SEPTEMBER 30 — Here’s an interesting finding by Google’s Barometre 2015 report, which was reported by the Malay Mail Online yesterday: we are among the best multitaskers in the world when it comes to our smartphones and television.
According to the report, 91 per cent of Malaysian respondents use their smartphones while watching television, second only to Indonesians at 92 per cent. But just smartphones, though, because only 15 per cent of Malaysian respondents open their laptops while watching television and 9 per cent their tablets.
“I think the nature of Malaysians when they see something, they want to buy it immediately or they want to know more immediately. Or we are just capable of processing much more information than anyone else,” said Sajith Sivanandan, Google’s managing director for Malaysia, Vietnam, Philippines and new emerging markets.
That we look at our smartphones so much is probably due to convenience — we already use it to maintain social relationships, read news, respond to 3am emails and do basic math to pay for lunch. And it’s smaller and lighter than a laptop or tablet is.
And it’s not just television: we also like to look at our smartphones all the time, really, for instance while driving. Look around next time you’re in a traffic crawl, your smartphone screen can wait.
(Of course this multitasking habit while driving predates smartphones; since I got my driving licence I have observed people do a myriad of other things while driving including, but not limited to, talking over the phone, eating nasi bungkus, putting on lipstick, powdering their face, reading newspaper, clipping fingernails...you get the idea.)
But multitasking so much, with our smartphones or otherwise, can be counter-productive. The concept of multitasking itself, which evokes the image of an octopus, each of its eight arms doing something different, eyes wildly monitoring each of its four pairs of appendage, is a myth: when we think we multitask, what we are really doing is switching our attention extremely quickly from one thing or another.
And we’re pretty bad at multitasking, really. The human brain isn’t able to focus on more than one thing at a given time. But of course I can figuratively hear the scepticism in your minds as you read this sentence—of course we all think we can.
The thing is, we are very good at convincing ourselves of this ability, especially when we do multiple tasks that use similar parts of the brain like typing email and Googling something while holding a Facebook chat conversation. The rapid and repeated switch in focus doesn’t use wildly different abilities (typing), enabling us to sustain a reasonable pace for each task, so we think we’re pretty good at it.
But consider when we multitask with things that are very different. Talk over the phone while you type an article, for instance. Don’t you find your typing slowing down almost to a halt or your words getting incoherent? You get the picture.
And when we multitask so much over a prolonged period of time, it changes how we function. The brain is built to change and adapt all the time — multitasking is no exception.
Already smartphones are changing the way we walk, for instance. It is no longer about looking ahead and putting one foot before another, but now involves locating a near-distance target, remembering its location and potential obstacles, then walking on auto-pilot towards it while we shift back to the smartphone screen, according to 2012 paper published by Stony Brook University researchers.
In the brain itself, when multitasking becomes a habit, those worse afflicted by this habit will have trouble shutting down that tendency to multitask even when they’re not, as a 2010 study by Stanford University researchers found.
The bottomline here is that prolonged multitasking with technology rewires our brain: even when we put down the smartphone, after some time we’ll hear a little voice in our head asking if there’s a new email. Or if there’s a new breaking story on Bloomberg or Financial Times.
This is our brain responding to repeated bursts of information that is becoming commonplace these days. It plays on our instinct to react to immediate opportunities, threats and Facebook posts—we get a rush from it and it can be addictive.
But it also hurts —in more ways than potentially killing you on the road in a moment of distraction.
Scientists have found that since we remain in multitasking mode after we stop multitasking, heavy multitaskers will have difficulty in shutting out irrelevant information. We get distracted more, either by a new email alert buzzing in our pocket or by that tiny voice in our heads telling us to check if there is a new email.
In turn this means it gets more difficult to focus. Millennials, how often have you heard your boss (from an older generation) describe someone roughly your age as “distracted”? When you pick up a book to read, do you find that you stop every few pages to check something on your phone?
It also hurts our social interaction — once we become wired to pay attention to others in only small bursts the way we multitask, empathy may lessen and with it the quality of our relationships, said one Stanford researcher to New York Times in 2010.
Once constant multitasking becomes a habit for the brain, it becomes an effort to shut everything out and focus on something —— writers especially would understand this challenge of going into deep focus when your brain insists on finding something else every few minutes.
So how? It takes conscious effort to counteract, but doable. And you can start with a little willpower and a silent mode function on your phone.
Next time you start writing something or reading something or having quality time with family or friends, put your smartphone on silent mode. Tell yourself to shut out everything else unless something’s on fire somewhere. It’ll be difficult to resist that urge to check your phone until you’re done, but over time you’ll get used to it again.
* This is the personal opinion of the columnist.
