Passages

 Multitasking!

A.

Do you read while listening to music? Do you like to watch TV while finishing your

homework? People who have these kinds of habits are called multi-taskers.

Multitaskers are able to complete two tasks at the same time by dividing their focus.

However, Thomas Lehman, a researcher in Psychology, believes people never really

do multiple things simultaneously. Maybe a person is reading while listening to music,

but in reality, the brain can only focus on one task. Reading the words in a book will

cause you to ignore some of the words of the music. When people think they are

accomplishing two different tasks efficiently, what they are really doing is dividing their

focus. While listening to music, people become less able to focus on their

surroundings. For example, we all have experience of times when we talk with friends

and they are not responding properly. Maybe they are listening to someone else talk, or

maybe they are reading a text on their smart phone and don't hear what you are

saying. Lehman called this phenomenon “email voice"

B.

The world has been changed by computers and its spin offs like smart-phones or

cellphones. Now that most individuals have a personal device, like a smart-phone or a laptop, they are frequently reading, watching or listening to virtual information. This

raises the occurrence of multitasking in our day to day life. Now when you work, you

work with your typewriter, your cellphone, and some colleagues who may drop by at

any time to speak with you. In professional meetings, when one normally focuses and

listens to one another, people are more likely to have a cell phone in their lap, reading

or communicating silently with more people than ever, liven inventions such as the

cordless phone has increased multitasking. In the old days, a traditional wall phone

would ring, and then the housewife would have to stop her activities to answer it. When

it rang, the housewife will sit down with her legs up and chat, with no laundry or

sweeping or answering the door. In the modern era, our technology is convenient

enough to not interrupt our daily tasks.

C.

Earl Miller, an expert at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, studied the

prefrontal cortex, which controls the brain while a person is multitasking. According to

his studies, the size of this cortex varies between species, He found that for humans,

the size of this part constitutes one third of the brain, while it is only 4 to 5 percent in

dogs, and about 15% in monkeys. Given that this cortex is larger on a human, it allows

a human to be more flexible and accurate in his or her multitasking.. However, Miller

wanted to look further into whether the cortex was truly processing information about

two different tasks simultaneously. He designed an experiment where he presents

visual stimulants to his subjects in a wax that mimics multi-tasking. Miller then attached

sensors to the patients " heads to pick up the electric patterns of the brain. This sensor

would show if " the brain particles, called neurons, were truly processing two different

tasks. What he found is that the brain neurons only lit up in singular areas one at a

time, and never simultaneously.

D.

Davis Meyer, a professor of University of Michigan, studied the young adults in a

similar experiment. He instructed them to simultaneously do math problems and

classify simple words into different categories. For this experiment. Meyer found that

when you think you are doing several jobs at the same time, you are actually switching

between jobs. Even though the people tried to do the tasks at the same time, and both

tasks were eventually accomplished, overall, the task took more time than if the person

focused on a single task one at a time.

People sacrifice efficiency when multitasking, Gloria Mark set office workers as his

subjects. He found that they were constantly multitasking. He observed that nearly

every 11 minutes people at work were disrupted. He found that doing different jobs at

the same time may actually save time. However, despite the fact that they are faster, it

does not mean they are more efficient. And we are equally likely to self-interrupt as be

interrupted by outside sources. He found that in office nearly every 12 minutes an

employee would stop and with no reason at all, cheek a website on their computer, call

someone or write an email. If they concentrated for more than 20 minutes, they would

feel distressed. He suggested that the average person may suffer from a short

concentration span. This short attention span might be natural, but others suggest that

new technology may be the problem. With cellphones and computers at our sides at all

times, people will never run out of distractions. The format of media, such as

advertisements, music, news articles and TV shows are also shortening, so people are

used to paying attention to information for a very short time.

F.

So even though focusing on one single task is the most efficient way for our brains to

work, it is not practical to use this method in real life. According to human nature,

people feel more comfortable and efficient in environments with a variety of tasks,

Edward Hallowell said that people are losing a lot of efficiency in the workplace due to

multitasking, outside distractions and self-distractions. As a matter of fact, the changes

made to the workplace do not have to be dramatic. No one is suggesting we ban e-mail

or make employees focus on only one task. However, certain common workplace

tasks, such as group meetings, would be more efficient if we banned cell-phones, a

common distraction. A person can also apply these tips to prevent self-distraction.

Instead of arriving to your office and checking all of your e-mails for new tasks, a

common workplace ritual, a person could dedicate an hour to a single task first thing in

the morning. Self-timing is a great way to reduce distraction and efficiently finish tasks

one by one, instead of slowing ourselves down with multi-tasking.