Tuesday, January 20, 2015

Do Not Multi-Task!

http://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/jan/18/modern-world-bad-for-brain-daniel-j-levitin-organized-mind-information-overload

Russ Poldrack, a neuroscientist at Stanford, found that learning information while multitasking causes the new information to go to the wrong part of the brain. If students study and watch TV at the same time, for example, the information from their schoolwork goes into the striatum, a region specialised for storing new procedures and skills, not facts and ideas. Without the distraction of TV, the information goes into the hippocampus, where it is organised and categorised in a variety of ways, making it easier to retrieve.
Posted by Arun at 10:03 PM

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The Gardener's avatar

The Gardener · 531 weeks ago

I read a piece on Multitasking by Walter Frick in The Economic Times of the 22nd January. It says that trying to do two things at a time results in doing both the things badly. But if you cannot avoid it, your ability to multitask may depend on whether you are trained to do two tasks separately or simultaneously. In fact, the word 'multitasking' is a misnomer: You are not really doing two things at the same time; you are rapidly switching between them. The switching process is mentally taxing; so the result is poor performance in both.

The piece goes on to results of research by cognitive scientists at Brown drawing a connection between multitasking and the research on learning and memory. It concludes with the example that if you are typing while listening to a conference call in office, you are less likely to make mistakes if you were equally distracted when you learn to type.
1 reply · active 531 weeks ago
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macgupta 81p · 531 weeks ago

I suspect that when one can do two things at the same time, like take shorthand, or read music and play it, one or more of the actions is "reflex action" and the other is more "cognitive".

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