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NYT: New data on the problems of "multitasking"
Merlin Mann | Mar 26 2007
Slow Down, Multitaskers, and Don’t Read in Traffic - New York Times Yesterday's New York Times front page ran an article pulling together the results of several recent studies looking at how interruptions and attempts to multitask can affect the quality of work as well as the length of recovery time. Here's one bit that really grabbed me:
And, from a PDF of another of the studies cited ("Isolation of a Central Bottleneck of Information Processing with Time-Resolved fMRI"), here's a telling snippet from the article's abstract (yes, most of the rest of it is well over my head):
My own feelings on the myth of multi-tasking are well-documented, but it's fascinating to see research interest focused in this area -- although it's certainly not surprising, given its potential impact on knowledge workers and the industries that employ them. Again, from yesterday's NYT article:
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[...] Multi-tasking is generating a...Submitted by Plate-Spinning Productivity: MultiTasking That Works - MindT (not verified) on March 27, 2007 - 5:40pm.
[...] Multi-tasking is generating a lot of blog chatter lately; recent studies suggest that trying to accomplish a lot of things at once does not make us more productive, rather, actually seems to make us less efficient. (well.. er.. yeah we knew that, we just like to deny it.) And now, there is evidence from MRI’s to show that the brain isn’t equiped to focus on more than one task at a time. If forced to multi-task, there’s a neural bottleneck, and everything takes just a little bit longer. [...] » POSTED IN:
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