Nice little write-up from Ars Technica on the pitfalls of thinking you’re good at multi-tasking.
Send this to the jackass who’s fiddling with their Blackberries all through their meetings.
Although most people find themselves multitasking, we’re remarkably bad at it. Humans actually switch attention rapidly rather than truly multitasking, and tend to lose whatever is in our working memory when doing so. Nevertheless, a number of people tend to attempt to process multiple streams of information at once, which has prompted researchers to ask whether these individuals are especially good at juggling simultaneous inputs.
The answer, according to a paper that will appear in the Proceedings of the National Academies of Science later this week, is that they may actually be worse
Links
Multitaskers beware: your divided attention comes at a price
| Ars Technica
