Poor Pooh Bear, the Multitasker
December 23, 2011
Here’s an excerpt from great piece by Maria Konnikova posted in Scientific American: What Can Winnie-the-Pooh Teach Us About Media Multitasking?
I’d say more, but the piece speaks for itself and, dear reader, to say more would just be preaching to the choir.
Credit: Crabchick, Creative Commons.
In the very first paragraph of the very first chapter of Winnie-the-Pooh, Milne uses Edward Bear—newly dubbed Winnie-the-Pooh—to illustrate a concept that is no less (and perhaps far more) relevant now than it was back in the days of Christopher Robin’s childhood: we can’t think straight when our head is busy doing something else. Milne writes:
Here is Edward Bear, coming downstairs now, bump, bump, bump, on the back of his head, behind Christopher Robin. It is, as far as he knows, the only way of coming downstairs, but sometimes he feels that there really is another way, if only he could stop bumping for a moment and think of it.
Oh, the perils of multitasking for proper thought. Pooh would like to think of a better way to travel down stairs—but he can’t, not as long as his thought process keeps being interrupted by the next stair. And what are those bump-bump-bumps but the exact kind of taxing interruption that we place on our own minds, of our own choice? We don’t need Christopher Robin to drag us down a set of stairs. We are very capable of doing it to ourselves, thank you very much.
Think of each step as one more thing that keeps getting in the way of what you’d originally meant to be thinking—in Pooh’s world, how to get down stairs; in yours, anything that you were trying to accomplish. Each new input—an email, a phone call, a chat message that pops up on your screen, a beep from your phone that reminds you of something you were supposed to do—serves as a bump that, quite literally, interrupts the thought process in a physical way. And when you resume it? You have to try to recreate your brain’s path, retrace your steps, take a moment to gather your mental resources – all at an incredible cost to both quality and speed.
Just like Pooh’s mind isn’t meant to think when it is bouncing down steps, ours aren’t meant to multitask. We are horrible at it. Good multitaskers? They don’t exist. Even the self-proclaimed best of the best perform far worse at just about anything when they are multitasking than when they focus on one thing at a time. In one study, those people who defined themselves as successful heavy media multitaskers, consuming multiple content streams at once with ease, were actually more susceptible to both irrelevant environmental stimuli and irrelevant representations in memory. As a result, they were far more likely to get distracted and became worse instead of better at task-switching. And isn’t task-switching just where you’d expect good multitaskers to excel?
See the full article at:
