In an era of email, text messages, Facebook and Twitter, we’re all required to do several things at once. But this constant multitasking is taking its toll. Here neuroscientist Daniel J Levitin explains how our addiction to technology is making us less efficient
Daniel J Levitin Q&A
THE GUARDIAN - JAN 18, 2015
Our brains are busier than ever before. We’re assaulted with facts,
pseudo facts, jibber-jabber, and rumour, all posing as information.
Trying to figure out what you need to know and what you can ignore is
exhausting. At the same time, we are all doing more. Thirty years ago,
travel agents made our airline and rail reservations, salespeople helped
us find what we were looking for in shops, and professional typists or
secretaries helped busy people with their correspondence. Now we do most
of those things ourselves. We are doing the jobs of 10 different people
while still trying to keep up with our lives, our children and parents,
our friends, our careers, our hobbies, and our favourite TV shows.
Our
smartphones have become Swiss army knife–like appliances that include a
dictionary, calculator, web browser, email, Game Boy, appointment
calendar, voice recorder, guitar tuner, weather forecaster, GPS, texter,
tweeter, Facebook
updater, and flashlight. They’re more powerful and do more things than
the most advanced computer at IBM corporate headquarters 30 years ago.
And we use them all the time, part of a 21st-century mania for cramming
everything we do into every single spare moment of downtime. We text
while we’re walking across the street, catch up on email while standing
in a queue – and while having lunch with friends, we surreptitiously
check to see what our other friends are doing. At the kitchen counter,
cosy and secure in our domicile, we write our shopping lists on
smartphones while we are listening to that wonderfully informative
podcast on urban beekeeping.
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