I am fascinated by the way the brain works and I have been interested for a while in the fact that some people say you can multitask and others say it is impossible. I think it is partly because I am married to a professor who spends lots of concentrated time thinking deeply about things and sits in “fascinating” lectures where NO one would consider having handouts or using PPT and often read from prepared papers.As you might imagine he thinks that people cannot multitask and that students who do email and look at websites while listening to his lectures are tuning him out and not paying attention. He is better than friends of his who make everyone close their laptops during class and decry the existence of wireless in the classroom (“Why would you put wireless in a classroom? It is just a distraction!!”)
On the other side I have many friends in the Ed Tech community who say that one of the problems with education is that we don’t recognize that kids are changing and that they CAN multitask. Examples are given of kids doing homework while listening to music while carrying on a conversation online while playing an online game. So, can people multitask or not?
It is clear that there is a difference between generations. I wouldn’t even TRY what some of the kids do today. I KNOW that I would be totally mixed up.
Well… I just read a really interesting chapter in a book called “Brain Rules” by John Medina. He is a “developmental molecular biologist and research consultant” in Seattle, Washington. I highly recommend reading this book. Here is a small part of what he says about multitasking:
“Recently, I agreed to help the high-school son of a friend of mine with some homework, and I don’t think I will ever forget the experience. Eric had been working for about a half hour on his laptop when I was ushered into the room. An iPod was dangling from his neck, the earbuds cranking out Tom Petty, Bob Dylan, and Green Day as his left hand reflexively tapped the backbeat. The laptop had at least 11 windows open [added comment: sound familiar?]including two IM screens carrying out simultaneous conversations with MySpace friends. Another window was busy downloading an image from Google. The window behind it had the results of some graphic he was altering for MySpace friend No 2, and the one behind that held an old Pong game paused mid-ping.
Buried in the middle of this activity was a word-processing program holding the concepts of the paper for which I was to provide assistance. “The music helps me concentrate,” Eric declared, taking a call on his cell phone. “I normally do everything at school, but I’m stuck. Thanks for coming.” Stuck indeed. Eric would make progress on a sentence or two, then tap out a MySpace message, then see if the download was finished, then return to his paper. Clearly Eric was not concentrating on his paper. Sound like someone you know?
To put it bluntly, research shows that we can’t multitask. We are biologically incapable of processing attention-rich inputs simultaneously. Eric and the rest of us must jump from one thing to the next.”The rest of the chapter explains how our brains work and it was an “aha” experience for me to read. I think that it confirms both the fact that kids learn differently than we did and some multitasking keeps us from “attention-rich inputs”. What we often think of as multitasking is consecutive attention changes.
He goes on to what may be the most helpful part of this chapter where he explains the 10 minute rule. I will not go into that, but I think it is probably worth the price of the book for any teacher or lecturer. I am guessing that some people do it without thinking and that is why they are great teachers or presenters…. but the rest of us need to think about this. What do you think? What have you observed in yourself or in your students? Labels: attention, brain, brain_rules, medina, multitasking