MULTITASKING AND ALTERED FOCUS OF ATTENTION, Part 1

You can’t drive and text at the same time

According to a Harvard study, the average human mind wanders 47% of time when doing a task. It means that our mind, instead of focusing at the task in hand, wanders and thinks about something else. It could have deadly consequences, as seen in many teenage drivers trying to text while they are driving. This happens because when thinking starts for something else, all automatic reflexes for the task at hand stops and working memory for the job disappears. In these situations, we become prone to accidents and our job performance, quality of our work and satisfaction we get from doing a good job, markedly diminishes.

This is why I don’t think multitasking is a good ability to have, as claimed by some. In order to succeed in any job, your full and undivided attention must be paid. In multitasking, attention is divided between tasks and every task is only half done. Therefore, we should try to learn how to develop a focused and sustained attention, and make it a habit, in order to do a perfect job.

It is worth to remember the phrase, if you think you are working for somebody else, you are badly mistaken. You are working for yourself. Your work speaks volumes about you. Your physical, psychological and financial wellbeing, as well as your self-confidence and satisfaction with your life, all comes from the quality and success of your work. Unemployment, not working and unsatisfying work could beget boredom, lessened self-worth, anxiety or depression.

I believe that our shortened and unsustained attention span has something to do with the lessening quality and success in our work. I also believe that the digital world and social media have something to do with it. Social media has been designed and engineered, specifically for quick rewards with superficial little writing, pictures, videos and emojis that only require a very short attention span and no thinking. 

A recent Microsoft study has shown that our focused (spontaneous) attention span has shortened from 8 seconds to 6 seconds since the digital world became an essential part of our lives.

Selective attention is a component of our consciousness; we are consciously aware of everything, in terms of time, person and place around us. At any given time in our modern living, we are bombarded with a lot of audio – visual stimuluses in form of news, commercials, information, infomercials and misinformation. But we are only aware of a small fraction of them, because they have no interest for us and our conscious mind selectively blocks them. So, it appears that selective attention is already a part of sensory processing of our consciousness. Thanks to our brain’s plasticity, we can relearn our sustained and selective focus attention, improve and master it with the help of our willpower.

Selective focused attention simply means willfully clearing our mind from all thoughts and focusing our attention to one thing at a time and sustaining it for as long as possible. At this stage, some important questions have to be raised, such as:

How do we do that?

What is the neural mechanism of focused attention?

What advantages does focused prolonged attention provide for us?

How do we prolong our sustained attention?

I shall discuss the answers to these questions, in upcoming second part of this article.