The Multitasking Mind
By Sanders Kleinfeld
Novelist Walter Kirn recently wrote an extremely insightful, extremely hysterical piece in The Atlantic on the effects of a 21st-century, electronic-gadget-glut-enabled multitasking culture on our beleaguered Pleistocene brains.
It's a long read, but well worth it. And I highly recommend perusing it while viewing a classic rerun of Saved By The Bell, like I did. Here's a fabulous snippet on the evolution of the metaphors we've used over the ages to characterize the machinery of the mind:
Much of the problem is the metaphor. Or perhaps it's our need for metaphors in general, particularly when the subject is our minds and the comparison seems based on science. In the days of rudimentary chemistry, the mind was thought to be a beaker of swirling volatile essences. Then came classical physical mechanics, and the mind was regarded as a clocklike thing, with springs and wheels. Then it was steam-driven, maybe. A combustion chamber. Then came electricity and Freud, and it was a dynamo of polarized energies—the id charged one way, the superego the other.Now, in the heyday of the microchip, the brain is a computer. A CPU.
Except that it's not a CPU. It's whatever that thing is that's driven to misconstrue itself—over and over, century after century—as a prototype, rendered in all-too- vulnerable tissue, of our latest marvel of technology. And before the age of modern technology, theology. Further back than that, it's hard to voyage, since there was a period, common sense suggests, when we didn't even know we had brains. Or minds. Or spirits. Humans just sort of did stuff. And what they did was not influenced by metaphors about what they ought to be capable of doing but very well might not be equipped for (assuming you wanted to do it in the first place), like editing a playlist to e-mail to the lover whose husband you're interviewing on the phone about the movie he made that you're discussing in the blog entry you're posting tomorrow morning and are one-quarter watching certain parts of as you eat salad and carry on the call.
Well worth at least 20% of your divided attention!
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It's been written over(1) and over(2) and over(3) that we don't, really, multi-task...and what we fool ourselves into thinking is multitasking is really high overhead task switching.
I long ago cleaned my systems of any and all instant messaging software from my system. (a move that has confounded and frustrated no end of coworkers) I've amused my wife on more than one occasion by describing my "societally induced ADD" ... though I wasn't (really) kidding.
It's seductive, though. My perception that I'm actually accomplishing something. Thirty seven outlook/excel/firefox/IE/putty/whatever windows open gives me a sense that I _must_ be doing something.
Perhaps "doing something" is the corporate coping mechanism when you can't "accomplish something." Maybe especially for corporate monolith knowledge workers..?
I want to accomplish..to succeed. If where I work makes that difficult, am I more likely to take the easy road to "feeling" like I'm doing something, or the hard road of trying to move the 9000lb gorilla? (I wonder how closely this tracks to the "twitter effect" (5) and getting a false feeling of accomplishment...?)
As a student of martial arts, my sensei has mentioned several times that to really "get" something..to where it starts to be automatic, you've got to do it 1000 times. (nice, conveniant round number I know). I read somewhere (drat..don't remember where) that this is the point when the task moves from the consious mind to the unconscious mind...from short term storage to long term, if you will.
I was struck by one section, later on in the article, that seemed to directly support this:
Meyer, it’s worth noting, is a relative optimist among the researchers studying multitasking, since he’s convinced that some people can learn, with enough practice, to perform two tasks simultaneously as successfully as if they were doing them sequentially. But "enough practice" turns out to mean at least 2,000 tries...
Cornell university did a study back in the 1960's that confirmed that even the process of listening to music can affect one's ability to concentrate/find solutions.
It all seems to be related, somehow. =^)
cheers!
-aaron
"serial multitasker"
(typing this in a corporate nosiy cubeville, wearing headphones...yet still checking email 4-6x, browsing the web, and idly wondering if it's time for the afternoon starbucks run...)
(1)http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000022.html
(2)http://headrush.typepad.com/creating_passionate_users/2005/03/your_brain_on_m.html
(3)http://lifehacker.com/software/how-to/multitask-without-losing-your-mind-315200.php
(4)http://discuss.joelonsoftware.com/default.asp?joel.3.181869.29 - about 1/3 of the way down
(5)http://headrush.typepad.com/creating_passionate_users/2007/03/is_twitter_too_.html