Ah, yes, this will tick a whole bunch of you off.  Deservedly so, since many of you perpetually tell me I am making a mistake with all my time-slicing.  (I don’t call it multi-tasking- because those that can, actually fill in the micro-time spaces with a different task.)

My response to your plaints is akin to many a new admonition you see on your TV screens.  Don’t try this at home.  Professional is at work.  That’s the key point- some of us can.  Sorry, if you can’t.

OK, that might have been a bit smarmy, but I am sick and tired of having rules generated for the least of us, instead of using common sense.  I used to be able to make my own contact lens solution.  But, then the FDA outlawed the practice, since so many (sic) were incapable of performing the tasks safely.  And, we can only get disposable soft contacts now, since so many failed to disinfect the permanent ones properly.

The same applies to time-slicing.  As new data is now proving.  By two Portland (OR) students, Sarayu Caulfield and Alexandra Ulmer, whose results were presented at the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair [May, 2014, Los Angeles].  These two teenagers actually received the “second award” in the Behavioral Science section.  And, Caulfield and Ulmer were then invited to propound their results once again (Capacity Limits of Working Memory: The Impact of Media Multitasking on Cognitive Control in the Adolescent Mind) to the American Academy of Pediatrics (Annual Conference, San Diego, 2014).

The teenager’s study examined 403 adolescents [196f, 207m], aged 10 to 19 (average 14.5), at the Oregon Episcopal School over a two year period.  The subjects were classified as low, medium, and high multitaskers, using criteria (a test) developed at Stanford University.  The high multitaskers (60 of them) averaged 3 hours a day of multitasking (of which at least 1.5 hours were involved with performing their homework).  The low level multitaskers (50) spent less than 20 minutes a day trying to time-slice- and they never tried it while doing homework.

And, 15% of the study participants (the high multitaskers) performed more proficiently when not devoting their efforts on a single activity.  Yes, reading eMail and listening to music amplified their results.  Of course, those who were not among the high multitasker group failed to succeed, when they tried to time-slice.

(It should be noted that Drs. Kee Loh and Ryota Kanai of University College, London recently reported in PLOSOne that those who routinely juggle multiple media have a lower grey matter density within their anterior cingulate cortex.  That is the region of the brain associated with cognitive and emotional processes.  Their study didn’t determine if the multitasking caused this- or was already a phenomenon before the study.)

Share this: