And frankly, we're seeing this across the world, from the least developed countries to the most developed countries. Multitasking is one of the most dominant trends in the use of media, so we could be essentially dumbing down the world.
That's a terrifying thought.
It's very scary. And it's one of the reasons we're so excited about this research and why so many other people are getting excited.
People never bothered to look at what we call chronic multitaskers. What they would do is they'd make people do five things at once and say: "Ha ha! They're not as good as if they do one thing at a time." Not a big shock, I think. What we decided to do is ask the question, what's happening if you're doing this all the time, even when you're not multitasking? So if we take a multitasker and say, "Now just focus on this," can they? As a professor and as a teacher, we think a lot about how do you teach kids who can't pay attention or are distracted by irrelevancy or don't keep their memory neatly organized? It's a scary, scary thought.
And, in fact, you already hear professors and others talking about changes in the way kids write, so that instead of writing an essay, they write in paragraphs, because what happens is, they write a paragraph, and they say, "Oh, now I'll look at Facebook for a while." Or they write a paragraph and say, "Oh, chance to play poker," or whatever other activity they want, or to do all of these at once.
So what we're seeing is less of a notion of a big idea carried through and much more little bursts and snippets. And we see that across media, across film, across, in Web sites, this idea of just do a little bit and then you can run away.
We were at MIT, and we were interviewing students and professors. And the professors, by and large, were complaining that their students were losing focus because they were on their laptops during class, and the kids just all insisted that they were really able to manage all that media and still pay attention to what was important in class -- pick and choose, as they put it. Does that sound familiar to you?
It's extremely familiar. ... And the truth is, virtually all multitaskers think they are brilliant at multitasking. And one of the big new items here, and one of the big discoveries is, you know what? You're really lousy at it. And even though I'm at the university and tell my students this, they say: "Oh, yeah, yeah. But not me! I can handle it. I can manage all these," which is, of course, a normal human impulse. So it's actually very scary. ...
So who are these kids that you picked [for your study] to come in here today?
We picked the kids at Stanford who are multitasking a whole lot. So on a college campus, most kids are doing two things at once, maybe three things at once. These are kids who are doing five, six or more things at once, all the time.
So they're the kids who are texting while talking with people, while working on their papers, while chatting on multiple sessions. They're the kids who are playing multiple games on their screen while they're doing Facebook, while they're talking, while they're doing all these other things. So these are the extreme kids, the kids who are at the very, very high end of that. ...
And do these kids think they're pretty good at it?
Yeah. They all seem to think they're really good at it. In fact, what's ironic is when we talk with people who multitask all the time, those who don't -- even though our research suggests the ones who don't would actually be better at it -- they're the ones who are sure they're really bad at it. And the ones who do it all the time and are sure they are great at it are really bad at it. So it's a real question: What's going on?
or anyone's else either...I actually think we are more alike than we are different... and the mix of similar and different is what makes the world a more interesting place. Please give me the benefit of not reading more into my words than are there and I will do the same for you.
