Turns out I’ve had good reason to worry about how The Matrix is impacting humans. Over at Health.com:
A new study suggests that people who often do multiple tasks in a variety of media—texting, instant messaging, online video watching, word processing, Web surfing, and more—do worse on tests in which they need to switch attention from one task to another than people who rarely multitask in this way.
Specifically, heavy multitaskers are more easily distracted by irrelevant information than those who aren’t constantly in a multimedia frenzy, according to the study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Chris, Bora, Phil, Sci, Isis, Physioprof, Zuska, Jessica, PalMD, Grrl, Janet and the rest… we may have a problem. Then again, what’s wrong with being mad as a hatter?
August 25th, 2009 at 11:15 pm
As always, media got it wrong. See the correct interpretation.
August 25th, 2009 at 11:26 pm
Oh Bora, you didn’t like the set up for the Alice in Wonderland trailer?
As for blogs, I’ve had the sense of falling down the rabbit hole since day one…
August 26th, 2009 at 12:38 am
You guys should consider writing a response to the anti-vaxxer nuts at Age of Autism who had the audacity to challenge your understanding of the science:
http://www.ageofautism.com/2009/08/responding-to-chris-mooney-in-the-lat.html
August 26th, 2009 at 3:07 am
Of course, the really important thing about this study is that… hang on, I have a text…
August 26th, 2009 at 4:54 am
On a more serious note, the media have largely ignored the fact that “multimedia” in this study refers to 12 activities, which include print media, TV, music, non-music audio and telephone calls, rather than just online stuff. As Vaughan from Mind Hacks says, “You could have multitasked five out of the twelve activities in the 1950s.”
August 26th, 2009 at 5:51 am
Ah, hm. So in other words, multi-taskers are bad at multi-tasking, as in competently engaging in and successfully achieving multiple tasks in quick succession, as this requires attentional volition for each particular task when it happens to be on the docket. But we’re not supposed to believe that conclusion, because:
a) flightiness might turn out to be good for something or other somewhere down the line (to be shown by future experiments),
b) the success of some conceivable tasks actually hinges upon flightiness (or susceptibility to roving attention — like being able to turn your attention towards a distracting stimulus, which might i.e., turn out to be a child running on to the road).
But (a) is not an objection, it’s a statement about every conclusion you can ever make in any study. And (b) is (at least for us who took Young Drivers lessons) entirely on-task behavior, so long as we are speaking of the task of driving. (So are we meant to separate the task of driving into sub-tasks, then evaluate them…?)
Have I understood the two objections fairly? Am I missing something? By all means, correct me if I’m wrong.
August 26th, 2009 at 7:31 am
It may be oan old wives tale, but aren’t women meant to be better at multi-tasking than men? So, if multi-tasking is ‘bad’ for you, then does that mean men have got it right?
August 26th, 2009 at 8:06 am
Vaughan’s post that Ed mentioned is here and it is excellent.
August 26th, 2009 at 8:06 am
Oh, and I have commented on the (awsecome) Alice trailer on Twitter about a month ago…
August 26th, 2009 at 9:01 am
Ian, I’ve also heard that women are better an multi-tasking but I don’t think it’s an old wives tale. I’d argue an evolutionary component. In hunter-gatherer societies the men went far afield hunting while the women gathered and forgaged closer to camp to watch over children. Men focused heavily on single task, tracking an animal to kill it. Women focused on many tasks, examining differnt potential food sources while watching our for danger to themselves and their offspring, and keeping an eye on the kids to see they didn’t wander off. I think this is also an argument why men are resistant to asking directions. Any guy who wandered off and couldn’t find his way home couldn’t feed his family and probably didn’t make it long enough to pass on his genes in any case. So there’s a built-in defensiveness (real men don’t ask directions) about getting lost.
August 26th, 2009 at 10:47 am
Evidently I have a soft spot for the science communicators today.
The only argument in the new post that I didn’t comment on above was the “1950s argument”:
“In other words, listening to music while reading a book counts as ‘media multitasking’, as does chatting on the telephone while watching television, none of which need digital technology. In fact, you could have multitasked five out of the twelve activities (print, TV, music, nonmusic audio, phone calls) in the 1950s.”
Well, okay, but for one thing, listening to music is an activity, but it isn’t usually a task — there’s no necessary goal there except stimulation. For another thing, one would expect the results to generalize to those that like to engage in the above activities in the 1950s multimedia environment. That proves that the present-day media has forgotten its Marshall McLuhan, but not much more.
A much more telling criticism would be that the thing that distinguishes our present-day multi-taskers from their 1950s analogues is the quality (or complexity) of the tasks, but that of course isn’t the experiment that was done. And the media exaggerated the importance of a half-second delay, of course, though they’re helped in making their hyperbole when you have comments to the effect that half a second is an eternity in neuroscience.