The world lost a great mind this week.
Clifford Nass, Stanford professor and a critic of multitasking, passed away at 55.
No, he wasn’t texting while driving; sadly, he appears to have suffered a heart attack after hiking in California. Nass was born in Teaneck, N.J., in 1958 and received a bachelor’s degree in mathematics and a master’s and doctorate in sociology, all from Princeton. He then taught and studied communications at Stanford, when he wasn’t consulting on software with Microsoft.
I come from a distinguished line of mono-taskers. My mom is famous in our family for forgetting she’d left a pot of string beans cooking on the stove while she played the piano, until a horrible scorching smell reminded her.
I would do the same, except I never learned any piano piece longer than “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star.”
Doing just one thing at a time is hard enough. Already I leave coffee cups and reading glasses all over the house, whenever I’m interrupted. Why add multitasking to this mix?
When Nass first studied multitasking, he thought he would discover the secrets of efficiency. All around him, students seemed able to text their friends and check out Facebook while listening to music and doing homework simultaneously. I think it’s a conspiracy – in two parts. Part One makes it fashionable to be distracted: “See? It’s not that we can’t focus, it’s multitasking!”
According to the L.A. Times’ Steve Chawkins, Nass wanted to know how they did it. But, “After several years of studies, Nass and other Stanford researchers came to some disturbing conclusions. They found that the heaviest multitaskers – those who invariably said they could focus like laser beams whenever they wanted – were terrible at various cognitive chores like organizing information, switching between tasks and discerning significance.”
In Part Two, they bombard the rest of us with ads, texts, and Facebook questions, until we too are incapable of any thought longer than “Hunh?”
“Sweetheart, can you keep the kids out of the garden while I Google something? I’m afraid that one of those plants is poison ivy, you can tell if it has red…”
And the more multitasking people did, the worse they got. According to New York Times reporter William Yardley, Nass found that “heavy multitasking shortened attention spans and the ability to concentrate. ”
>>You have 17 friends with birthdays this week – write on their timelines!<<
>>What do you think of Miley Cyrus’ twerking?<<
“What is ‘twerking?’ Who is Miley Cyrus? And where was I, anyway? A red something-or-other? Never mind, I guess it wasn’t important.”
Some scientists think that our species evolved large brains for the development of language. Others think it was for organizing social groups. Either way, we then invented computers, the internet, and iPhones.
But have we evolved far enough to use these things safely?
Nass observed in 2011 that, “writing samples from freshman multitaskers showed a tendency toward shorter sentences and disconnected paragraphs.”
Suppose, through some sort of magic, a working iPhone fell into the hands of a Stone Age teen.
“Scruff,” as I call him, is stationed at a key point in his tribe’s hunt for meat. His job is to wait for just the right moment and trigger a net so it catches a member of the mastodon herd being driven his way by other hunters in his tribe. There is a loud crashing noise as a mastodon comes through the jungle, right toward Scruff’s net.
But Scruff is oblivious. He has just discovered a video of someone putting Mentos in soda. “Now!” shouts the tribal leader. Scruff puts up one forefinger, the universal gesture for “Just a minute, I’m busy here.”
“We see less complex ideas. We could essentially be dumbing down the world,” said Nass.
Multitasking “may be creating people who are unable to think well and clearly,” eroding our social and emotional abilities.
And so the mastodon runs past, untrapped, and lives to a healthy old age – which is more than we can say for Scruff’s tribe, which starves to death soon thereafter. Indeed, multitasking wouldn’t be safe in any world that hadn’t already invented pizzas, Chinese food, and 30-minute delivery.
Clifford Nass died too soon; but he left us an important message: “The moral here is really clear. We’ve got to make face-to-face time sacred, and we have to bring back the saying we used to hear all the time, and now never hear, ‘Look at me when I talk to you.’”
Before it’s too late.
