> "The growing trend, especially among young people, to multi-task may seem wonderful. But actually, multi-tasking is most likely to interfere with focused attention and, in turn, degrade memory formation, recall, and thinking quality."
Eventually I realized that parallelization is not really possible, you end up making a mess of everything, and trying to be a rapid context-switcher - similar to the illusion of simultaneous multitasking on a single CPU core - just takes too much energy and time - 15-30 min to unload, clear the slate and reload with something else seems common.
Practically, this is why people working on difficult problems that require their full attention get really irritated by interruptions, and often prefer to work in isolation or only with like-minded individuals.+
I've come across "action sequences" in psychology writing, which seems to be the active form of procedural memory. Over time well rehearsed actions can move from conscious parts of the brain to parts focused on motor actions like the basal ganglia ( and its friends ).
Probably easier to focus if distraction has moved to the old lizard brain.
I can't find an obviously good source to share, but there's plenty of research to check out.
> "The growing trend, especially among young people, to multi-task may seem wonderful. But actually, multi-tasking is most likely to interfere with focused attention and, in turn, degrade memory formation, recall, and thinking quality."
Eventually I realized that parallelization is not really possible, you end up making a mess of everything, and trying to be a rapid context-switcher - similar to the illusion of simultaneous multitasking on a single CPU core - just takes too much energy and time - 15-30 min to unload, clear the slate and reload with something else seems common.
Practically, this is why people working on difficult problems that require their full attention get really irritated by interruptions, and often prefer to work in isolation or only with like-minded individuals.+