The Computer Is the Enemy
What Happens In The Brain When We Multitask
I’ve known for a while that the computer, while undoubtedly an invention of great consequence, is also an impingement. Often, I’m at my best when I avoid the computer, when I work exclusively in notebooks and only sporadically go to the computer to execute a specific task. I was grateful then for an excellent article in the most recent issue of Psychology Today, where a neuroscientist summarized learnings from Sweden’s experiments with digital tools in its education system. Long story short: They found that digital tools impair rather than enhance learning. They are reverting, in many cases, to more analog tools.
The insight I enjoyed the most had to do with attention.
People say ‘time’ is our most valuable resource. But attention, the ability of our brain to filter out certain stimuli, and only concentrate on stimuli relevant to the task at hand, dictates our use of time. Attention is what advertisers want from us. Everyday, managing and deploying our available focusing power is perhaps the most important set of decisions we make. So what did this neuroscientist have to say?
Multitasking is terrible for learning and memory.
Computers are multitasking machines.
You see where I’m going with this? We have designed the most powerful tool of our own psychic oppression. Computers are great. But we use them incorrectly. We use them to consume media. Worse, we hop from stimulus to stimulus. We should instead use them to search for relevant information and then return to our analog materials!
Okay, let me slow down and take you through what’s happening in our brains.
I quote now from Jared Horvath, the neuroscientist who wrote the article I’m referencing, “How The Brain Learns Best” in the August 2024 issue of Psychology Today. (How can they call it an August issue when it comes out in June; I don’t know!)
“Whenever we engage with a task, the relevant rule set must be loaded into a small area of the brain called the lateral prefrontal cortext, LatPFC. Whatever rule set is being held within this part of the brain will ultimately determine what the attentional filter deems relevant or irrelevant.
The LatPFC can hold onto only one rule set a time. This is why it’s impossible for human beings to multitask; the best we can do is quickly jump back and forth between tasks, swapping out the rule set within the LatPFC.”
Quickly jumping back and forth between tasks. Does that sound familiar? Hopping between tabs. Or flitting between apps. Or scrolling through a feed and having to re-attune to new stimuli.
In detail, Horvath takes us through loss in three areas — time, accuracy, memory — from quick LatPFC shifts. In conclusion, rapidly shifting attention between tasks is disastrous for learning and memory in students and presumably not good for adults either.
In that same article, Horvath shares that when students use a computer for homework, they typically last fewer than 6 minutes before accessing social media, messaging friends, and engaging with other digital distractions. I know adults for whom that’s probably far less than six minutes!
I can hear you saying, “I’ve got this. I know how to use my computer!”
Horvath ends this segment with a caution against trying to “beat the computer” —- “in order to effectively learn while using a computer, people must expend an incredible amount of cognitive effort battling impulses that they’ve spent years honing, a battle they lose more often than not.”
So, hear me out. Don’t fight the computer. Ditch the computer. You can still go to the computer as a resource, briefly, like a heavy dictionary. You can still use it for some functions: storage, communication (though probably less than you think), computation (its original use), but when it comes to doing long, hard, deep work, look for opportunities to go analog. Do a slide deck in rough draft on paper, for example. They always turn out better anyway. Do your long correspondence in a notebook and then type it up.
I hear you fighting me on this. Computers are our reality, you say. Raghav, you are advocating something unrealistic. I’m not. Recall a few weeks ago, my post on Solomon Golomb, the man who used shift register sequences to encode data for transmission. He didn’t even have a computer at home!
Let’s try (when possible) to not use our computers as a work surface. Let’s see if we can get somewhere together!
Quick Note: The article I’m referencing is “How The Brain Learns Best” by Jared Cooney Horvath in the August 2024 print issue of Psychology Today.
MISSY Pre-Order Information:
Apologies if you have already pre-ordered my book. Some people have mentioned having a hard time pre-ordering my book. The best online retailers for my book are currently Waterstones and Blackwells. Amazon US does not currently support my book because the US rights remain on submission.
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Thank you. Good advice and a good tip for successful aging