychologist David Meyer at the  University of Michigan 
believes that rather than a bottleneck in the  brain, a process of "adaptive 
executive control" takes place, which  "schedules task processes 
appropriately to obey instructions about their  relative priorities and 
serial order," as he described to the New  Scientist. Unlike many other 
researchers who study multitasking, Meyer is  optimistic that, with 
training, the brain can learn to task-switch more  effectively, and there is 
some evidence that certain simple tasks are  amenable to such practice. But 
his research has also found that multitasking contributes to the release of 
stress hormones and adrenaline, which can cause long-term health problems if 
not controlled, and contributes to the loss of short-term memory.

In one recent study, Russell Poldrack, a psychology professor at the 
University of California, Los Angeles, found that "multitasking adversely 
affects how you learn. Even if you learn while multitasking, that learning 
is less flexible and more specialized, so you cannot retrieve the 
information as easily." His research demonstrates that people use different 
areas of the brain for learning and storing new information when they are 
distracted: brain scans of people who are distracted or multitasking show 
activity in the striatum, a region of the brain involved in learning new 
skills; brain scans of people who are not distracted show activity in the 
hippocampus, a region involved in storing and recalling information. 
Discussing his research on National Public Radio recently, Poldrack warned, 
"We have to be aware that there is a cost to the way that our society is 
changing, that humans are not built to work this way. We're really built to 
focus. And when we sort of force ourselves to multitask, we're driving 
ourselves to perhaps be less efficient in the long run even though it 
sometimes feels like we're being more efficient."

If, as Poldrack concluded, "multitasking changes the way people learn," what 
might this mean for today's children and teens, raised with an excess of new 
entertainment and educational technology, and avidly multitasking at a young 
age? Poldrack calls this the "million-dollar question." Media multitasking - 
that is, the simultaneous use of several different media, such as 
television, the Internet, video games, text messages, telephones, and 
e-mail - is clearly on the rise, as a 2006 report from the Kaiser Family 
Foundation showed: in 1999, only 16 percent of the time people spent using 
any of those media was spent on multiple media at once; by 2005, 26 percent 
of media time was spent multitasking. "I multitask every single second I am 
online," confessed one study participant. "At this very moment I am watching 
TV, checking my e-mail every two minutes, reading a newsgroup about who shot 
JFK, burning some music to a CD, and writing this message."

The Kaiser report noted several factors that increase the likelihood of 
media multitasking, including "having a computer and being able to see a 
television from it." Also, "sensation-seeking" personality types are more 
likely to multitask, as are those living in "a highly TV-oriented 
 household." The picture that emerges of these pubescent multitasking 
mavens is of a generation of great technical facility and intelligence but 
of extreme impatience, unsatisfied with slowness and uncomfortable with 
silence: "I get bored if it's not all going at once, because everything  has 
gaps - waiting for a website to come up, commercials on TV, etc." one 
participant said. The report concludes on a very peculiar note, perhaps 
intended to be optimistic: "In this media-heavy world, it is likely that 
brains that are more adept at media multitasking will be passed along and 
these changes will be naturally selected," the report states. "After all, 
information is power, and if one can process more information all at once, 
perhaps one can be more powerful." This is techno-social Darwinism, nature 
red in pixel and claw.

Other experts aren't so sure. As neurologist Jordan Grafman told Time 
magazine: "Kids that are instant messaging while doing homework, playing 
games online and watching TV, I predict, aren't going to do well in the long 
run." "I think this generation of kids is guinea pigs," educational 
psychologist Jane Healy told the San Francisco Chronicle; she worries that 
they might become adults who engage in "very quick but very shallow 
thinking." Or, as the novelist Walter Kirn suggests in a deft essay in The 
Atlantic, we might be headed for an "Attention-Deficit Recession."
Paying Attention
When we talk about multitasking, we are really talking about attention:  the 
art of paying attention, the ability to shift our attention, and, more 
broadly, to exercise judgment about what objects are worthy of our 
attention. People who have achieved great things often credit for their 
success a finely honed skill for paying attention. When asked about his 
particular genius, Isaac Newton responded that if he had made any 
discoveries, it was "owing more to patient attention than to any other 
talent."

William James, the great psychologist, wrote at length about the varieties 
of human attention. In The Principles of Psychology (1890), he outlined the 
differences among "sensorial attention," "intellectual attention,"  "passive 
attention," and the like, and noted the "gray chaotic indiscriminateness" of 
the minds of people who were incapable of paying attention. James compared 
our stream of thought to a river, and his observations presaged the 
cognitive "bottlenecks" described later by neurologists: "On the whole easy 
simple flowing predominates in it, the drift of things is with the pull of 
gravity, and effortless attention is the rule," he wrote. "But at intervals 
an obstruction, a set-back, a log-jam occurs, stops the current, creates an 
eddy, and makes things temporarily move the other way."

To James, steady attention was thus the default condition of a mature mind, 
an ordinary state undone only by perturbation. To readers a century later, 
that placid portrayal may seem alien - as though depicting a bygone world. 
Instead, today's multitasking adult may find something more familiar in 
James's description of the youthful mind: an "extreme mobility of the 
attention" that "makes the child seem to belong less to himself than to 
every object which happens to catch his notice." For some people, James 
noted, this challenge is never overcome; such people only get their work 
done "in the interstices of their mind-wandering." Like Chesterfield,  James 
believed that the transition from youthful distraction to mature  attention 
was in large part the result of personal mastery and  discipline - and so 
was illustrative of character. "The faculty of voluntarily bringing back a 
wandering attention, over and over again," he wrote, "is the very root of 
judgment, character, and will."


Today, our collective will to pay attention seems fairly weak. We require 
advice books to teach us how to avoid distraction. In the not-too-distant 
future we may even employ new devices to help us overcome the unintended 
attention deficits created by today's gadgets. As one New York Times article 
recently suggested, "Further research could help create clever technology, 
like sensors or smart software that workers could instruct with their 
preferences and priorities to serve as a high tech 'time nanny' to ease the 
modern multitasker's plight." Perhaps we will all accept as a matter of 
course a computer governor - like the devices placed on engines so that 
people can't drive cars beyond a certain speed. Our technological governors 
might prompt us with reminders to set mental limits when we try to do too 
much, too quickly, all at once.

Then again, perhaps we will simply adjust and come to accept what James 
called "acquired inattention." E-mails pouring in, cell phones ringing, 
televisions blaring, podcasts streaming - all this may become background 
noise, like the "din of a foundry or factory" that James observed workers 
could scarcely avoid at first, but which eventually became just another 
part of their daily routine. For the younger generation of multitaskers, the 
great electronic din is an expected part of everyday life. And given what 
neuroscience and anecdotal evidence have shown us, this state of constant 
intentional self-distraction could well be of profound detriment to 
individual and cultural well-being. When people do their work only in the 
"interstices of their mind-wandering," with crumbs of attention rationed out 
among many competing tasks, their culture may gain in information, but it 
will surely weaken in wisdom.

 --------------------------------------------------------------------------------Christine Rosen is a senior editor of The New Atlantis and a fellow at theEthics and Public Policy Center.Christine Rosen, "The Myth of Multitasking," The New Atlantis, Number 20, Spring 2008, pp. 105-110.