Multitasking and the Sticky WWWeb

"Multitasking messes with the brain in several ways. At the most basic level, the mental balancing acts that it requires—the constant switching and pivoting—energize regions of the brain that specialize in visual processing and physical coordination and simultaneously appear to shortchange some of the higher areas related to memory and learning. We concentrate on the act of concentration at the expense of whatever it is that we’re supposed to be concentrating on. ... Even worse, certain studies find that multitasking boosts the level of stress-related hormones such as cortisol and adrenaline and wears down our systems through biochemical friction, prematurely aging us. In the short term, the confusion, fatigue, and chaos merely hamper our ability to focus and analyze, but in the long term, they may cause it to atrophy. ... A brain attempting to perform two tasks simultaneously will, because of all the back-and-forth stress, exhibit a substantial lag in information processing." ~ Walter Kirn, "The Autumn of the Multitaskers" The Atlantic

Kirn describes a situation where he was distracted from his task by an online image of Kevin Federline and became enmeshed in a rolling snowball of unnecessary and undesirable activities, taking him away from his core task. Here is the Big Words Explanation from Kirn's article: "What the avalanche overwhelmed was a mental function that David E. Meyer, a psychology professor at the University of Michigan, calls 'adaptive executive control.' Thanks to Federline, I lost my ability, as Meyer would say, to 'schedule task processes appropriately' and to 'obey instructions about their relative priorities.' "

Perhaps we could all benefit from exercising our adaptive executive control by sticking a little closer to our To Do lists. I know I could, so now I am off to have my shower, which I should have done half an hour ago before I read this article by Nicholas Carr that hyperlinked me to this one on multitasking. I'd like to blame Meredith's post for starting my own personal avalanche this morning, but the truth is I only have my own propensity for multitasking to blame!