Christine Rosen, in The New Atlantis, does a masterful job of collating all the arguments against multitasking in her Myth Of Multitasking. I discovered the piece this morning courtesy of the editorial staff of the New York Times, who put it in the Reading File with the uncritical lede, "In The New Atlantis, Christine Rosen explores the dangers of multitasking."
Note: the title does not mean that people aren't multitasking, just that its purported benefits are mythical. And what are those supposed benefits? Well, she sort of charges right past that with a handwave:
In modern times, hurry, bustle, and agitation have become a regular way of life for many people—so much so that we have embraced a word to describe our efforts to respond to the many pressing demands on our time: multitasking. Used for decades to describe the parallel processing abilities of computers, multitasking is now shorthand for the human attempt to do simultaneously as many things as possible, as quickly as possible, preferably marshalling the power of as many technologies as possible.
Well, at least in my case, I am not trying to do as many things simultaneously as possible, as quickly as possible, using as many technologies as possible. I am trying to remain connected to a large, sprawling network of thousands of edglings, and to gain an understanding of the world through that connection. The instant messaging, blogging, RSS readers, and other tools are merely a means to accomplish that, and in fact, a necessary one.
But Rosen doesn't explore these aspirations of sociality at all, or really examine motivations at any more depth than setting up a strawman with the express purpose of burning it down.
It is heartening that Rosen did look into the modern cognitive studies about attention, and did report on some of the positive results about multitasking and attention:
[from The Myth of Multitasking.
Psychologist David Meyer at the University of Michigan believes that rather than a bottleneck in the brain, a process of “adaptive executive control” takes place, which “schedules task processes appropriately to obey instructions about their relative priorities and serial order,” as he described to the New Scientist. Unlike many other researchers who study multitasking, Meyer is optimistic that, with training, the brain can learn to task-switch more effectively, and there is some evidence that certain simple tasks are amenable to such practice.
Uh, yes, simple skills like flying fighter jets at Mach 4, or playing basketball. Nearly every sort of physical skill mastery involves multitasking. Meyer's and other researchers work is directed toward discovering how people can learn to coordinate many complex tasks. We have yet to be able to conduct magnetic resonance tests on basketball players or fighter pilots, but that's clearly where the researchers want to get to.
As usual, Rosen is focused on the efficiency of task switching, and not its effects, because her arguments are totally industrial age. The presumption is that individual productivity is the highest good, and anything that deviates from that is bad. What if we are multitasking without trying to be more efficient?
She continues:
But his [Meyer's] research has also found that multitasking contributes to the release of stress hormones and adrenaline, which can cause long-term health problems if not controlled, and contributes to the loss of short-term memory.
My contention is that as people become more used to multitasking they are stressed by it less. More research is needed in that area.
In one recent study, Russell Poldrack, a psychology professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, found that “multitasking adversely affects how you learn. Even if you learn while multitasking, that learning is less flexible and more specialized, so you cannot retrieve the information as easily.” His research demonstrates that people use different areas of the brain for learning and storing new information when they are distracted: brain scans of people who are distracted or multitasking show activity in the striatum, a region of the brain involved in learning new skills; brain scans of people who are not distracted show activity in the hippocampus, a region involved in storing and recalling information. Discussing his research on National Public Radio recently, Poldrack warned, “We have to be aware that there is a cost to the way that our society is changing, that humans are not built to work this way. We’re really built to focus. And when we sort of force ourselves to multitask, we’re driving ourselves to perhaps be less efficient in the long run even though it sometimes feels like we’re being more efficient.”
In the wonderful book, Kluge, Gary Marcus makes a solid case that the human mind is really bad at memory, and that we have developed all sorts of compensating techniques to counter that weakness. Our memories can be demonstrably changed by simple shifts in context or in framing questions, as any successful trial attorney knows. Evidence shows that we reconstruct memories out of fragments, or by contextual associations with more general knowledge.
[from Kluge by Gary Marcus]
In the final analysis, we would be nowhere without memory; as Steven Pinker once wrote "To a very great extent, our memories are ourselves." Yet memory is arguably the mind's original sin. So much is built on it, and yet it is, especially in comparison with computer memory, wildly unreliable.
[...]
In the final analysis, the fact that our ability to make inferences is built on rapid but unreliable contextual memory isn't some optimal tradeoff. It's just a fact of history: the brain circuits that allow us to make inferences make do with distortion prone memory because that's all evolution had to work with. To build a truly reliable memory, fit for the requirements of human deliberate reasoning, evolution would have to start over. And, despite its power and elegance, that's the one thing that evolution can't do.
My suggestion is that Rosen, and the other detractors of the multitasking flow state, takes it as a given that optimizing our (truly miserable) human memory is obvious. My belief is that we are shifting to alternative forms of cognition where the context is relied on more than our flaky memories.
[she goes on]
If, as Poldrack concluded, “multitasking changes the way people learn,” what might this mean for today’s children and teens, raised with an excess of new entertainment and educational technology, and avidly multitasking at a young age? Poldrack calls this the “million-dollar question.” Media multitasking—that is, the simultaneous use of several different media, such as television, the Internet, video games, text messages, telephones, and e-mail—is clearly on the rise, as a 2006 report from the Kaiser Family Foundation showed: in 1999, only 16 percent of the time people spent using any of those media was spent on multiple media at once; by 2005, 26 percent of media time was spent multitasking. “I multitask every single second I am online,” confessed one study participant. “At this very moment I am watching TV, checking my e-mail every two minutes, reading a newsgroup about who shot JFK, burning some music to a CD, and writing this message.”
Who says kids are getting an excess of simultaneous media? They are definitely shifting their consciousness, and these media are becoming non-rivalrous (don't require foreground full attention). But the 'excess' is pejorative and judgmental.
She has made her case with a few modern studies and some apparently alarming statistics about young people, and then she quotes the infamous study that equated multitasking with smoking dope. Of course she quotes Linda Stone, who characterized continuous partial attention an affliction of executives: "constantly scanning for opportunities and staying on top of contacts, events, and activities in an effort to miss nothing.” She quotes the author of CrazyBusy, Edward Hallowell, who suggests we are driving ourselves crazy or at least ADD.
And then she wheels out William James:
To James, steady attention was thus the default condition of a mature mind, an ordinary state undone only by perturbation. To readers a century later, that placid portrayal may seem alien—as though depicting a bygone world. Instead, today’s multitasking adult may find something more familiar in James’s description of the youthful mind: an “extreme mobility of the attention” that “makes the child seem to belong less to himself than to every object which happens to catch his notice.” For some people, James noted, this challenge is never overcome; such people only get their work done “in the interstices of their mind-wandering.” Like Chesterfield, James believed that the transition from youthful distraction to mature attention was in large part the result of personal mastery and discipline—and so was illustrative of character. “The faculty of voluntarily bringing back a wandering attention, over and over again,” he wrote, “is the very root of judgment, character, and will.”
It may be that in this age -- unlike Jame's 1890s -- we need to retain the youthful mind-wandering instead of a settled sort of thinking in comfortable and well-worn ruts. The evidence that learning while multitasking leads to memories being laid down in different areas of the brain, areas associated with learning not settled memories, also suggests that we are responding to an imperative: we need a new sort of thinking, and a new sort of memory, to deal with this new century.
Rosen is looking back, wistfully, to a time when things were simpler, quieter, and less hurried. Just like Nick Carr, who believes the Web is making is stupid because we don't think the way we used to, Rosen is suggesting that the new ways of thinking that we are developing are illegitimate and inferior to what we are leaving behind.
Let's be clear. One-sided, left-brain dominated thinking, based on the inherent irrationality and content-driven memory of the human mind, is not necessarily the end all and be all of human understanding. And most of what is involved in reasoning is learned, not innate.
Rosen and others would make it seem that the changes in our perceptions, thoughts, and ethics that come from new patterns of interaction through new media are somehow overthrowing a god-given system that is inherent. It is not. The pre-Web industrial mindset is taught. We learn it through family, school and cultural institutions, but mostly through media that we are exposed to.
Boiled down, Rosen's argument can be turned on its head: We are using new media, and it is changing our perceptions, how we process the world, and the ethics that arise from our beliefs. She would like us to go back to linear time, industrial age norms, and the ethical systems of the last century, where we would, among other things, take it as a given that personal productivity should be placed squarely ahead of all other goods.
At the same time, I can't disagree that there are messy cognitive issues associated with multitasking, but human reasoning is a mess, across the board. We are born innumerate, irrational, and with terrible memories. We have developed cultural artifacts like writing, math, physics, and logic to counter some of these defects, and they help some of us some of the time.
But there is nothing stopping us from developing new, different, and perhaps better ways to perceive the world and understand it. And we are. And Rosen, even quoting William James, can't stop us.
Judging the 'better' in that assertion will be a job for new -- not old -- ethics, though.
