Our ever-increasingly ubiquitous technology makes possible all manner of things that would have been insurmountable just decades ago. We carry smartphones that envelope more computational power than mainframes just a generation ago. Yet for all this power at our fingertips we seem to forget that we are still very much human animals with limitations. One … Continue reading Multitasking: A Powerful and Diabolical Illusion
The hit drama Mad Men shows us that cocktail parties can be fun — colorful drinks and colorful conversations with a host of very colorful characters. Yet cocktail parties also highlight one of our limitations, the inability to multitask. We are single-threaded animals despite the constant and simultaneous bombardment for our attention from all directions, … Continue reading Cocktail Party Science and Multitasking
We have indeed reached the era of peak multi-tasking. It’s time to select a different corporate meme. Study after recent study shows that multi-tasking is an illusion — we can’t perform two or more cognitive tasks in parallel, at the same time. Rather, we timeshare: dividing our attention from one task to another sequentially. These … Continue reading Are You Monotasking or Just Paying Attention?
Luddites and technophobes rejoice, paper-bound books may be with us for quite some time. And, there may be some genuinely scientific reasons why physical books will remain. Recent research shows that people learn more effectively when reading from paper versus its digital offspring. From Wired: Paper books were supposed to be dead by now. For … Continue reading Paper is the Next Big Thing
We all lose our car keys and misplace our cell phones. We leave umbrellas on public transport. We forget things at the office. We all do it — some more frequently than others. And, it’s not merely a symptom of aging. Many younger people seem to be increasingly prone to losing their personal items, perhaps … Continue reading Now Where Did I Put Those Keys?
Einstein transformed our notions of the universe, teaching us, amongst other things, that time is relative to the velocity of the observer. While he had in mind no less than the entire cosmos when constructing his elegant theories, he failed to consider relativity in the home and workplace, and specifically how women and men experience … Continue reading The Spacetime Discontinuum
Competing with the co-worker who is a frenzy of activity is stressful. You know the type. This person is constantly rushing from one assignment to the next, hosting multiple hallway conversations, leaving meetings to take a call, dropping a call to answer an email, multitasking on 3 devices. After all, you have to keep up … Continue reading Mr.Busy
It’s official — teens can’t stay off social media for more than 15 minutes. It’s no secret that many kids aged between 8 and 18 spend most of their time texting, tweeting and checking their real-time social status. The profound psychological and sociological consequences of this behavior will only start to become apparent ten to … Continue reading Media Multi-Tasking, School Work and Poor Memory
If you’re an office worker you will relate. Recently, you will have participated on a team meeting or conference call only to have at least one person say, when asked a question, “sorry can you please repeat that, I was multitasking.” Many of us believe, or have been tricked into believing, that doing multiple things … Continue reading Single-tasking is Human
The long-term downward trend in the number injuries to young children is no longer. Sadly, urgent care and emergency room doctors are now seeing more children aged 0-14 years with unintentional injuries. While the exact causes are yet to be determined, there is a growing body of anecdotal evidence that points to distraction among patents … Continue reading Childhood Injuries on the Rise: Blame Parental Texting
[div class=attrib]From the New York Times:[end-div] NEW forms of media have always caused moral panics: the printing press, newspapers, paperbacks and television were all once denounced as threats to their consumers’ brainpower and moral fiber. So too with electronic technologies. PowerPoint, we’re told, is reducing discourse to bullet points. Search engines lower our intelligence, encouraging … Continue reading Mind Over Mass Media