So, having read Amicucci’s “Four Things Social Media Can Teach You About College Writing and One Thing It Can’t” and Bradbury’s “Multitasking Damages Your Brain and Career, New Studies Suggest,” I have concluded that I might not get multitasking the same way as others do. Maybe it’s because of the way I tackle things—I already approach writing assignments like I would a blog post. I think the massive difference for me between the two is that one doesn’t require me to remember how to format things, and is freer. The other depends on all that structure just to get a grade. With one, at worst, someone online might just correct my spelling. With the other, a grade can damage my academic standing. The major difference between the two is the sense of pressure that I am under. The lack of pressure in one does not cause me to overthink, but the pressure in the other certainly does. However, being able to apply the same structural procedure from one to the other isn’t hard outside of that.
I feel like multitasking is the same for me because of that. Multitasking, to me, is being able to juggle multiple tasks at once without losing the thread. It’s not the stereotypical image of housewife doing all the womanly chores at once; that’s just how it feels when you’re overwhelmed. I think it depends on what you’re doing and what part of the brain is being use to do them. The intensity of the work can also play a role in that. Multitasking is not necessarily impossible; I think keeping the thread is.
I’d like to see the parameters that the research was working under. What were the sex, backgrounds, and ages of their participants? Were any of them neurodivergent or not? Were they allowed to work in a way they might naturally? Or were they told to do tasks that they normally would not? Did they account for how that might affect someone’s performance?
(Side note: This is why I hate when the news and other media outlets cover scientific studies. They never drop a link to the study, and never properly state the findings. They almost always conflate causation with correlation, and it drives me mad. Not saying this article did all that, just saying it wouldn’t be the first of its kind if it had.)
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