multitasking – Techdirt (original) (raw)

Stories filed under: "multitasking"

DailyDirt: Playing Games With Your Brain

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Who wouldn’t want to improve their brain function simply by playing some games or doing some brain training exercises? (If doing homework or reading counts as a brain training exercise, though, there are plenty of students who don’t seem to want to better their brains.) Brain games are getting popular (have you seen any Lumosity ads recently?), and there are already plenty of educational software programs for skills like learning foreign languages. Some of these brain games claim to help you maintain your cognitive skills as you get older, and there’s even some evidence that these claims could be true. Here are just a few examples of brain games that could help keep us all mentally fit for decades to come.

If you’d like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post via StumbleUpon.

Filed Under: brain, cognitive abilities, education, elderly, games, memory, multitasking, neuroracer, retirement, training, video games
Companies: lumosity

People Get Distracted! Blame Technology!

from the trend-pieces dept

With Nick Carr’s book out, misleadingly suggesting that the internet is bad for our brains, it looks like the NY Times has decided to a trend piece on the same concept, except even more misleading. Practically the entire article hinges on one family whose father is sometimes distracted. The article opens with the fact that he once missed an email from someone who wanted to buy his company. And, um, it’s because the internet makes us dumb? The connection is never made. The fact that people miss emails all the time, just as they might have missed snail mail in the past, is never made either. Honestly, the guy in the article sounds a lot like me, in terms of how I work, but he also sounds a lot like my Dad back when I was a kid and he would have his desk of papers disorganized. That’s not a condemnation of technology. It’s just that some people can be a bit absent-minded at times. Of course, the article throws in quotes from neuroscientists and other studies to give it that scientific coating, but what the researchers talk about has absolutely nothing to do with what makes someone miss an email or want to spend some time playing video games. It’s one of those newspaper trend pieces that sounds good, but doesn’t even come close to holding together its central thesis if you look at the details.

Filed Under: blame, multitasking, technology

Multitasking Is Our Main Activity

from the learn-to-love-it dept

Earlier this year, I wrote a post questioning whether the “inefficiency” found in multitasking was a bug or a feature. It was in response to studies pointing out that people who multitask tend to be less efficient at specific tasks. Folks like Nick Carr like to hold up things like that as examples of how modern technology makes us dumber, but more and more people are questioning that concept. While this is from a few months ago, Kevin Donovan points us an excellent piece by economist Tyler Cowen that challenges the concept that internet multitasking is a problem. In it, he makes a key point:

Multitasking is not a distraction from our main activity, it is our main activity.

That’s a nicer way of saying what we said a few months ago. The “inefficiencies” from multitasking aren’t a bug. They’re a feature. Cowen goes on to explain it using the analogy of a long distance relationship compared to a stable marriage:

A long-distance relationship is, in emotional terms, a bit like culture in the time of Cervantes or Mozart. The costs of travel and access were high, at least compared to modern times. When you did arrive, the performance was often very exciting and indeed monumental. Sadly, the rest of the time you didn’t have that much culture at all. Even books were expensive and hard to get. Compared to what is possible in modern life, you couldn’t be as happy overall but your peak experiences could be extremely memorable, just as in the long-distance relationship.

Now let’s consider how living together and marriage differ from a long-distance relationship. When you share a home, the costs of seeing each other are very low. Your partner is usually right there. Most days include no grand events, but you have lots of regular and predictable interactions, along with a kind of grittiness or even ugliness rarely seen in a long-distance relationship. There are dirty dishes in the sink, hedges to be trimmed, maybe diapers to be changed.

If you are happily married, or even somewhat happily married, your internal life will be very rich. You will take all those small events and, in your mind and in the mind of your spouse, weave them together in the form of a deeply satisfying narrative, dirty diapers and all. It won’t always look glorious on the outside, but the internal experience of such a marriage is better than what’s normally possible in a long-distance relationship.

The same logic applies to culture. The Internet and other technologies mean that our favorite creators, or at least their creations, are literally part of our daily lives. It is no longer a long-distance relationship. It is no longer hard to get books and other written material. Pictures, music, and video appear on command. Culture is there all the time, and you can receive more of it, pretty much whenever you want.

In short, our relationship to culture has become more like marriage in the sense that it now enters our lives in an established flow, creating a better and more regular daily state of mind. True, culture has in some ways become uglier, or at least it would appear so to the outside observer. But when it comes to how we actually live and feel, contemporary culture is more satisfying and contributes to the happiness of far more people. That is why the public devours new technologies that offer extreme and immediate access to information.

Many critics of contemporary life want our culture to remain like a long-distance relationship at a time when most of us are growing into something more mature. We assemble culture for ourselves, creating and committing ourselves to a fascinating brocade. Very often the paper-and-ink book is less central to this new endeavor; it’s just another cultural bit we consume along with many others. But we are better off for this change, a change that is filling our daily lives with beauty, suspense, and learning.

The full piece is much longer, but beautifully written and quite convincing.

Filed Under: bug, efficiency, feature, multitasking, tyler cowen

Is The Inefficiency Of Multitasking A Bug Or A Feature?

from the questions-to-ponder... dept

There have been a bunch of studies recently claiming that multi-tasking and our constant use of technology harms our ability to concentrate or accomplish certain tasks. A recent example is a study claiming that so much tech usage is harming our ability to learn because kids can’t focus as much on long form work. Of course, I’m a bit skeptical of any such claims (almost all anecdotal) considering that actual studies have shown that kids read more books today than in the past. And, it’s not just kids. More people are reading books than in the past in the general population as well.

Still, there’s another argument to be made also, which reader JJ recently pointed out. Stowe Boyd notes that all of these types of studies miss the point, in that personal efficiency may be less important than being more interactive:

Perhaps what we are doing has nothing to do with efficiency. I don’t operate the way I do with the principal goal of speeding things up. My motivations are much more complex and diffused.

I don’t perceive what I am doing as multitasking, really. I am not trying to speed up how quickly I shift from one thing to another. Instead, I am involved in a stream of activities, in which other people figure prominently, either synchronously through direct discussion (a la Twitter or IM) or indirectly, through their writings and my responses.

In many cases, I leave activities dangling because I don’t know exactly how I feel about them. In some cases, I could resolve my feelings and take some action if I simply stopped other activities and focused solely on that activity, but in most cases that is not the case. And simply forcing myself to focus on the next thing in the activity would not lead to an acceptable or beneficial result, necessarily.

It’s like a painter with a number of works in process. My primary motivation is not getting a particular painting ‘done’, but adding dabs of paint that I feel are the right ones.

I honestly had never thought of it this way, and I’ll admit I’m not sure how I feel on this. But it is an interesting way of looking at such things. Obviously, in a work setting, personal productivity may matter. But, in general — just doing stuff online — is it a problem that we multitask? Or is that a feature?

Filed Under: bug, efficiency, feature, multitasking

Is Internet Distraction A Good Thing Or A Bad Thing For Kids?

from the talk-to-some-kids dept

It’s pretty obvious by now that there are tons of distractions that can be found on the internet, and if you’re not careful, you can certainly get dragged away from something more important. However, InternetNews.com has an article suggesting that because kids these days are growing up with so many internet distractions, they won’t be able to accomplish nearly as much as older generations who had no such distractions and could concentrate on just doing stuff. In fact, the author writes: “We’re not preparing kids for the future.”

Now that strikes me as odd, because my thought was exactly the opposite. These distractions are there — and since kids these days are growing up with such distractions, they’re used to them and take it as a natural state of affairs. In other words, by getting them to think of continuous partial attention as the norm from a very young age, we absolutely are preparing them for the future. Of course, the real answer may lie somewhere in-between — in that it may depend on just what people are trying to accomplish.

Filed Under: continuous partial attention, internet distraction, kids, multitasking