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| Proforma Safety, LLC Proforma PSI…when performance counts. Are You Really Multi-tasking? A recent article in The New York Times described results of several studies on multitasking that blow holes in the illusion that one can simultaneously concentrate on several tasks without implications. Of particular note, a study on Microsoft workers found that, after responding to emails and the like, it took 15 minutes for them to focus again on serious mental tasks after being distracted. “Multitasking is going to slow you down, increasing the chances of mistakes,” said David E. Meyer, a cognitive scientist and director of the Brain, Cognition and Action Laboratory at the University of Michigan. “Disruptions and interruptions are a bad deal from the standpoint of our ability to process information.” According to another study ”Isolation of a Central Bottleneck of Information Processing with Time-Resolved fMRI“), when trying to tackle two tasks at the same time, the human brain addresses the first and usually postpones the second. The experts think the brain experiences a bottleneck at a central, amodal stage of information processing that does not permit simultaneous decision-making. Another study conducted by the Institute for the Future of the Mind at Oxford University showed this to be the case, regardless of the person’s age. Hence, the myth of the young being more adept at multi-tasking is just that – a myth. There’s lost productivity as well resulting from multitasking, according to Jonathan B. Spira, chief analyst at Basex, a business-research firm. He estimates the cost of interruptions to the American economy to be in the range of $650 billion a year. Spira’s conclusions were based on surveys and interviews with professionals and office workers, who reported 28 percent of their time was spent on interruptions and recovery time. Full text of the article is available here. .
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