Is Multitasking a digital fried to our brains??? (II)

Multitasking has rapidly taken our lives to a point we are looked awfully lax if we are doing one thing at a time. Chances are good you have several browser tab on your Mozilla Firefox while you are doing your homework, chances are good also you are driving back home but blabbering over the phone with your best buddy. With the ever growing array of digital distractions available, multitasking has become prevalent than ever before. This is however; our brains are not built for the onslaught from multitasking and this is according to Professor Nass, a neurologist from Stanford University. We are built to train and focus on a single intellectual task, when our minds are bombarded with different tasks, it get overloaded and virtually coming to a halt in the dead alley.

First of all, multitasking is draining out our brainpower infinitely. Imagine that, when I am in the middle of learning from Answers.com and texting email to pen-pal, both tasks are competing to reach the same place in the brain. As a result, our brain get exhausted, cluttered, and overloaded. According to Dr. Glenn Wilson, a psychologist from University of London, he has pinpointed that, this scenario is actually able to knock down 10 points of our IQ, much to situation where the head-fog is caused by losing a night’s sleep. Even we are not multitasking in the same time, but we are switching between tasks it can slow down on our works according to Dr. Wax from University of Queensland. When the group of people was asked to solve the complicated Math, in the mean time they have to divert their attention to others, they were actually up to 40% much slower in their usual performance.

Besides that, it is also the single most important reason why we are witnessing the epidemic of rage according to Dr. Gary Small, a psychologist from Harvard Institute. Take the sample likes this, I am a busy parents, living in a crowded city, and I have to perform multitasking daily, all these hectic and chaotic in my personal experiences would be translated to be a chemical changes under my brain, and thus it would chronically raise the level of the stress hormone cortisol in my bloodstream. In longer term, I would be disposed as being more to impulsive and compulsive personalities. Therefore, in short, it is the psychological and intellectual toll which may eventually cause a harmful spread onto my body, mind and soul. According to the American Study reported in Cyberpsychology, kids who are immersing heavily in multitasking find it difficult to concentrate on their single intellectual task such as reading text.

In addition to that, multitasking is potent enough to cast a form of autism into the future of our children. When our minds are filled with noise, it is starting to losing it out capacity to process, from attended fully to gradually anything. This phenomenon has been christened by Hallowell as “Attention Deficit Trait”, a psychologist expert from University of Holland. According to him, children with autism are often demonstrating the behavioral likes lacking of the interpersonal skills, isolating with others, doesn’t make eyes-contact with peers, focusing on the pieces of part and even worst misinterpreting the imply meaning or failed to catch the subtle non-verbal messages such as body language. We can think this along the scale of Asperger, a mild form of autism where there is no connectiveness, other the fancy world of us.

In conclusion, it is the psychological and intellectual toll taking as a whole in this collateral damage. If we must perform multitasking by anyhow, we should heed on the following advices from experts. Whenever we hit on the “Fried” point, we must quickly turn ourselves into low-information environment; get a soothing view; walk away to allow the brain to discard on the tangling and extraneous thoughts. Never do in the afternoon, the post-lunch fatigue, added to the strain of multitasking could cause an overload to brain. Mediate is to increase the attention and memory in the brain. Ironically, Professor Nass could not find any to quit cold turkey in Stanford when he offered 100 bucks as the reward to them.