Gleanings

Rick Saenz has a nifty tool in his sidebar where he links to articles he finds interesting but doesn't have time for or see a need to comment on. Here's one of them that interested me:
The Myth of Multi-Tasking- this interested me because I used to rather pride myself on my abilities in this arena (which abilities probably weren't any greater than any other woman's). But of late, I find my mind feeling fractured, discombobulated, unfocused, and I want to do this less, not more. There is a place for it- particularly with young children when you might be listening to an older child recite a poem while changing the baby's diaper, or going over a lesson with the children while you brush and put up the girls' hair, or making two or three things in the kitchen at once.

But...

In one of the many letters he wrote to his son in the 1740s, Lord Chesterfield offered the following advice: “There is time enough for everything in the course of the day, if you do but one thing at once, but there is not time enough in the year, if you will do two things at a time.” To Chesterfield, singular focus was not merely a practical way to structure one’s time; it was a mark of intelligence

and....

In 2005, the BBC reported on a research study, funded by Hewlett-Packard and conducted by the Institute of Psychiatry at the University of London, that found, “Workers distracted by e-mail and phone calls suffer a fall in IQ more than twice that found in marijuana smokers.”

because...

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 specialized, so you cannot retrieve the information as easily.” His research demonstrates that people use different areas of the brain for learning and storing new information when they are distracted: brain scans of people who are distracted or multitasking show activity in the striatum, a region of the brain involved in learning new skills; brain scans of people who are not distracted show activity in the hippocampus, a region involved in storing and recalling information. Discussing his research on National Public Radio recently, Poldrack warned, “We have to be aware that there is a cost to the way that our society is changing, that humans are not built to work this way. We’re really built to focus...

so we should ask...

what might this mean for today’s children and teens, raised with an excess of new entertainment and educational technology, and avidly multitasking at a young age?

Answer: We don't know. But it might look like this:

The picture that emerges of these pubescent multitasking mavens is of a generation of great technical facility and intelligence but of extreme impatience, unsatisfied with slowness and uncomfortable with silence: “I get bored if it’s not all going at once, because everything has gaps—waiting for a website to come up, commercials on TV, etc.” one participant said."

On the other hand...

The report concludes on a very peculiar note, perhaps intended to be optimistic: “In this media-heavy world, it is likely that brains that are more adept at media multitasking will be passed along and these changes will be naturally selected,” the report states. “After all, information is power, and if one can process more information all at once, perhaps one can be more powerful.” This is techno-social Darwinism, nature red in pixel and claw.

But then again...

“I think this generation of kids is guinea pigs,” educational psychologist Jane Healy told the San Francisco Chronicle; she worries that they might become adults who engage in “very quick but very shallow thinking.

A hundred years ago my favorite educator, Charlotte Mason, noted the same thing:

...we turn out young people sharp as needles but with no power of reflection, no intelligent interests, nothing but the aptness of the city gamin. (volume 6, page 55)

Charlotte Mason also stressed the value of teaching children to gain control of and direct their attention, to focus, and that's the next point in this article as well:

When we talk about multitasking, we are really talking about attention: the art of paying attention, the ability to shift our attention, and, more broadly, to exercise judgment about what objects are worthy of our attention. People who have achieved great things often credit for their success a finely honed skill for paying attention.

Once upon a time, the scattered mind, the brain that flitted from thought to thought without any ability to rein itself in and focus was the mark of a juvenile, immature mind. FOcused, steady attention was the mark of maturity.

Times have changed.

And given what neuroscience and anecdotal evidence have shown us, this state of constant intentional self-distraction could well be of profound detriment to individual and cultural well-being. When people do their work only in the “interstices of their mind-wandering,” with crumbs of attention rationed out among many competing tasks, their culture may gain in information, but it will surely weaken in wisdom.

Full disclosure: while writing this post I had two conversations with two daughters, read two articles, an email, and googled Langston Hughes.