Multitasking is bad for you but I don't care

I read this in between pressing the "random" button on assorted webcomics and writing a paper on the evolution of turbulent gas clouds in galaxy clusters. Now I feel guilty...

As a rule, I prefer to "multitask" (actually, flick back and forth between different activities) when I have something boring and tedious to do (or just plain long). This makes them all collectively much more interesting, which is apparently because chemicals :

Multitasking creates a dopamine-addiction feedback loop, effectively rewarding the brain for losing focus and for constantly searching for external stimulation. To make matters worse, the prefrontal cortex has a novelty bias, meaning that its attention can be easily hijacked by something new – the proverbial shiny objects we use to entice infants, puppies, and kittens.

I tend to do this an awful lot at work, but much less so at home. If I have a single, definite problem to tackle and a clear way forward, that's different - I'll work at it constantly and try and shut out emails etc. as much as possible. Or even if it's not so straightforward but interesting to think about then I tend very much to focus. Oh, I might still be doing other things, but I'm not really concentrating on them, they're more in the hope of catching an inspiration particle than being genuine diversions (except for walking, which is the single best way to induce concentration). It's when things get boring that so-called multitasking comes into effect. And I'm not sure I'd really want to work any other way - if someone forced me to write the paper and banned all access to webcomics, I'm pretty sure productivity would go down, very sharply.

Fortunately my phone is rarely used for anything and I don't have the other problems of being inundated with messages in various formats described elsewhere in the article, however :

Because the very act of writing a note or letter to someone took this many steps, and was spread out over time, we didn’t go to the trouble unless we had something important to say. Because of email’s immediacy, most of us give little thought to typing up any little thing that pops in our heads and hitting the send button. And email doesn’t cost anything. The sheer ease of sending emails has led to a change in manners, a tendency to be less polite about what we ask of others. Many professionals tell a similar story. One said, “A large proportion of emails I receive are from people I barely know asking me to do something for them that is outside what would normally be considered the scope of my work or my relationship with them. Email somehow apparently makes it OK to ask for things they would never ask by phone, in person, or in snail mail.”

The most common variant of this I have is being asked to watch lengthy documentaries about things I'm not at all interested in, mostly UFOs. Listen, bub, if my best friends suggest a TV series to me I'll get round to it within the next six months or so if they're lucky, so what makes you think I'm going watch something I keep telling you I'm not interested in by next Tuesday ? Not gonna happen.
Worse are requests for art. I had one recently from a reputable company (I couldn't actually figure out what it is that they do from their website, but it looked shiny) and not two days later I got a reminder email. Two days ! I don't always respond to work emails that quickly, let alone strangers. Give 'em an inch and they'll take a mile...
And worst of all are people - just random strangers on the internet - asking for Blender files. Why not just ask for a stool sample while you're at it ? Hell no, you can't "just have" my Arecibo or Orion models. Do you know how many tens of hours they took to produce ? Lots, that's how many. They're not even for sale, so no, mysterious stranger*, you can't "just have" them. They're mine, so sod off.

* This does not apply to people I've already established trust with.

Peter Milner and James Olds, both neuroscientists, placed a small electrode in the brains of rats, in a small structure of the limbic system called the nucleus accumbens... Olds and Milner called it the pleasure centre. A lever in the cage allowed the rats to send a small electrical signal directly to their nucleus accumbens. Do you think they liked it? Boy how they did! They liked it so much that they did nothing else. The rats just pressed the lever over and over again, until they died of starvation and exhaustion. Does that remind you of anything? A 30-year-old man died in Guangzhou (China) after playing video games continuously for three days. Another man died in Daegu (Korea) after playing video games almost continuously for 50 hours, stopped only by his going into cardiac arrest.

I would hazard a guess that that level of terminal addiction develops from a combination of the chemical effects of addiction but coupled with a life lacking in meaning (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/johann-hari/the-real-cause-of-addicti_b_6506936.html) or a serious underlying neurological condition. I doubt very much it's easy for normal people to become so chronically addicted to video games or smartphones or emails.


Multi-tasking has an actual energy cost: ‘Asking the brain to shift attention from one activity to another causes the prefrontal cortex and striatum to burn up oxygenated glucose, the same fuel they need to stay on task.’
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/jan/18/modern-world-bad-for-brain-daniel-j-levitin-organized-mind-information-overload