Levan James Production
Multitasking Summary
Between the ages of thirteen and eighteen years old, the average teenager uses roughly six types of social media outside of school at any given time. This requires great attention to detail, according to the article written by Sarah Spark about the Studies on Multitasking Highlight Value of Self-Control. In this article, Sparks explains that the effect of partially paying attention to multiple tasks at the same time, resulted in the setback of not being able to deeply and fully focus on any one given task at all. Furthermore, the article states that humans are actually not able of true multitasking since the human brain cannot be in two or more places at the same time.
The results of memory and attention tests are also listed in the article. From these results, we can infer that multi taskers did a lot worse on these tests than people who did not shift their focus back and forth between two or more task at a time. Additionally, when text messages or phone calls were added to the task of studying, those scores essentially dropped even further as the reader now had to focus on getting back to the originally started task once the student was done with answering the message. In some cases, the reader may even “forget” that he or she was reading a chapter in the first place. In the marshmallow experiment, children were offered the choice between eating a single marshmallow now and refraining from eating the marshmallow for fifteen minutes.
As a reward, the child would get two after the fifteen minute wait period. The children who waited to eat the marshmallow did significantly better in their academics and in their social life later on in life. In conclusion, humans are not computers and are therefore not truly capable of multitasking. instead, we shift our focus back and forth between the task at hand to complete them in a timely and effective manner. If humans were capable of this ability, it should be taught to them as it would increase their level of productivity.