Читать книгу Overcoming Internet Addiction For Dummies - David N. Greenfield - Страница 87

There is perhaps no better example of the purported benefits of screen technologies than the power of multitasking. Multitasking is a very misunderstood concept, and there has been much research on the neuroscience of attention; the overwhelming conclusion is simply that there is no such thing as multitasking.

What is often seen as multitasking is rapid attention-shifting and moving your focus in an alternating fashion. What this means is that you’re quickly shifting your attention from one screen or activity to another, and although it feels seamless and simultaneous, it isn’t. There is no way for the human brain to attend to and process two stimuli at the same time. So, the next time your teenager has a laptop, tablet, TV, textbook, and smartphone open in front of them (while they are listening to music) and then tells you they are attending to all of them at once, they are kidding themselves (and you!). They may believe they are attending to all these activities simultaneously, but what the research shows is that the amount of comprehension of each stimulus is basically reduced by a factor of how many other sources of input you have going on at once. So, if you are doing homework while doing other activities, it will simply take you longer to get it done and/or there will be less comprehension of what you worked on. Internet and screen technology does not actually increase efficiency; it increases the functional organization of how we manage information, but even this benefit must be weighed against the amount of distraction it creates along the way.