Is Multitasking Really a Good Thing?
It’s the “art” that many of us assume we’ve managed to perfect.
While you’re doing your homework, your television’s in front of you with the volume on high, and you are texting your friends about plans for Friday night. After the season finale gets boring, you choose to listen to your favorite CD and ditch texting your friend for scrolling through Twitter.
Is your attention really on all these things? Can you honestly say that you’re applying full focus to all these events happening before you?
If you’re shaking your head yes, then you might want to reconsider.
In National Public Radio’s (NPR) piece, “Think you’re Multitasking? Think Again,” neuroscientist Earl Miller says that it is impossible for humans to focus on more than one piece of information at a time.
The proliferation of social media and mobile technology has led younger people to have shorter attention spans than the elderly.
Social Times’ infographic, “How Social Media Is Ruining Our Lives”, reports that 25% of young people forget the names and details of close friends and family, simple tasks like leaving pots or pans on the stove, and even their own birthdays from time to time.
I wasn’t surprised to learn that the average attention span today is present for five seconds — ten years ago it was 12 seconds.
Because of the Internet’s uncanny ability to distract the user, interruptions become habitual in our brains, which is injurious when it comes to completing daily tasks. Every time we start on something new, our brains have to renew themselves. This creates a cycle that in turn makes our minds hungry for new information just as soon as we’ve received the old. Our need for information has sped up, but our ability to pay attention is compromised.
Lacking the attention to focus on the more important things in life doesn’t only rob you of your memory, but of fundamental social cues and skills you learn from interacting with others, says Daniel Goleman in his new book Focus: The Hidden Driver of Excellence. Causing a person to feel less important or neglected because you have a notification to answer isn’t proper social etiquette.
In order to lead richer lives, we must learn to elongate our attention span and concentrate on what we have right in front of us, first, before anything else.
Checking the urges we have for updating our newsfeeds and browsing through multimedia can helps us be at peace with the demands of both the virtual and physical realms. It won’t be easy — but if we want to lead more fulfilling lives, it’s something that we’ve got to do.
