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The Pros And Cons Of Multitasking

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Having single pointed focus and no multitasking- In today’s modern hustle and bustle, people are very much preoccupied by their work, are always in hurry, engrossed in busy schedules and easily get agitated so much so that people have ingrained and imbibed a word to describe their efforts to respond to the many pressing demands on our time: Multitasking. Used for decades to describe the parallel processing abilities of computers, multitasking is now shorthand for the human attempt to do simultaneously as many things as possible and as quickly as possible. But more recently, ill effects of multitasking have begun to emerge. Numerous studies have shown the sometimes-fatal danger of using cell phones and other electronic devices while driving, for example, and several states have now made that particular form of multitasking illegal ! Dr. Edward Hallowell, a Massachusetts-based psychiatrist who specializes in the treatment of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and has written a book with the self-explanatory title CrazyBusy, has been offering therapies to combat extreme multitasking for years; in his book he calls multitasking a “mythical activity in which people believe they can perform two or more tasks simultaneously.” In one recent study, Russell Poldrack, a psychology professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, found that “multitasking adversely affects how you learn. Even if you learn while multitasking, that learning is less flexible and more

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