What are you actually accomplishing when you’re doing five things at once?? Maybe not as much as you think.? Scientists have found that “self-described multitaskers performed much worse on cognitive and memory tasks that involved distraction than did people who said they preferred to focus on single tasks.”? Their research, along with other research on memory and learning, is profiled in The Chronicle of Higher Education. The researchers profiled believe that the best learning comes from single-minded attention: one professor even forbids his students from taking notes in class. (HT: Marginal Revolution) [%comments]
Pay Attention!
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I no longer have any choice but to pay attention. The ol’ neurons don’t fire as rapidly any longer.
My hat’s off to the prof who forbids taking notes. I scribbled my way through plenty of classes as a mechanical engineering student and often got the feeling that I was too busy writing to really listen and try to comprehend.
I’ve found taking notes helps me concentrate on what’s being said.
Is this necessarily the best comparison? I’m not surprised multitaskers do a worse job filtering out distractions, but for people whose second (or third, or fourth, etc.) task is something productive, it’s entirely possible that solving the two simultaneously is quicker than solving them serially.
In short: in this study there was a “distraction,” but in the real world, the second or third task is productive.
Multitasking helps me complete tasks when the task at hand is too boring to complete without a distraction. Eg. music or a movie while doing manual-labor, cleaning, or routine coding tasks makes it possible for me to keep up my motivation and/or not fall asleep (especially when coding).
If the task requires any degree of intelligent thought or learning though, I like quiet.
Students of mindfulness, especially Buddhists, have been talking about this for several millenia. Glad to see there is modern scientific evidence against multitasking as well.
In one of my first classes in grad school (abstract algebra), the professor talked and wrote on an overhead projector with a roll (cerebral palsy prevented his using the blackboard). So I got together with two other students: one wrote what the prof wrote, one wrote what he said, and the other simply listened and read intently (we rotated the jobs). Afterwards, we’d debrief and share what we had. It turned out to be an excellent system.
I agree about note-taking in general. As an undergraduate I had to sit through Art History and Music History at Santa Barbara. Sitting was about all I contributed and my grades proved it but over 40 years later I remember more of that information than any other undergraduate course. Conversely, in the doctoral program at UCLA our econometrics course was taught the old-fahioned way, all in matrix algebra w/out benefit of software packages that did it for you. I took such copious notes that I had a complete teaching prep when it was over and I was able to refer to those notes for years.