The Multitasking Myth: A Selection from Johann Hari’s Stolen Focus (2022)
“We invented a myth. The myth is that we can actually think about three, five, ten things at the same time. To pretend this was the case, we took a term that was never meant to be applied to human beings at all. In the 1960s, computer scientists invented machines with more than one processor, so they really could do two things (or more) simultaneously. They called this machine-power ‘multitasking.’ Then we took the concept and applied it to ourselves. . . .
If you are focusing on something and you get interrupted, on average it will take twenty-three minutes for you to get back to the same state of focus. A different study of office workers in the U.S. found most of them never get an hour of uninterrupted work in a typical day. If this goes on for months and years, it scrambles your ability to figure out who you are and what you want. You become lost in your own life. . . .
When attention breaks down, problem-solving breaks down. Solving big problems requires the sustained focus of many people over many years. Democracy requires the ability of a population to pay attention long enough to identify real problems, distinguish them from fantasies, come up with solutions, and hold their leaders accountable if they fail to deliver them. If we lose that, we lose our ability to have a fully functioning society. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that this crisis in paying attention has taken place at the same time as the worst crisis of democracy since the 1930s. People who can’t focus will be more drawn to simplistic authoritarian solutions—and less likely to see clearly when they fail. A world full of attention-deprived citizens alternating between Twitter and Snapchat will be a world of cascading crises where we can’t get a handle on any of them. . . .
When people think they’re doing several things at once, they’re actually—as Earl explained—‘juggling. They’re switching back and forth. They don’t notice the switching because their brain sort of papers it over, to give a seamless experience of consciousness, but what they’re actually doing is switching and reconfiguring their brain moment to moment, task to task—[and] that comes with a cost.’
There are three ways, he explained, in which this constant switching degrades your ability to focus. The first is called the ‘switch cost effect.’ There is broad scientific evidence for this. Imagine you are doing your tax return and you receive a text, and you look at it—it’s only a glance, taking five seconds—and then you go back to your tax return. In that moment, ‘your brain has to reconfigure, when it goes from one task to another,’ he said. You have to remember what you were doing before, and you have to remember what you thought about it, ‘and that takes a little bit of time.’ When this happens, the evidence shows that ‘your performance drops. You’re slower. All as a result of the switching.’
So if you check your texts often while trying to work, you aren’t only losing the little bursts of time you spend looking at the texts—you are also losing the time it takes to refocus afterward, which can be much longer. He said: ‘If you’re spending a lot of your time not really thinking, but wasting it on switching, that’s just wasted brain-processing time.’ This means that if your Screen Time shows you are using your phone four hours a day, you are losing much more time than that in lost focus.
When Earl said this, I thought, yes, but it must be a small effect, a tiny drag on your attention. But when I went and read the relevant research, I learned there is some science suggesting the effect can be surprisingly large. For example, a small study commissioned by Hewlett-Packard looked at the IQ of some of their workers in two situations. At first they tested their IQ when they were not being distracted or interrupted. Then they tested their IQ when they were receiving emails and phone calls. The study found that ‘technological distraction’—just getting emails and calls—caused a drop in the workers’ IQ by an average of ten points. To give you a sense of how big that is: in the short term, that’s twice the knock to your IQ that you get when you smoke cannabis. So this suggests, in terms of being able to get your work done, you’d be better off getting stoned at your desk than checking your texts and Facebook messages a lot.
From there, the research shows, it gets worse. The second way switching harms your attention is what we might call the ‘screw-up effect.’ When you switch between tasks, errors that wouldn’t have happened otherwise start to creep in, because—Earl explained—‘your brain is error-prone. When you switch from task to task, your brain has to backtrack a little bit and pick up and figure out where it left off’—and it can’t do that perfectly. Glitches start to occur. ‘Instead of spending critical time really doing deep thinking, your thinking is more superficial, because you’re spending a lot of time correcting errors and backtracking.’
Then there’s a third cost to believing you can multitask, one that you’ll only notice in the medium or longer term—which we might call the ‘creativity drain.’ You’re likely to be significantly less creative. Why? ‘Because where do new thoughts [and] innovation come from?’ Earl asked. They come from your brain shaping new connections out of what you’ve seen and heard and learned. Your mind, given free undistracted time, will automatically think back over everything it absorbed, and it will start to draw links between them in new ways. This all takes place beneath the level of your conscious mind, but this process is how ‘new ideas pop together, and suddenly, two thoughts that you didn’t think had a relationship suddenly have a relationship.’ A new idea is born. But if you ‘spend a lot of this brain-processing time switching and error-correcting,’ Earl explained, you are simply giving your brain less opportunity to ‘follow your associative links down to new places and really [have] truly original and creative thoughts.’
I later learned about a fourth consequence, based on a smaller amount of evidence—which we might call the ‘diminished memory effect.’ A team at UCLA got people to do two tasks at once, and tracked them to see the effects. It turned out that afterward they couldn’t remember what they had done as well as people who did just one thing at a time. This seems to be because it takes mental space and energy to convert your experiences into memories, and if you are spending your energy instead on switching very fast, you’ll remember and learn less.
So if you spend your time switching a lot, then the evidence suggests you will be slower, you’ll make more mistakes, you’ll be less creative, and you’ll remember less of what you do. . . .
You should think of your brain as like a nightclub where, standing at the front of that club, there’s a bouncer. The bouncer’s job is to filter out most of the stimuli that are hitting you at any given moment—the traffic noise, the couple having an argument across the street, the cellphone ringing in the pocket of the person next to you—so that you can think coherently about one thing at a time. The bouncer is essential. This ability to filter out irrelevant information is crucial if you are going to be able to attend to your goals. And that bouncer in your head is strong and ripped: he can fight off two, four, maybe even six people trying to barge into your brain at a time. He can do a lot. The part of your brain doing this is known as the prefrontal cortex.
But today . . . the bouncer is besieged in an unprecedented way. In addition to switching tasks like never before, our brains are also being forced to filter more frantically than at any point in our past. Think about something as simple as noise. There’s broad scientific evidence that if you are sitting in a noisy room, your ability to pay attention deteriorates, and your work gets worse. For example, children in noisy classrooms have worse attention than kids in quiet classrooms. Yet many of us are surrounded by high levels of noise, working in open-plan offices, sleeping in crowded cities, and tapping away on our laps in crammed coffee shops like the one we were sitting in at that moment. Rising noise pollution is just one example—we live surrounded by shrieking distractions calling for our attention, and the attention of others. That’s why . . . the bouncer has to work ‘way harder’ to keep out distractions. He’s exhausted. And so a lot more is fighting its way past him, into your mind—interfering with the flow of your thoughts.
As a result, a lot of the time, he can’t filter like he used to. The bouncer is overwhelmed, and the nightclub becomes full of rowdy assholes disrupting the normal dancing.”—Johann Hari, Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention—And How to Think Deeply Again (2022)
