Sitting Near a Multitasker Decreases Your Intelligence By 17 Percent
Research from Stanford and other top universities suggest that multitasking may be damaging our brains.
By Geoffrey JamesContributing editor, Inc.com@Sales_Source
Perhaps the most obvious characteristic of open-plan offices is that they're designed so that employees must multitask. Even if you're wearing noise-canceling headphones, some part of your brain must always remain alert for opportunities to "collaborate." Even if you're managing to focus on something, you're still surrounded by other people who are multitasking. That's just the nature of the beast.
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멀티태스킹 작업, 뇌 손상시킨다 - 스탠포드대 등
근처에만 앉아있어도 영향
스탠포드대 등 미 상위 대학들의 연구에 따르면 멀티태스킹을 사용하면 뇌에 17%까지 손상을 줄 수 있다는 분석이 나왔다.
개방형 사무실의 가장 분명한 특징은 직원들이 여러 가지 일을 할 수 있도록 설계되었다는 것이다. 늘 멀티태스킹 작업자 주위에 둘러싸여 있다.
물론 개방형 사무실은 이러한 "협업"이 개인과 팀을 "혁신적"으로 만들고 기본적으로 "더 현명함"을 의미하지만.
멀티태스킹 작업은 보다 명료하게 말하면 오히려 역효과가 있는 것으로 밝혀졌다. 연구에 따르면, 멀티태스킹 작업은 자신과 주변의 사람들의 지능을 떨어뜨린다고 한다
약 10년 전, 조직 심리학자들은 여러 미디어 소스(예: YouTube, Netflix)를 동시에 보는 사람들이 다양한 작업을 수행할 때 멀티태스킹 작업을 더 잘 할 수 있도록 뇌를 훈련시키고 있는지 알고 싶어했다.
그 기대는 오늘날의 개방형 사무실에서처럼 다중 작업을 필요로 하는 환경에서 작업하기에 더 적합할지를 입증하는 것이었다.
놀랍게도, 연구원들은 일상 생활에서 이런 다중 작업 관련 실험실 멀티태스킹 테스트에서 성과상 이점을 주지 않는다는 것을 알아냈다.
한편, 스탠포드 대학의 다른 연구에서는 정기적인 멀티태스킹이 사람들이 하나의 업무에 집중하는 것을 더 어렵게 하고, 어쩌면 더 중요한 것은 "목표와 관련된 정보와의 경쟁에서 취약점에 노출되어 있다"는 것을 발견했다.
왜 이런 일이 생기는 걸까? 음, 여러분이 다중 작업을 할 때, 여러분이 보고 듣는 것을 이해하는 능력으로 측정되는 것처럼, 말 그대로 자신의 지능을 감소시킨다
영국의 요크 대학의 한 획기적인 연구에 따르면, 표준 이해력 테스트에서 멀티 태스커가 멀티 태스킹하지 않은 사람들보다 11% 낮은 점수를 받았다고 한다.
더욱 충격적인 것은, 연구원들은 단지 멀티태스킹 하는 사람 근처에 앉아 있는 것만으로도 뇌의 기능을 17퍼센트나 떨어뜨린다는 사실을 발견했다.
이것은 분명히 다른 사람의 화면이나 활동을 보는 시각적인 오염 때문이다.
황기철 콘페이퍼 에디터 큐레이터 Ki Cheol Hwang, conpaper editor, curator
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The assumption behind open-plan offices, of course, is that this "collaboration" makes individuals and teams more "innovative" and "nimble," which basically means "more intelligent." It turns out that multitasking has the exact opposite effect. According to extensive research, multitasking makes you--and the people around you(!)--measurably less intelligent.
About a decade ago, organizational psychologists wanted to know whether people who watch multiple media sources (like YouTube and Netflix) simultaneously were training their brains to be better able to multitask when performing various tasks.
The expectation was that young people (who do a lot of media multitasking) would prove to be better suited for working in environments that require multitasking, as in the modern open-plan office.
Surprisingly, the researchers discovered that media multitasking in everyday life does not translate to performance benefits in multitasking tests conducted in a laboratory. In fact, the opposite was the case. Regular media multitasking makes people LESS effective at accomplishing tasks while multitasking.
Meanwhile, a different study at Stanford University discovered that regular multitasking also makes it harder for people to focus on a single task and, perhaps more importantly, "allow[s] goal-irrelevant information to compete with goal-relevant information." In other words, daily multitasking makes you:
LESS effective when multitasking.
LESS effective when not multitasking.
LESS effective at prioritizing to achieve goals.
Why does this happen? Well, it turns out that when you're multitasking, you literally reduce your intelligence, as measured by your ability to comprehend what you're seeing and hearing. A landmark study from York University in the UK found that on a standard comprehension test, multitaskers scored 11 percent lower than those who weren't multitasking.
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Even more disturbingly, researchers discovered that merely sitting near somebody who is multitasking drops your comprehension by an astounding 17 percent. This is apparently due to the visual pollution of seeing the other person's screen or activities, which forces your brain to interpret what it's seeing...which takes more effort than the multitasking itself.
To find out what was going on, the psychologists called in the neuroscientists at the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience at University College London, who scanned the brains of frequent multitaskers. The neuroscientists discovered that multitaskers "had smaller gray matter density in the anterior cingulate cortex," which matched the "observed decreased cognitive control performance."
In other words, daily multitasking--or just being around multitasking--actually does brain damage, making people less intelligent. And, indeed, this squares with personal experience, because anybody who's worked with or lived with habitual multitaskers knows that they tend to be scatterbrained.
The implications of this research are truly frightening, considering that 70 percent of all companies have moved to an open-plan office design, which virtually guarantees that everybody will always either be multitasking or be surrounded by multitasking. Ironically, the very technology that was supposed to make us smarter is actually making us dumber.
Sigh.
https://www.inc.com/geoffrey-james/multitasking-reduces-your-intelligence-by-17.html
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