Multi-tasking May Damage the Brain
We older adults tend to be awed at how young people today can multi-task. They seem to text message on cells phones, watch TV, listen to music, play a video or computer game, carrying on a conversation, and maybe even study their school lessons all simultaneously with apparent ease. Many adults, and even teachers, encourage multi-tasking because they think it is good stimulus for the brain and that learning how to multi-task is a useful skill. But I have already identified many research reports that show multi-tasking to impair formation of memory. Multi-tasking prevents the focused attention and reduction of distractions that are necessary for good memory.
Now there is a research report suggesting that the brain itself may be damaged by multi-tasking. Investigators at Stanford University gave questionnaires to their subjects to identify how much multi-tasking each person did. Nineteen subjects were "heavy multi-taskers" and 22 were "light multi-taskers." Comparison of how these two groups in thinking control tasks revealed that heavy media multi-taskers were more susceptible to interference from irrelevant environmental stimuli and from irrelevant representations in memory.In other words, they were more distractible. Then researchers tested the subjects for ability to filter relevant information from the environment and from their memories and to switch thinking tasks. A typical filtering test, for example, required subjects to detect changes in red triangles on a screen while ignoring blue triangles in the same pictures.
The heavy multi-taskers performed worse, even though their experience and presumed skill at multi-tasking should have made them more effective at these tasks. The heavy multi-taskers believed that they were good at multi-tasking, when in fact they were bad at every task that required multi-tasking.
Tags: Source Ophir, Stanford University, TVRelated posts
Forgetting Can Be Good – Solving the “Tip-of-the-Tongue” Problem
Ever forget something you know you know ... like a friend's name or some other equally embarrassing piece of information? It is on the tip of your tongue, but you just can't get it out.
New research suggests that the problem is caused by a failure to forget. That is, you remember too many wrong things that interfere with the recall of what you want.
Researchers at Stanford University recently clarified this problem by a study in which subjects were required to recall words from among many similar words that they had also seen but not required to remember.
Recall effectiveness ranged from about 30 to 80%, with better performance correlating with poor recall of those words that subjects were not supposed to remember. In other words, the better subjects could forget irrelevant information, the better they could recall what they were supposed to remember.
Tags: MRI, Nature Neuroscience, Source Kuhl, Stanford University