While having lunch with my long time and good friend Brian Raymor in Seattle, the topic of human multitasking came up. Brian was kind enough to send me the Multitasking Stanford Study done by study conducted by Stanford researchers Eyal Ophir, Clifford Nass and Anthony Wagner. The article written by Adam Gorlick and Jack Hubbard.
It is a GREAT study! The link above also has a video with it. This is a must read article in my opinion. There is a great statement made in the video, "multitaskers are lousy at multitasking."
Here are a couple of points from the article:
"High-tech jugglers are everywhere – keeping up several e-mail and instant message conversations at once, text messaging while watching television and jumping from one website to another while plowing through homework assignments. But after putting about 100 students through a series of three tests, the researchers realized those heavy media multitaskers are paying a big mental price.
"They're suckers for irrelevancy," said communication Professor Clifford Nass, one of the researchers whose findings are published in the Aug. 24 edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. "Everything distracts them.""
This backs up several, ok many, conversations that I have had with my sons about multitasking:
"Sorry, you're not multi-threaded with multiple CPUs in your skull,
*no* humans are - turn off the damn TV, iPod,
video game and concentrate on ONE TASK AT A TIME!"
Monday, September 21, 2009
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