My brain on crackberry
Excerpts:
Distraction overload, and continuous partial attention.
Gloria Mark, professor of informatics at the University of California, Irvine, shadowed employees at two high-tech firms, she found that the average worker spends only 11 minutes on any given project before being interrupted and asked to do something else. IT workers have it worse, switching attention every three minutes, on average.
Interruption overload can impair higher cognitive functions, too, starting with decision making.
People take about 15 minutes to productively resume a challenging task when they are interrupted even by something as innocuous as an e-mail alert, scientists at Microsoft Research and the University of Illinois found in a 2007 study.
Information first lands in short-term memory, but if it is to stay with you for the long term it must be encoded-put in the right mental file drawer. That process requires a few minutes, and, if interrupted, can be short-circuited.
If new information is not indexed correctly, some of what the brain has stored about, say, TARP will be inaccessible; it's there, but you've failed to construct the neuronal road map needed to find it.
Continuous partial attention is actually a misnomer. Computer scientists use it, but most psychologists disdain it because what seems like partial attention or multitasking is actually rapid-fire switching of attention among tasks. In that state of mind, says computer scientist Mary Czerwinski of Microsoft Research, you don't process information as fully and are not using your frontal lobe effectively.
The stress and hence the cognitive damage caused by e-mail, text and similar intrusions are inversely related to a person's self-esteem and to how much control he perceives he has over his working environment, scientists in Scotland reported in 2006. People who feel they are at the whim of individuals and forces beyond their control tend to suffer the worst consequences of interruption overload.
http://www.newsweek.com/id/183719/page/1
Distraction overload, and continuous partial attention.
Gloria Mark, professor of informatics at the University of California, Irvine, shadowed employees at two high-tech firms, she found that the average worker spends only 11 minutes on any given project before being interrupted and asked to do something else. IT workers have it worse, switching attention every three minutes, on average.
Interruption overload can impair higher cognitive functions, too, starting with decision making.
People take about 15 minutes to productively resume a challenging task when they are interrupted even by something as innocuous as an e-mail alert, scientists at Microsoft Research and the University of Illinois found in a 2007 study.
Information first lands in short-term memory, but if it is to stay with you for the long term it must be encoded-put in the right mental file drawer. That process requires a few minutes, and, if interrupted, can be short-circuited.
If new information is not indexed correctly, some of what the brain has stored about, say, TARP will be inaccessible; it's there, but you've failed to construct the neuronal road map needed to find it.
Continuous partial attention is actually a misnomer. Computer scientists use it, but most psychologists disdain it because what seems like partial attention or multitasking is actually rapid-fire switching of attention among tasks. In that state of mind, says computer scientist Mary Czerwinski of Microsoft Research, you don't process information as fully and are not using your frontal lobe effectively.
The stress and hence the cognitive damage caused by e-mail, text and similar intrusions are inversely related to a person's self-esteem and to how much control he perceives he has over his working environment, scientists in Scotland reported in 2006. People who feel they are at the whim of individuals and forces beyond their control tend to suffer the worst consequences of interruption overload.
http://www.newsweek.com/id/183719/page/1