The Importance Of Multitasking While Learning

Multitasking while learning

Do you multitask? How often do you do it? It is extremely common, and we multitask every day more than we think, sometimes without even knowing. We can listen to music and text without any issue, but can we text and study at the same time without affecting leaning? There is a great concern about the frequency and the multitasked activities we do. Experts have taken brain scans showing different regions of the brain, each activity uses a different region of the brain. The human brain struggles to perform at its best when we multitask while leaning. The issue goes beyond academic failure, the process of information is becoming shallower in younger generations. In the article “The New Marshmallow Test: Students Can’t

Larry Rosen, a psychology professor at California State University, published a study in the May issue of Computers in Human Behavior. His research was focused on young people multitasking, especially the use of technology devices while learning. In the study, students knew they their behavior was being observed, and they were told to study something important. During the study, student’s attention drifted from studying to media/devices within 2 minutes. The time span of attention was impressive, even Rosen declares “it was kind of scary”. Paul’s added the previous quote to her article in order to create pathos and make the readers sympathize with the

Citations, quotes, data, and statistics are her appeal to Logos. David Meyer, psychologist professor at the University of Michigan studied the brain’s ability to multitask. He found that the brain cannot do two complicated tasks at the same time because the prefrontal cortex of the brain cannot be used for simultaneously. Moreover, he says that people are addicted to multitasking and in fact, they suffer the inefficiencies of multitasking without knowing. Paul uses Logos and adds data about the negative consequences in students that multitask. Students that multitask get distracted and have to familiarize with the information again after the interruption, therefore it takes them longer to complete their assignments. According to Paul “the mental fatigue caused by repeatedly dropping and picking up a mental thread leads to more mistakes”. The distraction and the inattention of one task lead to the failure to memorize or encode correctly information in the brain. The new way to store and process information is not beneficial. Russell Poldrack of the University of Texas examined brain scans of people and found that different parts of the brain were active while multitasking. The result shows that the brain encodes memories different when is forced to split the attention into two. Every day distractions are almost impossible to avoid, therefore academic success depends on how