Is Monotasking Bad for Us?
The article in question was by Vivek Wadhwa, an academic and researcher from Duke University in the US. Mr Wadhwa had recently been to a conference where Nicholas Carr, author of The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, and other commentators were debating whether the internet is rotting our and our children's brains.
We've heard this debate before. On one side sit authors like Carr who argue that due to the plasticity of the brain, the internet is fundamentally changing the way we think and communicate, with the prediction that "mankind will lose its ability to perform 'deep thinking;' that we will become as shallow as the websites we visit."
On the other side sit commentators like Clay Shirky, author of Here Comes Everyone and the recent Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age. Shirky is a web positivist - he sees the internet as a force for good that connects people and has the potential to bring about significant social change (some of which we are already seeing in the Arab world). Mr Wadhwa sits in this camp dismissing the naysayers in the same vein as the clergy in the late eighteenth century who thought that the mass production and availability of novels would rot the brains of the young people.
So where do I sit in this debate? Well, somewhere in the middle. I truly believe that the social web is an amazing thing - it opens up the potential of what we can achieve to a global audience; it allows us to interact with loved ones all over the world; it allows us to be as informed about the world as we wish. However, our increasing digital lives, where we are never very far from a computer, tablet or smart phone, has meant that sometimes we are just not very present. The danger is that we can miss the tiny opportunities and moments that make life interesting because we are buried in our device rather than open to the world. In this way, I think I am most aligned to the views of William Power in Hamlet's Blackberry who advocates balance, the smart use of our technologies, and disconnecting from the crowd, now and again.
But what has this got to do with multitasking? Well, one of the major disagreements between the two camps of opinion is that of multitasking versus monotasking or singletasking. The first camp say that multitasking is bad for you and that the internet is rendering us incapable of deep thought; the second camp say that our brain is adapting to this new phenomenon and that our children are becoming excellent multitaskers.
Another presenter at this same conference, Clifford Nass, is firmly in the first camp. He talked about how multitasking — walking and talking, eating and reading, texting while watching TV — is making us inefficient, distracted, and hurting our memory. In the second camp is one of Mr Wadhwa's colleagues Cathy Davidson, author of the forthcoming book Now You See It: How the Brain Science of Attention Will Transform the Way We Live, Work, and Learn. Davidson talked about the industrial workplace which was designed for monotasking, in which an individual takes one task from inception to completion. She asserts, however, that the harder we concentrate on one task, the more we miss everything else happening around us. This is the phenomenon of 'attention blindness'. Wadhwa concludes that monotasking, in this context, not multitasking, limits us.
I think both arguments are wrong.
Nass's arguments about doing more than one thing at a time totally miss the point. The fact that we can walk and talk at the same time or cook a meal while emptying the dishwasher or text and watch TV is because these activities do not require much thought. They are embedded routines controlled by our basal ganglia not requiring any original thinking by our pre-frontal cortex. If you were not used to cooking, however, you might find it difficult to cook and do other chores at the same time. Similarly, just because you can watch TV and text as the same time doesn't mean that you are really paying attention to either.
I also disagree with Wadhwa's opinion that monotasking limited us. What mindfulness teaches us is to become aware of awareness itself. When we use mindfulness in a work context we can create a relaxed state of focus that provides an expansive awareness, not a narrow 'fight or flight' contraction of awareness. In this way we can really open up the potential of the task in hand to new insights. This is impossible when we are distracted by our email notifications, texts or tweets.
What do you think? Are we becoming better multitaskers?
