Great Barrington — The Edge is like a big city news bureau with multiple desks. Not really, but the Editor and I like to joke about every time we talk. It depends what we’re working on at the moment.
“Crime desk,” I answer when he rings me up every morning.
“School choice desk,” he might reply.
“Log Homes desk,” I say in the afternoon.
“Election desk.”
And so it goes, on and on, even though we are running a newsroom between my attic, The Edge office downtown, David’s car, my kitchen table, Big Y (in those few aisles with cellular reception) the Price Chopper parking lot, the Atlanta airport (on one recent layover), or David’s study.
Sometimes we take the joke too far: “Laundry desk,” I say when he calls me over the weekend.
When we aren’t talking about tax reform, school budgets, leaking high schools, fiber optic cables, our children, or the various things that people tell us that we are ashamed to know and wonder how on earth to report in such a small town, we talk about the madness of multitasking, just as we were the other day when he finally had to hang up because he had spilled a pint of blueberries all over his kitchen floor while unpacking groceries with one hand, and holding the phone with the other.
“I picked them all up and put them away,” he said when he called me back.
“In the sink to wash,” I said. “That was quick.”
“No — three second rule.”
“Multitasking isn’t good,” I said.
“I know,” he replied.
I told him about a famous actress who recently said she knew she had a problem when she dropped her phone into the soup she was cooking. My friend and neighbor, Claudia Laslie, runs Berkshire Rental Properties, a management company, out of her home, and said she could not run her business and take care of her home and family without multitasking. The divorced mother of two teenagers, looking a bit like a modern Lucille Ball, says she wants to simplify by having “better boundaries,” between home, work and life.
Laslie is right to make the attempt. One only needs to read headlines to confirm what we know in our hearts to be true. The Atlantic Monthly: “Neuroscience is confirming what we all suspect: Multitasking is dumbing us down and driving us crazy.”
The Guardian’s “Why the modern world is bad for your brain,” says it all.
“There’s a fly in the ointment,” wrote Daniel J. Levitin in that Guardian article. “Although we think we’re doing several things at once, multitasking, this is a powerful and diabolical illusion. Earl Miller, a neuroscientist at MIT and one of the world experts on divided attention, says that our brains are “not wired to multitask well…”
Levitin, the author of The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload, goes on to insult us with a circus metaphor, saying that while we may think we’re juggling all those balls so nicely, “we’re more like a bad amateur plate-spinner.” Studies indicate that the bad plate spinning makes us significantly less efficient; as much as 40-percent less productive according to research cited by the American Psychological Association.
Even worse, multitasking apparently increases our production of cortisol and adrenaline, and creates — this is scary, but explains everything — “a dopamine-addiction feedback loop, effectively rewarding the brain for losing focus and for constantly searching for external stimulation…the prefrontal cortex has a novelty bias, meaning that its attention can be easily hijacked by something new…”
So it’s a vicious, hideous cycle we’re dealing with. When we check email, then Facebook, Instagram, answer the phone, text, text, text to the point where we are texting details about a shooting to the teenager who only asked whether the voice lesson is still on…because at that very moment, we were also entering the date our period ended in Pink Pad so that we can remember what’s going on there, what with all the other distractions….and wonder with a flood of panic — while sautéing onions — how the other teenager will get from baseball to soccer.
When we switch around like that — make sure you are seated — we are hit with a “burst of endogenous opioids…all to the detriment of our staying on task,” Levitin writes. “It is the ultimate empty-caloried brain candy. Instead of reaping the big rewards that come from sustained, focused effort, we instead reap empty rewards from completing a thousand little sugar-coated tasks.”
It’s even worse for your brain than pot-smoking, Levitin notes, since Cannibinol does wonders for messing with cognitive function.
If all this weren’t bad enough — and then I promise I’ll stop — “learning information while multitasking causes the new information to go to the wrong part of the brain.” This could have implications for vast numbers of teenagers. “If students study and watch TV at the same time, for example, the information from their schoolwork goes into the striatum, a region specialized for storing new procedures and skills, not facts and ideas.”
Levitin’s article, an excerpt from his book, goes on to cite the metabolic costs of multitasking. But I’m not going to get into that right now — you’ll have to excuse me — a Food 52 email just came in: “The Secret to a Tidier Pantry.”
