“Being able to focus into one thing
is more important than multitasking or trying to do many things at a
time.” ~Ankima Kul.
In today’s
society it is considered that people, who are able to do more than one task at
a time, are smarter or more intelligent than those who focus in one thing at a
time. This is true for directly simultaneous tasks, such as watching TV or
talking on phone while eating food, as well as indirect simultaneous tasks,
such as joining many extra-curricular activities in the week (e.g. cricket,
football, piano etc., all together along with regular school).
Those
people, who do multitasking, are actually shifting their attention from one
task to another, and it is found that it is not good for the smartness or
intelligence of the individual. David Walsh mentions in his book Smart parenting, Smarter kids ,“… this
digital age, teens wire their brains to make these shifts very quickly, but
paying attention to one thing at a time, sequentially. Common sense tells us
multitasking should increase brain activity, but actually it doesn’t. Researches
discovered that multitasking actually decreases brain activity. Neither task is
done as well as if each were performed individually, fractions of a second are
lost every time we make a switch, and a person’s interrupted task can take 50
percent longer to finish, with 50 percent more errors.”
It is not
that the children can’t do some tasks simultaneously but if they do two or more
tasks at once, one of them has to be very familiar. Our brain performs the
familiar task on “automatic pilot” while really paying attention to the other
one. For e.g., kids can normally talk while tying shoe laces, as latter goes on
auto pilot. But it is always better to do one thing at a time as constant
distraction is a real threat to kid’s growth and success.
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