Multi-tasking isn't making you more efficient, it's frying your attention span
Daniel Goleman - Published Sept. 9, 2017
We all suffer from the digital-age version of life’s “full catastrophe”: incoming emails, pressing texts, phone messages, and more, storming in all at once – not to mention the Facebook posts, Instagrams, and all such urgent memos from our personal universe of social media. Given the ubiquity of smartphones and such devices, people today seem to take in far more information than they did before the digital age.
Decades before we began to drown in a sea of distractions, cognitive scientist Herbert Simon made this prescient observation: “What information consumes is attention. A wealth of information means a poverty of attention.”
Then, too, there are the ways our social connections suffer. Did you ever have the impulse to tell a child to put down her phone and look in the eyes of the person she is talking to? The need for such advice is becoming increasingly common as digital distractions claim another kind of victim: basic human skills like empathy and social presence.
The symbolic meaning of eye contact, of putting aside what we are doing to connect, lies in the respect, care, even love it indicates. A lack of attention to those around us sends a message of indifference. Such social norms for attention to the people we are with have silently, inexorably shifted.
Yet we are largely impervious to these effects. Many denizens of the digital world, for instance, pride themselves on being able to multitask, carrying on with their essential work even as they graze among all the other incoming channels of what’s‑up. But compelling research at Stanford University has shown that this very idea is a myth – the brain does not “multitask” but rather switches rapidly from one task (my work) to others (all those funny videos, friends’ updates, urgent texts. . .). Read full article HERE.
Then, too, there are the ways our social connections suffer. Did you ever have the impulse to tell a child to put down her phone and look in the eyes of the person she is talking to? The need for such advice is becoming increasingly common as digital distractions claim another kind of victim: basic human skills like empathy and social presence.
The symbolic meaning of eye contact, of putting aside what we are doing to connect, lies in the respect, care, even love it indicates. A lack of attention to those around us sends a message of indifference. Such social norms for attention to the people we are with have silently, inexorably shifted.
Yet we are largely impervious to these effects. Many denizens of the digital world, for instance, pride themselves on being able to multitask, carrying on with their essential work even as they graze among all the other incoming channels of what’s‑up. But compelling research at Stanford University has shown that this very idea is a myth – the brain does not “multitask” but rather switches rapidly from one task (my work) to others (all those funny videos, friends’ updates, urgent texts. . .). Read full article HERE.
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