学进去

Nowadays our life is getting more and more demanding. It seems that multitasking can help us get out of the trouble. It was first used to describe computer performance. However, the human brain, is not a computer. And human attention is a very limited resource. Can we actually multitask?

According to the spotlight theory of attention, when we focus on the leftmost or rightmost things, our attention must cover the intervening region(间隔区) because the spotlight of attention cannot be divided. Even though we’re constantly receiving a huge amount of information from our senses, it’s only possible for a small amount to make it through to conscious awareness(意识). Take the Bouncing Ball Experiment for an example. Let’s watch carefully and pay particular attention to how many balls bounce(弹跳) in the circle. How many balls can you count? Seven, right? But did you also notice that little dinosaur? What about the changing shape of the circle? Or the smiley face on one of the balls? This experiment shows just how powerful our focused attention is.

Being able to delete irrelevant(无关的) detail is an amazingly useful tool, but it means we might miss things that are right under our noses. This is the effect known as inattention blindness. You can see this very clearly in the famous Invisible Gorilla experiment. When asked to concentrate exclusively on how often basketball players in white pass the ball, most people completely miss the gorilla walking across the screen and beating his chest.

We just don’t have the ability to process everything at a time. This is a particular problem when we try to multitask. We can change attention from one task to another and back again. But when attention is overloaded, we miss things, and the result is nearly always that we perform tasks less well than we will do them one at a time. It’s only truly possible to do two things at once if they require different sets of mental(头脑的) resources. For example, it’s totally possible to read a book and listen to music at the same time.

This would suggest that driving while talking on the phone is not a problem, as long as it’s a hands-free phone. But it’s not that simple. Research has shown that while talking on the phone we have tendency(趋势) to create mental images, and this uses the same visual resources needed for driving. And if visual resources become too spread, it’s possible for a driver to look directly at a danger but, just like with that little dinosaur, fail to see it.

So multitasking makes us at best, inefficient, and at worst, downright dangerous. If you’re feeling like you should be doing 17 things at once, remember, that’s just not the way your brain works.