"Neuroscience is confirming what we all suspect: Multitasking is dumbing us down and driving us crazy.“ These challenging words appear in an article by Walter Kirn entitled "The Autumn of the Multitaskers“ (The Atlantic magazine, November 2007.) The dream of being able to do it all has become prevalent in our 21st century world: "Thanks to technology or some other magic, we’ve entered a new age when the laws of cause and effect (as propounded by Isaac Newton and Adam Smith) have yielded to the principle of of dream-and-make-it-happen (as manifested by Steve Jobs and Oprah).“
Kirn views multi-tasking not as an ideal, but, rather, as somewhat of a nightmare. "Through a variety of experiments, many using functional magnetic resonance imaging to measure brain activity, they’ve [scientists] torn the mask off multitasking and revealed its true face, which is blank and pale and drawn.“ The true face of multi-tasking is not beatifically Botox-ifically beautiful?
The article goes on to reality check with consensual, waking reality what the unintended consequences of mutil-tasking are. "Multitasking messes with the brain in several ways. At the most basic level, the mental balancing acts that it requires – the constant switching and pivoting – energize regions of the brain that specialize in visual processing and physcial coordination and simultaneously appear to shortchange some of the higher areas related to memory and learning. We concentrate on the act of concentration at the expense of whatever it sit hat we’re supposed to be concentrating ON.“ Multi-tasking short-changes us? But it’s supposed to result in our having fuller pockets!
While this reality is uncomfortable, worse follows. "Certain studies find that multitasking boosts the level of stress-related hormones such as cortisol and adrenaline and wears down our systems through biochemical friction, prematurely aging us. In the short term, the confusion, fatigue, and chaos merely hamper our ability to focus and analyze, but in the long term, they may cause it to atrophy.“ This is the stuff of nightmares.
It gets worse yet. "This is the great irony of multitasking – that its overall goal, getting more done in less time, turns out to be chimerical. In reality, multitasking slows our thinking. It forces us to chop competing tasks into pieces, set them in different piles, then hunt for the pile we’re interested in, pick up its pieces, review the rules for putting the pieces back together, and then attempt to do so, often quite awkwardly. (A brain attempting to perform two tasks simultaneously will, because of all the back-and-forth stress, exhibit a substantial lag in information processing.)“
Multi-tasking is a chimera? Now we’ve definitely entered the realm of nightmares! The dictionary tells us that in Greek mythology, a chimera is a fire-breathing female monster that has a lion's head, a goat's body, and a serpent's tail! Whoa! In the abstract, a chimera is defined as a grotesque product of the imagination. Monster? Grotesque? Multi-tasking?
Kirn posits his own questions about multi-tasking. "Productive? Efficient? More like running up and down a beach repairing a row of sand castles as the tide comes rolling in and the rain comes pouring down. Multitasking, a definition: 'The attempt by human beings to operate like computers, often done with the assistance of computers.' It begins by giving us more tasks to do, making each task harder to do, and dimming the mental powere required to do them. It finished by making us forget exactly how on earth we did them (assuming we didn’t give up, or 'multiquit‘), which makes them harder to do again.
The dream of multi-tasking, of being able to do it all so as to have it all, at once, as is the case with all dreams, needs to be grounded in reality. Multi-tasking is the daydream of boundless riches, the aspiration to boundless efficiency, the ideal of time well spent and just rewards for a job well done. However, when made real in consensual reality, multi-tasking, as Mr. Kirn’s essay demonstrates, multi-tasking creates many unpleasant and unforseen dark consequences. Perhaps the dream of multi-tasking needs to be seen as a chimera and radically re-formulated.
