Multitasking reduces our creativity
Summary
- When we try to multi-task our creative ability is reduced
Details
- creativity comes from when our mind has the time to link together disparate thoughts.
- If we are constantly time switching then our brain has reduced bandwidth to follow associative links
References
- Brandwashed - Tricks Companies Use to Manipulate Our Minds and Persuade Us to Buy - Martin Lindstrom
Quotes
Then there’s a third cost to believing you can multitask, one that you’ll only notice in the medium or longer term – which we might call the creativity drain. You’re likely to be significantly less creative. Why? ‘Because where do new thoughts [and] innovation come from?’ Earl asked. They come from your brain shaping new connections out of what you’ve seen and heard and learned. Your mind, given free undistracted time, will automatically think back over everything it absorbed, and it will start to draw links between them in new ways. This all takes place beneath the level of your conscious mind, but this process is how ‘new ideas pop together, and suddenly, two thoughts that you didn’t think had a relationship suddenly have a relationship’. A new idea is born. But if you ‘spend a lot of this brain-processing time switching and error-correcting’, Earl explained, you are simply giving your brain less opportunity to ‘follow your associative links down to new places and really [have] truly original and creative thoughts’. I later learned about a fourth consequence, based on a smaller amount of evidence – which we might call the diminished memory effect. A team at UCLA got people to do two tasks at once, and tracked them to see the effects. It turned out that afterwards they couldn’t remember what they had done as well as people who did just one thing at a time. This seems to be because it takes mental space and energy to convert your experiences into memories, and if you are spending your energy instead on switching very fast, you’ll remember and learn less.