The definition of multitasking is the handling of more than task at the same time by a single person. Many teenagers and even older people would argue that it is easy for them to do multiple things at once. Others would disagree that it is difficult to perform many tasks at once. Whether it is easy or hard, science has proven multitasking is a not very efficient and can be dangerous in certain circumstances.
In my reading of the articles, I learned a lot about multitasking that I didn't know. Goal shifting and rule activation was one concept I found interesting. To summarize this, goal shifting is deciding you are going to start a new task. Rule activation is changing the rules of what you were doing and guiding it towards what you are going to start. Another intriguing concept of multitasking was the link to social and emotional development of tweenage females.
English: Evolution of the prefrontal cortex, from ...
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English: Location of the ventromedial prefrontal c...In a survey in article called, "Multitasking may harm the social and emotional development of tweenage girls, but face to face talks could save the day, say Stanford researchers", many of the girls who multitasked with homework and a lot of technology did not feel socially successful and didn't feel normal. In the same article, it discusses emotional development of young people. With more face to face conversations, the better development can and will be. One experiment done by Stanford researches caught my attention. They performed three tests of high multitaskers and low multitasker. In the end they found the multitaskers couldn't memorize much or faster and were constantly distracted.
Many of the articles in the packet discuss different parts of the brain and how they deal with memory and learning. Correlating with page 280 in the book, the article, "The Multitasking Mess", discusses that the hippocampus...