Multitasking Negative Effects

Alina Tugend also brings up the work of Professor David Meyer, Meyer tells us about case studies which have shown that how multitasking has caused the loss of focus. The loss of focus is shown by people performing tasks in longer periods of time, there was also another study by the RAC foundation that showed how multitasking actually caused slower response times then that of people were under the influence of drugs or alcohol. Tugend also uses the work of Dr. Hallowell,

In the essay “Multitasking can make you lose … Um … Focus” Alina Tugend exams why multitasking can make you lose focus. Tugend explains what multitasking is in the first section she also explains why it is bad. She then brings in a professor to explain how multitasking works in a scientific way. Alina Tugend then uses case studies to show how multitasking can cause loss of focus and impairment in motor activities. She then shows how multitasking can actually delay your progress on completing projects by constantly switching to different tasks. Tugend then sums it all up by trying to teach us how to better ourselves and to not multitask.

Roman Emperor Constantine became an important contributor to the spread of Christianity because he announced the Edict of Milan. The Edict of Milan gave Christians the freedom to openly practice their religion without prosecution. In the excerpt from History Alive!: The Ancient World, the text states, “Constantine had a vision of a cross in the sky.

1. The text says that "multitasking hurts your brain's ability to learn" and that your IQ will drop by how many points when you are distracted by email or phone calls? (1 pt.)

Secondly, multitasking negatively affects humans in all areas of their life. But one place it really hits is relationships. Multitasking devalues relationships in many ways. Today people want the reasons to why things happen right then and there. One of Restaks friends who happens to have ADD/ADHD says, “Don’t tell me anything that is going to take more than 30 seconds for you to get out” (416). This devalues relationships because it

“Flying” by Alice Miller is a short story about a woman, Allie who learned to by her cousin Mack when she was six years old. Mack tells Allie to never tell anyone that Allie can fly and that all boys are able to fly. Allie in the story then grows up without ever flying again until she is a mother of three. Allie thinks about flying all the time but something keeps her from not flying. Until one night Allie cannot help but try and goes on top of her roof and flies away. Then a couple of days later when Allie is not satisfied and wants to take flight again. While tucking in her children, Allie decides to take her daughter outside to teach her to fly. The central idea of the story is that one should do what makes them feel happiest.

Yelling at your children…” She also says that “since the 1990’s we’ve accepted multitasking without questions,” helping give background and showing how new technology has changed our working habits.In the second paragraph on the second page of the article she explains more how technology has changed and how there are now more distractions; however, she never explicitly states how new technology has changed how much and how often we multitask. In the next paragraph she helps explain how it can hurt productivity by quoting a psychiatrist Edward M. Hallowell with the statement “you have to keep in mind that you sacrifice focus when you do this”

Pop-up ads are constantly on every link, along with flashy signs and music to keep us from concentrating on the task. This ultimately leads to multitasking. We assume that we can handle all the information thrown at us together, but in reality it is too much. An experiment done by Thomas Buser and Noemi Petter involved three groups. The first group consisted of participants who worked on two tasks consecutively for twelve minutes each. The second group had to alter between these two tasks every four minutes for the same amount of time. Subjects in group three were not notified of how many switches were going to occur and for how long. The three group’s total time spent on each task was equal to prevent any lurking variables. The results of this experiment showed work schedules can be an important factor in productivity. The results emphasized that participants who focused on one task at a time, had a higher productivity rate than the subjects that tried to multitask. Machines can run several applications at one time while keeping one hundred percent concentration on each, precisely because it is a machine, people simply cannot. Carr agress that the internet has almost taken control over people. He says, “The Internet, an immeasurably powerful computing system, is subsuming most of our other intellectual technologies. It’s becoming our map and

Students may easily lose their attention and concentration with easy access to such incredibly rich store of information. With such new technologies as television, internet and social networks, people nowadays tend to multitask more often as they have easy access to large amount of information. However, such easy access may sometimes be a distraction. Study report “Your Brain on Computers” shows that heavy multitaskers perform up to 20% worse on most tests compared to performance of light multitaskers. Working efficiency of people, who multitask, are claimed to be significantly lower. The same is with concentration. As a result, they are not engaged in working process. Students tend to be easily distracted with this situation. For example, combining doing homework with operating on Twitter, phone or YouTube results in poor engagement of a student into deep thinking process, according to Winifred Gallagher, who is the author of Rapt. He also points out that nowadays high school and college students have decreased capacity of serious thinking because of multitasking and distraction. Moreover, Tyler Cowen, economist and famous blogger, claims that nowadays information tends to come in shorter and smaller portions and that explains why our generation encourages short reading. Since online information is always presented in short written passages, the web prevents user from concentration and contemplation. As an illustration, Nicholas Carr, the speaker at MIT and Harvard,

Sana, Weston, & Cepeda (2013), Laptop multitasking hinders learning for both users and nearby peers. Computers & Education 62 (2013): 24-31.

The excavation and discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb was as a result of the efforts of the Archaeologist Howard Carter and his team. Carter’s discovery of the tomb came by finding steps to the burial near the entrance to the tomb Ramses VI. The subsequent excavated of the site by Carter and his team revealed the greatest ever treasure found from an Egyptian tomb and showed the existence of Tutankhamun. Carter’s methodology for the excavation was that of maintaining records for each artefact and that every artefact that was brought out of the tomb was preserved appropriately. The discovery and excavation of the tomb was a long and complex process but with it revealed much about Tutankhamun.

Media multitasking is associated with symptoms of depression and social anxiety according to Mark W. Becker, Reem Alzahabi, and Christopher J. Hopwood’s study. These people conducted an experiment containing 318 participants. And the 318 people completed self-inventory tests to measure their media use, personality, depression, and social anxiety. The study suggests that the increased use of media multitasking show a risk to develop problems related to the individual’s mood and anxiety levels. With that being said this problem is raising concerns that media is replacing face to face interactions. “While overall media use among America’s youth increased by 20 percent over the past decade, the amount of time spent multitasking with media (simultaneously interacting with more than one form of media) increased by over 119 percent over the same period”( Becker, M. W., Alzahabi, R., & Hopwood, C. J. (2013)). Media multitasking has now been associated with attention control, meaning how to filter out any useless information and how to ignore distractions. Also in this study they looked at not only mood changes and anxiety disorders they also looked at traits of neuroticism and extraversion. All of these

When you multitask there is a chain reaction of starting with determination and ending with stress. A majority of people are aware that too much stress cannot be could for the body, but stress could also bring health problems. It is claimed that this bad habit tends to cause sleep problems, headaches, trouble focusing, anxiety, heart problems, etc. These side effects could eventually become a clue for other future diseases. As said in a wellness article, “It may be a better predictor for your risk of getting age-related diseases like Alzheimer’s, heart disease, diabetes, and cancer than conventional diagnostic

After all, if a person was to learn about or concentrate on a different subject every few minutes, it would be nearly impossible to retain and remember the information. As one study discovered, "multitasking adversely affects how you learn. Even if you learn while multitasking, that learning is less flexible and more specialized, so you cannot retrieve the information as easily (Rosen 412)." Most people who multitask become so distracted by the amount of information they are trying to obtain at one time that it is actually causing the opposite effect. Multitasking makes it harder to distinguish the difference or importance between individual tasks. This means that many people either dismiss all the information gain as redundant or clump all knowledge, unnecessary and essential, together.

​Another article focusing on the negative effects of technology on society is “5 Ways Technology has Negatively Effected Families” by Kim Williamson. The difference of this one is that is focuses specifically on family issues. Williamson first mentions that School Performance is affected by the distraction of TV and the Internet. Kids can easily pull out their iPhones and go onto the Internet in a matter of seconds. During school, kids only want to use their technology to aid their boredom and that does not help their learning. Williamson then brings up the fact that Quality Time is being taken away from families due to excessive