Chang W. Lee/The New York Times Kord Campbell, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, has multiple computer screens set up in his home office.Updated, June 8, 11:30 a.m. | Clifford Nass, a professor of cognitive science, and Gloria Mark, a professor of informatics, join the discussion.
Updated, June 8, 7:20 a.m. | Russell A. Poldrack, a neurobiologist, joins the discussion and says that multitasking can have an insidious effect on learning, particularly in children. But Timothy B. Lee of Princeton argues that the Internet can improve social interactions.
In the first article of a Times series, “Your Brain on Computers,” Matt Richtel profiles a family, the Campbells, who are tethered to e-mail, BlackBerrys, iPads and other electronic devices. The constant use of digital media seems to be taking a toll on their lives and their ability to focus.
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New research is showing that such immersion can cause multitaskers to have more fractured thinking and trouble shutting out irrelevant information, and that even when they are offline, those problems persist. A lot of Americans feel stress from juggling too much incoming information, but have to be online for work.
What are some strategies for unplugging from the demand of digital devices? Is there such a thing as too much multitasking?
- Nicholas Carr, author of “The Shallows” and “The Big Switch”
- Gary W. Small, psychiatry professor, U.C.L.A.
- William Powers, author, “Hamlet’s BlackBerry”
- Liza Daly, software engineer
- Steven Yantis, professor of psychological and brain sciences
- Russell A. Poldrack, professor of neurobiology
- Timothy B. Lee, Princeton’s Center for Information Technology Policy
- Clifford Nass, professor of cognitive science
- Gloria Mark, professor of informatics
It Starts With the Individual
Nicholas Carr is the author of “The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains” and “The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, From Edison to Google.”
Life would be intolerable if we weren’t able to multitask. Imagine not being able to cook a meal while listening to the radio or chatting with your spouse. Or imagine being forced to do only one thing at a time all day at work. The tedium would be unendurable.
Your career may suffer if you aren’t available all the time. You may feel socially isolated if you disconnect. But you’ll protect your brain.
The ability to juggle tasks, to keep track of different streams of information simultaneously, is one of the human brain’s great strengths.
The problem today is that, thanks to our more or less continuous connections to the Internet and other electronic media, we never stop multitasking. And we juggle more tasks and bits of information than ever before. That’s taking a big toll. Constant multitasking is associated with shallower thinking, weakened concentration, reduced creativity, and heightened stress.
Focus on One Thing
Gary W. Small is a professor of psychiatry and biobehavioral sciences and director of the Memory and Aging Research Center at the David Geffen School of Medicine at University of California, Los Angeles. He is is co-author of the forthcoming book, “The Naked Lady Who Stood on Her Head: A Psychiatrist’s Stories of His Most Bizarre Cases.”
There is such a thing as too much multitasking, but how much is too much will vary. With practice, the brain becomes more efficient at multitasking, but in general, multitaskers make more errors than people who focus on one task at a time.
Every hour or so turn off all your gadgets.
Multitaskers believe they’re getting more done, but instead they’re just getting faster and sloppier.
Many of us escalate from multitasking to partial continuous attention: we’re constantly scanning the environment for the next exciting bit of information — the next text message, IM, email, or even land-line phone call. That next ping or buzz or ring interrupts our focus and charges up the dopamine reward system as we anticipate something new and more exciting than the task at hand.
You Have to Want to Unplug
William Powers is the author of “Hamlet’s BlackBerry: A Practical Philosophy for Building a Good Life in the Digital Age”, to be published this month. The book grew out of an essay he wrote as a fellow at Harvard University’s Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy.
The problem isn’t our iPhones and BlackBerrys, it’s how we’re using them. We’ve simply gone overboard, surrendered too much of our lives to our little screens.
Know why you’re withdrawing from your devices and make it a habit.
First, it’s essential to recognize that this is a completely normal human response to a powerful new technology. People have been addicted to connectedness since the dawn of time. We need it to get ahead in life, learn about the world beyond ourselves, find happiness and meaning. Some of the most accomplished figures in history have struggled with the challenge captured in Matt Richtel’s story, that restless inability to stop connecting.
Socrates was so hooked on the dominant connectedness of his time — oral conversation — he couldn’t bear to spend time outside the walls of Athens. Why take a quiet walk in the country when he could be where the action was, chatting up his friends? A friend showed Socrates that putting some distance between yourself and your busy, connected life does wonders for the mind. Today we just need to learn that same lesson.
We’ll Learn Fast
Liza Daly is a software engineer who specializes in applications for the publishing industry. She is the president of Threepress Consulting Inc. and recently released e-book reading software called Ibis Reader.
My husband and I are both software engineers, and my business in particular involves a lot of gadgets, including half a dozen specialized e-reading devices. The hardest part is finding the actual gadget I need (and then waiting for it to recharge — most of them sit idle for weeks on end).
Right now, we’re still playing with the new toys, but we’ll find a good equilibrium over time.
So yes, we have our iPhones and Kindles on our nightstands, and we don’t differentiate between staring at screens for our jobs and staring at screens for pleasure. But as the number of screens in the world has multiplied, so too has interest in traditional, hands-on crafts (mine is gardening and cooking).
Of course, we all feel distracted at times, and part of adapting to social media and ubiquitous Internet is about learning to turn those distractions off. Right now, we’re all still playing with the new toys, but if humans are good at anything, we’re good at returning to an equilibrium over time.
E-mail Can Wait
Steven Yantis is a professor of psychological and brain sciences at Johns Hopkins University.
The first step in developing a strategy for dealing with information overload is to recognize that the human mind, while amazingly adaptable, is nevertheless limited in what it can do — and that those limitations have to be respected.
With ‘multitasking,’ deep thinking about a complex topic can become nearly impossible.
Most people have a strong intuition that they are good multitaskers — that they can easily handle doing several things at once. However, that intuition is often wrong.
In fact, the term “multitasking” is misleading. With rare exceptions, people don’t carry out two (or more) tasks literally at the same time; they switch between them, and each switch takes time — a “switch cost.” The switch costs are small but easily measurable in an experimental psychology lab.
Addictive Signals
Russell A. Poldrack is the director of the Imaging Research Center and professor of psychology and neurobiology at the University of Texas at Austin.
As a busy researcher who owns an iPhone, iPad, and several computers, I often find it very difficult to practice what I preach when it comes to the dangers of multitasking (though I absolutely never talk on the cellphone while driving).
Our research shows that multitasking can have an insidious effect on learning, making it less flexible.
I think that the first key to successfully unplugging is to gain some insight into the effects that multitasking and information overload have on our own minds. As nicely discussed in the book “The Invisible Gorilla” by Chris Chabris and Dan Simons, humans are often very poor at understanding how our own minds work, and multitasking is a perfect example: Everyone thinks that they are one of those 3 percent of “supertaskers,” even as the scientific data shows that multitasking takes a serious toll on our performance as well as on our emotional lives.
Our research has shown that multitasking can have an insidious effect on learning, changing the brain systems that are involved so that even if one can learn while multitasking, the nature of that learning is altered to be less flexible. This effect is of particular concern given the increasing use of devices by children during studying.
The Social Internet
Timothy B. Lee is an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute and a member of the Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton University. He blogs at Bottom-Up.
When a new technology enters the social scene, hand-wringing about its social effects is never far behind. So I was not surprised to see Matt Richtel offer the latest contribution to this shopworn genre. The trends he describes are not nearly as novel — or as alarming — as he and the experts he interviews seem to think.
We shouldn’t be too worried if we spend more time on Facebook looking at our friends’ baby pictures and less time working on that spreadsheet.
The article quotes Stanford’s Clifford Nass, who warns that excessive use of digital technologies will “diminish empathy by limiting how much people engage with one another.” That may be true for some people, but for most people the reality is just the opposite: the Internet broadens and strengthens our social ties and greatly enhances our ability to engage with one another.
The Internet may have strained Kord Campbell’s marriage, but I’ve found it to have the opposite effect on my own. My wife and I are rarely out of touch for more than a few hours. We use a steady stream of text messages, instant messages, and e-mails to stay constantly in touch. We’re able to share the day’s joys and setbacks in real-time even when we’re miles apart.
Why Are You Multitasking?
Clifford Nass is a professor of communications and cognitive science at Stanford University. He is the author of the forthcoming “The Man Who Lied To His Laptop: What Technologies Teach Us About Human Relationships.”
The most important way to deal with your own multitasking is to consider a distinction proposed by Professor Barbara Fried at Stanford: are you multitasking because new information attracts you or because what you are currently doing is boring you?
Old and young may have different reasons for addictively checking e-mail.
I suspect that younger people are multitasking because they believe that information they haven’t seen is better than the information that they are currently working with. This may explain why they tend to prefer reading summaries to actual books, why they are willing to jump from one Web page to another, and why they do homework while Facebooking, Twittering, I.M.ing, texting, watching television and talking on the phone.
On the other hand, I suspect that older multitaskers understand that most new information is not worthwhile, but it’s better than what they’re currently doing.
Change the Workplace Norm
Gloria Mark is a professor in the Department of Informatics, University of California, Irvine. She studies human-computer interaction.
For many individuals, the use of applications like e-mail or Facebook follows a schedule where they receive rewards at random intervals. From psychological learning theory we know that random reinforcement schedules are the hardest to extinguish. It’s like playing the Las Vegas slot machines: one keeps checking e-mail for that next hit.
Some companies have experimented with interruption-free times or by allowing e-mail to be turned off.
Though withdrawal is not easy, I advocate working in “batch mode” where information technology is used at certain time intervals. This could mean reading e-mail once in the morning, once after lunch, and then again once in the evening. With enough discipline, e-mail could even be reduced to a single reading each day.
Other people may be dependent on information technology from to the demands of their workplace. People have to react to e-mail or I.M. or phone calls to keep current with work, and mobile devices allow work to bleed into personal life.