I think, if I were to pass tomorrow, that my colleagues would say of me I was an okay guy, did a decent job and cared about people but to not talk to him about multi-tasking. That subject has earned me something of a reputation around here. Not because I do it so well, but because I am so vocally opposed to it. You may ask why would anyone be opposed to multi-tasking.
Well, as something of a student of human behavior, I have long seen that, no matter how much we convince ourselves otherwise, we dont do it well. I am a staunch advocate for orginization, focus and discipline. In my observations these things are at the foundation for success. Any company or orginization that is very successful or widely respected that you analyze employs these actions in their daily operation.
I have had discussion after discussion about this subject and its always pointed out to me well look at so an so, (s)he is doing several things there and handling it quite well. One of my core arguements against multi-tasking was that if we were truly multi-tasking then you should not be able to distract one from handling multiple tasks. In otherwords, if they were 'truly' multi-tasking then equal though, brain power, focus, etc would be given to each task and that if another task was added (i.e. a distraction of some kind) then it would not cause an iterruption in the other tasks being carried out. Which most of you may know, thats just not the case. Furthermore, Ive pointed out that the frequency of errors goes up dramatically when someone attempts so call multi-tasking.
Well I caught a commercial ad that NPR would be doing a series on multi-tasking and of course it caught my attention.
Abraham Lincoln once said I will hold to a point of view until someone shows me the value of another or opposing point of view. In other words, he said I am going to stand strong on my particular position until someone shows me that its wrong or that it needs to be refined. I hold this philosophy very closely. So I wanted to hear the series they (NPR) had on multi-tasking for as much the possibility that they would support my position as they may offer information or proof I was wrong and that my particular position may need to be adjusted.
Well I heard the third part of it this morning and it seems the scientific evidence is in and we actually do not multi-task at all. Its an illusion. What they have proven is that we actually switch between different tasks at a high rate. They have shown that the brain will actually normalize, sorta switch off if you will and then restart analyzing the next task and what resource would be needed (speech, coordination, visual and so on).
Furthermore, they have shown our brain goes into something of a brown out when trying to multi-task as it tries very hard to allocate resources to each task, but since it was not designed for such operations it cannot allocate equal resources to multiple tasks.
They are even showing that it may be 'muddling' the brains of younger people, teens and pre-teens. They are showing that trying to multi-task shuts down connections to other important information in the brain. When we switch to a new task, we close connections to the previous task we were on and when we go back to it we have to re-initialize those connections which takes time and resources.
For those of you that like to do several things while driving, such as talk on a phone, try and eat something, etc. Well they have shown that the slow down in responses and reactions is as bad as a driver that is intoxicated. They stated that the statistics show that someone trying to multi-task while driving is four times as likely to be in a serious accident.
So after all this time (we're talking years) I may have finally found my vindication for my stand. I was prepared to change my stand but it would seem my original observations and conclusions were pretty much dead on.
What really clued me to this was that in the late 90's (1998, 1999 time frame) I went into a music store where you could preview the music before you bought it (it wasnt as popular then as it is now). They had these CD players set up with pretty decent headphones.
I popped in a CD I was interested in and sat down to sample the tracks. I had the volume up probably a bit louder than would be normal and I ran across a track that was so good to me that it just captured me. It struck a very deep connection, emotional even. I listed to it and it just resonated with me. So I bought the CD. I take it home (at the time I was not married and lived in an apartment) pop it in the CD player and selected that particular track again. Immediately I notice it did not have the impact on me in my apartment that it did in the music store. It was still a good song, but it was not striking the same cord with me.
Being the student of human behavior that I can be at times I made note of this and over the next couple of months as I went in that same store and sampled CD's to purchase I noticed that same thing repeated. I would listen to a track at the store, it would have that impact but once I got it home, it did not.
Well I didnt put two and two together until one day I was driving in my first Grand Prix and had the music up fairly loud listening to a CD that I had bought at that store. I pulled to a 4-way stop intersection. Almost instantly I noticed that I was checking the intersection out, looking for vehicles, but was not really registering whether or not I saw a vehicle. I dont know how to explain it I just know I was looking at the intersection but it was like I was not fully processing the visual information. I turned down the music and immediately noticed that now I was able to process the information better.
Putting it all together I realized that you can overwhelm a sensory input to such an extent that your brain nearly ignores all others. Overwhelm auditory senses and your brain devotes so much resources to processing the information that little is left to process other inputs.
From there, as I entered into a corporate world that seemed big on multi-tasking, I deduced that we just were not meant nor designed to multi-task. That grew into my being so vocal against that whole concept. Ive even shown on a few occasions that processing things one at a time can be done faster than someone trying to multi-tasking.
I'll even give you an analagy or maybe a comparison. Anyone remember parallel printers? Remember how slow they could be? Yep, parallel processing is essentially trying to multi-task, process several bits of information at the same time. You see where that ended up. Today, we are even moving away from parallel processing of hard drive information and opting for much much faster SERIAL (read: one at a time) drives (SATA). Even USB is a serial transfer.
Maybe we should take some clues from the machines we are building to carry out the tasks we do.
Originally Posted by SyntheticShield
