Long-Term Effects Of Multitasking

So what exactly is the result of our brains receiving so many different types of stimuli all at once? What are the long term effects of multitasking? In Is Google Making Us Stupid, Nicholas Carr includes a study conducted by scholars from the University College of London that sheds some light onto a resulting phenomenon. According to Carr, they examined computer logs that recorded the behaviors of visitors to two specific websites that provided access to journals, magazines and books. These scholars discovered something that was prevalent amongst all of the site-goers: skimming. They found that people had a certain tendency to quickly skim over passages and jump from site to site (2). The evidence shows that our reading skills are heavily impacted

This is a clear indication that kids nowadays aren’t able to store long term memories as much as they used to. One reason is an overload of information. Have you ever visited a website which showcases a wide range of colors, pictures, hyperlinks and videos? One might argue that such websites hold our attention far better than one with plain text because they make the content interesting and fun. Sure, it is visually appealing to look at and that is where the real problem resides. Adolescents who are presented with these kinds of websites have too much information bombarded at them. Instead of focusing on the text presented to them, their mind alternates between all the different information. One might ask how exactly does this affect memory? Nicholas Carr uses a valuable example to explain this in The Web Shatters focus, Rewires Brain. He says, “Imagine filling a bathtub with a thimble; that’s the challenge involved in moving working memory into long-term memory…on the net, we face many information faucets, all going full speed. Our little thimble overflows from tap to tap. We transfer only a small jumble of drops from different faucets, not a continuous, coherent stream” (3). I wholeheartedly agree with the comparison that Carr makes. Because our minds are trying to move from information to information to take it all in, we get bits of pieces of information from too many different sources. There are too many things jumbled up together with a very limited amount of logical flow to it, hence, our brain becomes unable to store all the information as long term