We love to see the interconnected subjects of Attention Fracture, Multitasking, Attention Theory, Cognitive Health, Attention Blindness, Cognitive Distraction, Attention Collapse, Cognitive Depletion, Unplugging and Attention Tuning, all on the rise. There is so much still unknown about the impact of attention fracture in our everyday work places.
Since Humantific is constantly creating tools for leaders to use in organizational contexts where attention fracture is a reality we remain deeply interested in these subjects.
Among those joining the conversation: This cover story: Multitasking Masters in Scientific American Mind, written by David L. Strayer and Jason M. Watson focused on “supertasking”. So far it looks like such humans are in short supply.
Ten things we saw in this article:
“…the examination of individual differences in multitasking ability is a relatively new enterprise….”
“…after testing 700 people we have identified 19 people (2.5 %) who meet the “supertasker” criteria.”
“…the vast majority of us cannot multitask without significant costs…”
‘This work suggests that overconfidence, rather than skill, drives proliferation of multitasking.”
“…heavy multitaskers tend to be sensation seeking”
“The premise of finite attention is now a cornerstone for contemporary cognitive neuroscience, and today it is well accepted that attention is limited in capacity and can be flexibly allocated among concurrent tasks.”
“The findings are clear: our performance deteriorates drastically when we attempt to focus on more than one task at a time.”
“We have some early evidence that that multitasking causes a kind of cognitive depletion and that “unplugging” has restorative properties.”
“Tuning attention appropriately is key to healthy cognition…”
“In the very distant future, supertaskers’ ability to better cope with multiple goals and information sources may be increasingly adaptive feature in the evolution of our species.”
Related:
The Myth of Multitasking in Scientific American
What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains by Nicholas Carr
