singular focus was not merely a practical way to structure one’s time; it was a mark of intelligence
multitasking
parallel processing abilities of computers, multitasking is now shorthand for the human attempt to do simultaneously as many things as possible, as quickly as possible, preferably marshalling the power of as many technologies as possible
2005, the BBC reported on a research study, funded by Hewlett-Packard and conducted by the Institute of Psychiatry at the University of London
2007 was Linda Stone’s notion of “continuous partial attention,
multitasking a “mythical activity in which people believe they can perform two or more tasks simultaneously.”
ADT is “purely a response to the hyperkinetic environment in which we live,”
“Attention Deficit Trait,”
workers took an average of twenty-five minutes to recover from interruptions such as phone calls or answering e-mail and return to their original task
“task-switching”—that is, multitasking behavior—the flow of blood increases to a region of the frontal cortex called Brodmann area 10
the last part of the brain to evolve, the most mysterious and exciting part
rather than a bottleneck in the brain, a process of “adaptive executive control” takes place, which “schedules task processes appropriately to obey instructions about their relative priorities and serial order,
with training, the brain can learn to task-switch more effectively
people who are not distracted show activity in the hippocampus, a region involved in storing and recalling information
people who are distracted or multitasking show activity in the striatum, a region of the brain involved in learning new skills
Media multitasking—that is, the simultaneous use of several different media, such as television, the Internet, video games, text messages, telephones, and e-mail—is clearly on the rise,
conductors have to be able to hear a bad note, then identify who did it, perhaps
they rewire their brains to combine their visual and auditory senses. A
there’s the possibility that everyone could train themselves to do more than one
thing at once