Anna Borges, A Multitasker’s Guide to Regaining Focus, NYTimes, March 11, 2024.
Doing a single task:
First, “multitask” itself is typically a misnomer. According to experts, it’s not possible to do two things at once — unless we can do one without much thinking (like taking a walk while catching up with a friend).
“Usually, when people think they’re multitasking, they’re actually switching their attention back and forth between two separate tasks,” said Gloria Mark, a professor of informatics at the University of California, Irvine, and author of “Attention Span: A Groundbreaking Way to Restore Balance, Happiness and Productivity.”
Let’s consider what happens when you engage in a single task like cooking dinner. From the moment you decide what to make, different regions of your brain, collectively referred to as the cognitive control network, collaborate to make it happen, said Anthony Wagner, a professor of psychology at Stanford and the deputy director of the university’s Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute.
This network includes areas of your brain that are involved in executive function, or the ability to plan and carry out goal-oriented behavior. Together they create a mental model of the job at hand and what you need to accomplish it. Your brain might do this, Dr. Wagner said, by drawing on both external and internal information, like the ingredients in your fridge or your memory of the recipe.
Switching cost:
As you would probably expect, the potential harm varies depending on the activity and how adept you are at doing it. But, generally, “when we switch between tasks, we pay what’s been dubbed a ‘switch cost,’” Dr. Wagner said. “We’re going to be slower and less accurate than we would have been if we stayed on a single task.”
Speed and precision aren’t the only risks, either. Multitasking is more cognitively demanding, even when we’re doing things we find enjoyable or easy. When we multitask, we can tax our working memory, or our ability to hold and handle information in our mind, Dr. Byers explained. “The more we overload that system and the more we’re trying to keep in our brains at once, the more mental fatigue it can lead to,” she said. And other studies have found that multitasking can set our heart racing, raise our blood pressure, trigger anxiety, dampen our mood and negatively impact our perception of the work at hand.
The article then goes on with advice for focusing on one thing at a time, which is all well and good. For example:
Dr. Mark suggested you start by observing yourself throughout the day, noticing when and how you task-switch without realizing it. From there, the advice is simple yet challenging: You’ll need to practice monotasking, or doing one thing at a time, to gradually retrain your focus and build your tolerance.
Then we have: When to keep multitasking ... by sticking to your strengths weighing the risks, finding break points, and, finally, Use multitasking when it actually helps. And so forth, yada yada, as they said on Seinfeld.
This is all about one of my current hobby-horses, and a recurring theme here on the Savanna, regulating the mind, which is in turn about consciousness. It puts me in mind of Walter Freeman's speculation that consciousness is like frames in a motion picture, flitting from frame to frame at the rate of about 10 frames (of consciousness) per second. I discuss this in, e.g. this post: Two more thoughts on ChatGPT: Conceptual spaces and system time-steps. You might also want to look at an old working paper: Music and the Prevention and Amelioration of ADHD: A Theoretical Perspective. For that matter, I've got a number of posts that mention ADHD, which, I suppose, could be characterized as involuntary multi-tasking.
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