For
years now, I’ve been beating the drum about the ineffectiveness of
multi-tasking, which we all do, especially with regards to electronics –
chatting on the phone while we’re driving or cooking or skimming through email,
reading the paper while listening to NPR, constantly interrupting any project
required sustained thought to check text messages or twitter…But in truth,
we’re not really doing several things at once. Rather the brain is shifting
quickly and constantly between separate tasks, which not only over stimulates
the brain and leads to muddled thinking but releases stress and
anxiety-producing hormones. And if we’re actually trying to learn something,
like reading important information while watching TV, the brain diverts new
information to the wrong part of the brain for proper storage and easy access.
Yet the pleasure and novelty seeking parts of
our brain light up with interaction like text or email exchanges, giving us a
sense of social connection and a task completed, but leading to a kind of
neural addiction. In his fascination article in The Guardian: “Why the Modern World is Bad for Your Brain, ” neuroscientist Daniel J. Levitan adds, “Just having the opportunity to multitask is detrimental to
cognitive performance. Glenn Wilson, former visiting professor of psychology at
Gresham College, London, calls it info-mania. His
research found that being in a situation where you are trying to concentrate on
a task, and an email is sitting unread in your inbox, can reduce your effective
IQ by 10 points.”
This can have an especially profound impact on the developing brain (it's still a work in progress til around age 25), and I fear kids are actually hard-wiring their circuitry to be less able to focus on issues demanding more in-depth thinking...
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