Multitasking Hypothesis

In Alina Tugend’s article “Multitasking Can Make You Lose…Um…Focus,” the author discusses the dangers of attempting to multitask. Life in the twenty-first century tends to be fast paced which is one of the reasons why there is so much multitasking. Because we want everything fast, we try to get as many things accomplished in the shortest amount of time. According to “The Cost of Interrupted Work: More Speed and Stress,” a study that from April of 2007, while multitasking one is not able to produce as much. University of California professor Gloria Marks noticed that multitasking resulted in higher stress levels, workload, frustration, and pressure; such factors may bring about results that are less than acceptable.

Over the past decade, we have seen an increase in a number of car accidents. Innocent lives have been taken away, because of reckless driving by humans due to the misconception of multitasking. To prevent these acts of violence, many states have passed laws that inhibit drivers from using a cellular device. To bring awareness of this impulsive act numerous cell phone providers and advocates have started campaigns such as “it can wait” and “stop text stop wrecks”. Yet, there are still people who take careless action that jeopardize other’s life. Cell phone use is an epidemic problem that is dangerous and unlawful. Recent studies show cell phone use while driving has much greater effect than driving intoxicated.

What is multitasking and how does it affect our everyday lives? Multitasking is defined as rapidity switching from one task to another or completing several tasks concurrently instead of focusing primarily on one task and one task only. Even though, multitasking can make a task more enjoyable it can also make our performance less efficient. I have come to find that though my personal experiences that multitasking is a normal act we perform in our everyday lives, and focusing on a single task is almost impossible. A few prime examples of everyday multitasking are listening to the radio while completing homework assignments or answering the telephone at work while typing daily logs. It is far more likely for an individual to be performed more than one task at a given time, even if multitasking is having a negative effect on our cognitive thinking and causing undesirable stress.

Another consideration among researchers when looking at the effects of multitasking is that it actually has a positive effect on a small percentage of people that are known as supertaskers. There have been many studies done on the critical effects it has on the brain, but what good does it do? Hammond wrote an article on how normal people don’t get the same benefits as supertaskers have. Hammond reported that “even if you’re not a supertasker, multi-tasking by surfing the web at the same time as answering emails, playing computer games, or listening to music could bring another benefit” (4). She includes that “people who regularly used three or more different media at a time were better at integrating the information that came in through their

Teens multitask every day. They do so when texting and doing school work. Multitasking is becoming more and more popular over the world.

In my article, some topics the researchers studied related more to the Hergenhahn chapter on Empiricism, Sensationalism, and Positivism. Primarily, my article related more on the topic of empiricism. The article investigated how a person’s attention of impulse factors into multitasking with the media. Also, on how the participants in the study working and long-term memory were affected with multitasking while using media. One thing discussed in the beginning of the chapter was how the mind takes notice to and puts aside sensory information. The mind was seen as actively altering sensory information, which would give it more meaning if not otherwise.

While you are able to do several things at the same time, multitasking can hinder a person’s ability to successfully complete several tasks until one has developed muscle memory. In ballet, I have noticed that the more attention I dedicate to a specific part of a step, the less I can perfectly complete the step as a whole. For example, if I am doing a pirouette combination, if I pay attention to balancing before I turn, I forget to spot. I attribute this to not having a complete muscle memory developed of doing a pirouette. I think that once you develop muscle memory for whatever task you are attempting to complete, the ability to multitask becomes easier. For example, you don’t have to remind yourself to breathe while you are reading a book,

We can watch TV and look through social media news feeds on laptops while reading texts on smartphones. With all the multitasking it could be shrinking the structure of our brains. According to new research from the University of Sussex, people who use cell phones or other devices tend to have a less gray-matter density in parts of the brain versus teens who use one or more devices at a time. “Published in the journal PLOS One, the research is the first to reveal links between multitasking on different media devices and brain structure” (Keating). "Media multitasking is becoming more prevalent in our lives today and there is increasing concern about its impacts on our cognition and social-emotional well-being, says Sussex neuroscientist Kep Kee Loh (Keating)”. The researchers asked 75 healthy men and women how often they divided their attention between different social media devices, which included sending a text or listing to music while doing other stuff. “The participants were given brain scans, which showed that, compared with people who used one device at a time, this group had a less dense gray matter in the cortex which is the part of the brain that is involved in processing emotion” (Keating). Researches aren 't sure whether people with less gray brain structures are more likely to be good at multitasking or if the multitasking causes the gray structures to shrink. Other studies found that learning how to juggle and learning map routes increased the gray area in

There is currently no proof that those with a larger brain are smarter than lose with a smaller brain.

This paper explores a published article that reports on results of Task Switching and Their Effects on Cognitive Processes with in an individual’s mind when asked to do something. This article addresses the shifts in between cognitive tasks, the reaction time and error time based on the task switch. This article also addresses how to decrease the chance of error by giving a chance of having an individual prepare beforehand. This paper will examine Monsell’s (2003) research in relation to how Task Switching is fully understood and what effects on the brain for the individual switching task and its cognitive process. As well as the analysis of participants which conducted this experiment and the materials that were used for this experiment. In this analysis there was 100 total trials where 50% contained Odd/Even trails and the other 50% contained Magnitude trials. All the trials were randomized and the participants pressed the correct key when the intended targets were displayed in the middle of a PC screen. There was a significant difference between the one independent variable and the two dependent variables.

Some studies show that people are likely to concentrate more on one thing, than they would when they are trying to do multiple things at a time. Many job descriptions say that they want someone that knows how to multitask, but this shouldn’t really be necessary when someone can focus on one work task and get it done faster as opposed to trying to do more things at once and dividing your time, making it harder to justify the information your receive while busy with the phone or instant messenger. Most multitaskers don’t even multitask right, they don’t switch tasks very easy which makes multitasking redundant. Doing your tasks from the one that will take the most time to the one that will take the least time. Put away the distractions and start

Multitasking is necessary in today’s society. It’s a requirement for jobs and for today’s modern, daily life style.Even though we embrace multitasking it is certainly not benefiting us. We have accepted multitasking without taking in mind that every rose has its thorn. Multitasking supports us by saving us time, but

In some cultures, multitasking is for intelligent people; similarly, in Saudi Arabia, women practice multitasking to show how they are smart and hardworking. It is one of the stereotyping that seems fascinating for most of Saudi people. Although multitasking has positive effects, it has negative consequences. To be more specific, multitasking consists of productive and powerless situations that has relationship between multitasking and health.

This experimental investigation has to do with how human’s attention work. It is based on a replication of the well-known “Stroop Effect” carried out on 1935 by John Ridley Stroop. The aim of this experiment was to demonstrate how hard it is for a person’s attention to be divided in different tasks, by making the participants read a series of three stimuli which consisted of: 1) words of colors in black ink, 2) words of colors in their actual font color, and 3) color words with different ink, where the participant read the font instead of the word present. The research hypothesis supposed that selective attention is as easy to be performed visually as well as audibly. The controlled variable of the experiment were the black ink color

Multitasking is part of everyday life. Daily routines from driving to work or school, to coming home, involve people handling more than one task at a time. At what point is it too much to handle before mistakes are being made? When someone answers a call on their cell phone while driving, that is multitasking, and that has shown to be hazardous. When a student is instant messaging and writing a paper at the same time, that is hazardous as well, but not in the way one would immediately think. Heavy media use may be associated with decreased social well-being and could cause harm on young adults psychological functioning. Also, people who often multitask with media such as the TV, the internet, etc, have shown instances in which there was a diminished ability to effectively filter non-important information cognitively. The usage of media that college students use today has increased by at least 20% in the last decade (Alzahabi & Becker, 2013).