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2024 Author: Malcolm Clapton | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 03:44
Stanford University professor Clifford Nuss has found good reasons to unlearn multitasking. Based on research, he claims that the more tasks you complete at one time, the less you will be able to learn or remember. You will not be able to concentrate properly on any business.
There are 20 tabs open on a laptop, and you jump from one to another, having time to read two sentences at a time. At the same time, chatting, chewing a sandwich and listening to your favorite track. It seems that you are doing a lot, but in fact it has a very negative effect on brain activity.
Why quit multitasking?
News is an example. If the announcer is telling something, and at the bottom there is a line with news about football or recent tragedies, you will be distracted and, most likely, you will not remember what was broadcast from the screen. Why? Because the more tasks you do, the harder it becomes for your brain to filter out unnecessary information.
In an interview with National Public Radio, Professor Nass said that a multi-tasking person is not able to:
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Focus and filter out unnecessary … The professor tested the work of two groups: in the first, people always perform several tasks at a time, in the second they do it extremely rarely. According to Nass, the difference in their abilities was huge.
People accustomed to multitasking couldn't weed out unnecessary information. Their memory worked much worse, and they were distracted all the time.
- At least do something good … Solving even one problem, such people use a much larger part of the brain than is actually needed, and this does not help them at all. When the scientists asked the participants to perform several actions at the same time, they failed with any. Their mental and thinking abilities were impaired.
Multitasking eats into the brain
When you do multiple tasks all day at the same time, this bad habit directly affects the brain and changes the way information travels. After that, it becomes simply impossible to maintain attention.
If you do multiple tasks all the time, your brain becomes remarkably flexible and adapts to a new way of thinking. It won't be easy to go back to the old, even if you want to. The fact is that the brain has become plastic, but it is not easy to return it to its previous shape.
How does this affect your work?
In his blog, James O'Toole wrote about the dangers of multitasking. He called its consequences as varied as disgusting.
Multitasking makes you impolite and unethical. Instead of paying attention to the person sitting across from you, you are sending messages or doing something else, which is really annoying.
Multitasking makes it difficult to manage. The more actions, the more difficult it is to sort the information (think of the simultaneous news feed).
Multitasking reduces creativity. To find a creative solution, you need to focus, and you cannot concentrate on anything in particular.
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