A student types on her laptop, balancing papers on her knees, a mug of coffee to her right. She wears a headset, nodding from time to time to the beat. Beside her is her cellular phone, vibrating and flashing every time a message appears. The television set in front of her is showing ?Glee.?

Somehow the student manages to finish her paper while listening to Lady Gaga, answering her phone, and watching ?Glee? simultaneously.
At least that is what she tells her parents when they ask her to turn off the TV, to teachers who tell her to remove the headphones, to counselors who try to help her develop better study habits.

?There is no way you can study with all those things happening at once!? they say.

?Oh yes, we can,? she replies. ?We are the multitasking generation.?

Attention deficit

It is no coincidence that the multitasking generation is also the attention-deficit generation.

When we try to do more than one demanding activity at the same time then, most likely, we will fail. In class, if students try to listen to the lecture, while secretly sending text messages to their friends (under the table, unaware that the teacher does see), they may think they are succeeding at both tasks.

But what is really happening is that they are switching back and forth between the two. The effort expended in doing these two things simultaneously is greater than if they tried to do the tasks one after the other.

What is worst, students become more error-prone when they multitask. They will more likely miss important points of the lecture and misspell their message or even send it to the wrong person.

In her book ?Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life,? award-winning behavioral science writer Winifred Gallagher says, ?Multitasking?s obvious drawback is inefficiency. In many cases, your ability to do two things simultaneously is impaired because both tasks draw on one or more of the same information-processing systems in the brain. For activities that involve language, such as conversing, watching TV, or simply thinking, for example, there?s just one major channel through which you send input and receive output.

There are occasional exceptions to the rule, says David Meyer, a cognitive scientist at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, but generally, ?if you?re, say, trying to listen to someone on the phone while typing an e-mail, something has to give.??

Using tests such as magnetic resonance imaging, psychologists from the University of California-Los Angeles have discovered that when we focus on a demanding task, we primarily rely on our brain?s hippocampus (which governs memory). But when we are distracted by things such as text messages, we unconsciously switch to another part of the brain, the striatum (which governs routine activities).

Fragmented recollection

?As a result,? says Gallagher, ?even if you get the job done, your recollection of it will be more fragmented, less adaptable, and harder to retrieve than it would be if you had given it your undivided attention.?

To make things worse, multitasking requires more time than doing things one at a time. Yes, you read it right. People multitask in order to save time but, in the end, they spend more time doing several things at once.

Gallagher interviews an attention expert who, after writing a book, says, ?If your train of thought is interrupted even for a second, you have to go back and say, ?Where was I?? There are start-up costs each time you reload everything into memory. Multitasking exacts a price, and people aren?t as good at it as they think they are.?

Multitasking is dangerous for learning. Research shows that American youths spend an average of 6.5 hours a day in the electronic world and, most likely, many spend much more time. Increasingly, Filipino youths are following their American peers? example, to the detriment of their capacity to learn.

Cases of students with attention-deficit disorders are increasing, and students increasingly find it difficult to pay sustained attention in class. What is worth doing requires focus and attention, and many of our children cannot sustain these.

According to Gallagher, Meyer says ?kids need to work at developing the capacity for the concentrated, sustained attention required to succeed in many endeavors, not just the skill of flitting among them. Einstein didn?t invent the theory of relativity while he was multitasking at the Swiss patent office.?

To students who call themselves the multitasking generation, Gallagher has this to say: ?If you grow up assuming that you can pay attention to several things at once, you may not realize that the way in which you process such information is superficial at best. When you?re finally forced to confront intellectually demanding situations in high school or college, you may find that you?ve traded depth of knowledge for breadth and stunted your capacity for serious thought.?

No wonder our children find it difficult to read good books, solve math problems, or even understand science concepts. They are not lazy. Because of shallow multitasking habits, they have found it extremely difficult to think about more complex matters.

Gallagher laments the toll on our youth?s relationships with real human beings because of hours spent multitasking on machines. Our kids boast of the millions of friends they have online, but they seldom have real-world interactions with them.
?The young in particular might fail to consider how many people in their electronic address book really know them and would be there for them if they needed help,? Gallagher warns.

Dangerous

Of all the concerns about cell phones (whether they cause brain cancer, emit harmful radiation, or blow up gas stations), I believe that the biggest danger involves cell phone use and driving.

Many accidents have occurred because the driver is either chatting on the cell or, even worse, texting with one eye on the road and the other on the phone.

In the United States, statistics show that hundreds of thousands of traffic accidents result from cell phone use alone. While there has been no studies in the Philippines, all of us have heard of accidents (or near-accidents) involving cell phones and driving.

Although there might be a few exceptional cases, driving while chatting or texting should be banned outright, and abusers punished.

?Rapt? is an eye-opener on the need for attention and focus. Let us live the focused life. Let us learn to pay attention.

?Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life? (by Winifred Gallagher, 2009) is available at National Bookstore.

E-mail the author at blessbook@yahoo.com.