A phone heralds the arrival of a text message with a fabulous buzzing. The computer dings when an email has hit your inbox. Your Facebook page pops up a new red alert. Your Twitter feed does whatever it is that Twitter feeds do, drawing your mind to any number of stories and announcements in the course of a second. What is it you were saying again? Or thinking or working on?
In a world as loud as ours, it's hard not to get distracted. Although the problem is far from new -- even the Benedictine monks complained of not being able to focus -- the modern environment plays into our brain's predilection for mind-wandering in uncanny fashion. Neurologist Marcus Raichle has spent most of his career looking at our brain's so-called resting state -- and what he has discovered is that, in that default state, the last thing our minds are doing is resting. Instead, they remain suspended in a state of ever-ready engagement, a baseline activation that constantly gathers information from the environment, flitting from stimulus to stimulus to see which might be important enough to warrant our attention. In other words, our minds are made to wander.
By: Maria Konnikova, Edited by: David Cornish
Continue reading...
via Wired.co.uk
http://www.wired.co.uk/magazine/archive/2013/02/ideas-bank/sherlock-holmes-can-teach-you-to-multitask
No comments:
Post a Comment