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#ATTENTION ATTENTION REVIEW CODE#
As Miller put it, “A man just beginning to learn radiotelegraphic code hears each dit and dash as a separate chunk. One is to “chunk” information so that you can, in effect, pack more material into one of those seven units.
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Crudely speaking, there are two ways to manage its effects. What Miller called the informational bottleneck has been recognized as a profound constraint on human cognition. If a person is anxious or fatigued or in the presence of an attractive stranger, his working-memory capacity will probably degrade. Likewise, when people are asked to repeat an unfamiliar sequence of numbers or musical tones, their limit on a first try is roughly seven.Īnd that is under optimal conditions. (Sometimes people do well with as many as nine.) Beyond that point, they estimate. When people are shown an image of circles for a quarter of a second and then asked to say how many circles they saw, they do fine if there were seven or fewer. Miller (then at Harvard, now at Princeton) suggested that humans’ working-memory capacity-that is, their ability to juggle facts and perform mental operations-is limited to roughly seven units. People can walk and chew gum at the same time, but not walk, chew gum, play Frisbee, and solve calculus problems. At the same time, there were no superstars: Beyond a fairly low level of multitasking, everyone’s performance breaks down. Some people seemed to be consistently better than others at concentrating amid distraction. The consensus today is that there are overlapping but neurologically distinct systems: one of controlled attention, which you use to push yourself to read another page of Faulkner, and one of stimulus-driven attention, which kicks in when someone shatters a glass behind you.īut those scholars also became intrigued by the range of individual variation they found. Those early scholars were largely interested in whether attention is generated by conscious effort or is an unwilled effect of outside forces. Another had people sort cards of various shapes while counting aloud by threes. One early researcher asked her subjects to read aloud from a novel while simultaneously writing the letter A as many times as possible. Nass and other scholars of attention and alertness say their work has the potential to illuminate unsettled questions about the nature of learning, memory, and intelligence.Īs far back as the 1890s, experimental psychologists were testing people’s ability to direct their attention to multiple tasks. But that is just one small, prosaic part of this terrain. The study was yet another piece of evidence for the unwisdom of multitasking.Įxperiments like that one have added fuel to the perpetual debate about whether laptops should be allowed in classrooms.
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Nass says he was surprised at the result: He had expected the multitaskers to perform better on at least some elements of the test. Indeed, last summer Nass and two colleagues published a study that found that self-described multitaskers performed much worse on cognitive and memory tasks that involved distraction than did people who said they preferred to focus on single tasks. “But there’s evidence that those people are actually worse at multitasking than most people.” Nass, a professor of psychology at Stanford University. “Heavy multitaskers are often extremely confident in their abilities,” says Clifford I. A student today who moves his attention rapid-fire from text-messaging to the lecture to Facebook to note-taking and back again may walk away from the class feeling buzzed and alert, with a sense that he has absorbed much more of the lesson than he actually has. But until recently-so the worry goes-students at least knew when they had checked out. Students’ minds have been wandering since the dawn of education. That illusion of competence is one of the things that worry scholars who study attention, cognition, and the classroom. Wasn’t I operating at peak alertness just then? Your brain had been aroused to perform several tasks, and you had an illusory sense that you must be performing them well. You’ve heard all the warnings about cellphones and driving-but on a gut level, this wreck might bewilder you in a way that the first scenario didn’t. You’re drinking coffee and talking to your boss on a cellphone, practicing your pitch. My mind just wasn’t there.īy contrast, imagine that you drive across town in a state of mild exhilaration, multitasking on your way to a sales meeting. You’re so distracted that you rear-end the car in front of you at 10 miles an hour. Imagine that driving across town, you’ve fallen into a reverie, meditating on lost loves or calculating your next tax payments.