Everest Uncensored

Russell A. Poldrack is the director of the Imaging Research Center and professor of psychology and neurobiology at the University of Texas at Austin.

As a busy researcher who owns an iPhone, iPad, and several computers, I often find it very difficult to practice what I preach when it comes to the dangers of multitasking (though I absolutely never talk on the cellphone while driving).

Our research shows that multitasking can have an insidious effect on learning, making it less flexible.

I think that the first key to successfully unplugging is to gain some insight into the effects that multitasking and information overload have on our own minds. As nicely discussed in the book “The Invisible Gorilla” by Chris Chabris and Dan Simons, humans are often very poor at understanding how our own minds work, and multitasking is a perfect example: Everyone thinks that they are one of those 3 percent of “supertaskers,” even as the scientific data shows that multitasking takes a serious toll on our performance as well as on our emotional lives.

Our research has shown that multitasking can have an insidious effect on learning, changing the brain systems that are involved so that even if one can learn while multitasking, the nature of that learning is altered to be less flexible. This effect is of particular concern given the increasing use of devices by children during studying.

via First Steps to Digital Detox – Room for Debate Blog – NYTimes.com.

We can do multitasking while driving, working, loving, caring, nurturing, protecting, memorizing, walking, running, concentrating, reading, writing, and practicing.

It seems that chronic media-multitaskers are more susceptible to distractions.

Heavy media multitaskers performed worse on task switching than light media multitaskers.

We all know Hindu Goddesses with 1000 of hands doing multiple things at a time killing all demons, compared to computer parallel thread model when RaktaBIJ , one demon would be alive with every blood drop, like thread killed rising ever again from nowhere.

So, our eastern culture religious model is connected to mind, our heart and spirit and soul.

Media multitasking is increasingly common, to the extent that some have dubbed today’s teens “Generation M.”

A national Kaiser Family Foundation survey found children and teens are spending an increasing amount of time using “new media” like computers, the Internet and video games, without cutting back on the time they spend with “old” media like TV, print and music. Instead, because of the amount of time they spend using more than one medium at a time (for example, going online while watching TV), they’re managing to pack increasing amounts of media content into the same amount of time each day.

Goddess model is now implemented across newer CPUs like NEON XEON processors..whatever from Intel, Dell to name a few.

The internet, with its increasing use of nonlinear nonsequential hypermedia, multimedia, and sophisticated graphic and visual features, has changed our habits of searching, locating, retrieving, accessing, using, and producing information. Users of hypertexts constantly conduct dual tasks or switch tasks by switching screens or web pages. The computer is a highly media-multitasked medium because it offers many opportunities for media multitasking, both within itself and across other platforms (7). The nonlinear and decentralized structure of information on the web, which is potentially contributing to media-multitasking behaviors, may have the potential to promote learning and creativity. Weinberger (8) argues that individuals exposed to a concept in multiple decentralized sources may gain deeper and more complex understandings of this concept.

While the researchers focused on a type of control known as “top-down” attention, meaning that control is initiated by higher-level mental processes such as cognition in service of a specific goal, they suggest that heavy media-multitaskers might be better at “bottom-up” attention.

Those who engage in media-multitasking more frequently are “breadth-biased,” preferring to explore any available information rather than restrict themselves.

Look around yourself – do you see notes and to-do lists? Piles of objects meant to remind you about tasks and goals? These sorts of reminders are a great way to take advantage of bottom-up attentional control, and this type of control might in fact be more influential in our lives than we realize.

Technology has long been identified as the catalyst that allows us to do more with less time or effort. McLuhan (6), whose work is viewed as one of the cornerstones of media theory studies, reminded us that media and technologies are extensions of humankind. According to McLuhan, each medium adds itself on to what we already are, creating both “amputations and extensions” to our senses and bodies, shaping them into a new technical form (6). It is our dependency and linkage to technology that makes it an integral part of our lives.

Portrait of a Multitasking Mind: Scientific American.