Multitasking may be harmful? ABSURD!!

Link to the CNN Article

As someone who can multitask quite well, I take offense at the logic in this article. Here are a few of the absurdities found within.

"Heavy multitaskers are more easily distracted by irrelevant information than those who aren't constantly in a multimedia frenzy." This statement is too subjective. The relevance of the information is determined by the individual, not by someone else.

"One reason may be because the multitaskers tend to retain the distracting information in their short-term memory, which affects their ability to focus." Again, too subjective. To a multitasker, the information is not distracting. This additional information actually allows a multitasker to focus better. As a matter of fact, multitaskers can focus on multiple tasks at once, hence the term multitasker.

"Its consequences can be quite severe in situations like driving." So you're driving down the road and texting at the same time, then you drop your phone and reach down to pick it up...yeah. That's bad. But the study didn't test physical multitasking such as this. It only tested mental multitasking, which is no way (at least in my multitasking mind) disadvantageous. The information processing ability of multitaskers actually helps in driving situations. They are more aware of what is happening around them and are able to respond quicker.

"You're being flooded with too much information and you can't selectively filter out quickly which is important and which is not important." Maybe you can't Dr. Goodman, but I can.

"Multitasking may 'lower the threshold of distractibility,' possibly harming the ability to do tasks that require intense sustained focus, such as art, science, and writing." Um, lets see. I'm an IT professional, a graphic designer, software developer, a perpetual student of science, spirituality, and philosophy, and a blogger, too. Sort of throws that hypothesis right out the window, doesn't it?

"If it's not very reversible...we don't yet know how reversible and flexible these things might be." Anything you can do I can do better. Why in the hell would I want to reverse that? They make it sound like multitasking is a disease or a not-yet curable condition.

"There hasn't been a huge amount of work in this area up to this point." Then why in the hell did you publish the result of the study? And why in the hell did CNN write an article about it?

"may be...can be...could be...may be...may lower...possibly harming...possibly frightening...we don't yet know...might be...it's unclear...it's not clear..." Yes, these are straight from the article. They expect the reader to take this study seriously with all this uncertainty?

The article essentially says multitasking is bad because you can't do only one thing at a time. That's like saying red apples are bad because they're not green.