7 ms·

My primary school age son, and anecdotally, lots of other kids of similar age, relentlessly multitask in ways that hurts my brain just to think about. He liter

My primary school age son, and anecdotally, lots of other kids of similar age, relentlessly multitask in ways that hurts my brain just to think about. He literally is playing a game, watching a YouTube video in another screen, and talking to friends at the same time, and in the most extreme case, is even listening to an audiobook or podcast as well. Asking kids about it, they all say that's just what they do and look at us oldies like we are from the 20th century or something.

wvenable 6y ago
I've noticed the exact same thing. My son will constantly be doing multiple things at once -- watch a youtube video while playing a game, etc. Although when I was a kid a literally did everything with the TV on in the background.
- AnimalMuppet 6y ago
  And I did college physics homework with the tape deck running. (I'd turn it off when I really needed to focus, though...)
  - Moru 6y ago
    I would turn the stereo on so I could focus for homework. Always needed something in the background. I'm 47. 20 years ago I had no problem having three to five conversations running in private chats mediating between guild members, keeping notes about them so I could remember for next session and still grinding XP in demanding highlevel areas of an MMORPG. Now? All quiet and maybe I can concentrate enough to finish one task at a time. When I visit people with TV on in the background I have a very hard time to talk to anyone.
periheli0n 6y ago
It would be interesting to see how much of all that information is actually retained. I bet kids are much better at filtering out background noise than grown-ups are.
mvanaltvorst 6y ago
I wonder if brain structures of children are getting wired differently to better accommodate for multitasking in the modern Information Age. I would imagine that if you multitask all day, your brain would adapt to do this context switching more effortlessly, probably at the cost of something else that the brain judges as less important. Not saying that that's a bad thing, I'm just curious.
- imwillofficial 6y ago
  It strikes me as a sensory immersion overload. The rise in ADD and other attention related issues seems to be related. Never in history have human animals been exposed to such levels of stimuli at such a young age.
  - touisteur 6y ago
    I'm not sure the stimuli of open nature, danger, the elements isn't higher. One element that seems striking is how predictable and repetitive the modern stimuli are. If you can autopilot through a game, it must be quite constrained and your estimation/prediction abilities must be highly trained (or consistently doing 'good enough'). Movies, cartoons are all animated images that reward a good predictor, from image to image, from word to word. Open nature seems more chaotic, less... repetitive and predictable. I'm just saying, different kind of sensory stimulation...
- papito 6y ago
  I doubt it. We have known for a while that the brain is not multithreaded. The kids that can focus - they are the ones that will lead, build, and succeed. It's amazing what you can achieve in a short period of time with a quieted down brain.
  - selfhoster11 6y ago
    While I agree with the part about the brain not being multithreaded, I cannot agree with the rest. Leading, building and succeeding doesn't seem like something that is predicated on the ability to focus.
pizza 6y ago
Why be in a single state of flow when you can dip into and cycle through multiple flow states simultaneously. Only saying this semi-sarcastically. There is a kind of janky skill of knowing how to allocate attention while 'multiconsuming', but I'd be wary of doing it for anything that matters/multitasking simply because you start wading into the risk of unknown-unknowns territory, when you ignore crucial potentially info
jacobsenscott 6y ago
Sure, but these are all just fun things, none of which really require any focus. My kid does this too, but when it is time to do homework even having music on has an immediately obvious negative effect.
bluefirebrand 6y ago
That's a pretty wide amount of tasks, and more than that it's a lot of sensory input. It makes me wonder if they are actually processing any of it or just letting it sort of wash over them. Like at the end of it could they give you a detailed report about what happened with any one of those things? Even just asking for the gist of things, I imagine at least one of those things is being tuned out entirely. For instance, I often game and talk with friends at the same time. That's pretty normal I think, especially if we're playing the same game together. I could easily have a podcast on and a youtube video playing, and from my girlfriend's perspective I'd look like I was trying to do it all at once. But realistically there's no way I'd be able to give the podcast or the YouTube any attention. They'd just be on.
- tshaddox 6y ago
  This sounds more like entertainment or leisure time, so I don't know how important "processing any of it" really is. Giving a detailed report about what happened certainly doesn't seem to be a goal, and I don't see why it ought to be. If you're trying to relax or be entertained, and you are succeeding, that seems fine to me.
  - bluefirebrand 6y ago
    Sure, but that has nothing to do with why I wrote my comment. It's fine for people to spend their leisure time however they want. If you want to focus on a single thing like reading a book, or sit in a room in quiet contemplation, or turn on every electronic in your house, I don't care. I'm just curious if the latter is really the same as multi-tasking. It's reasonable to question if having a lot of sensory input thrown at you that you are mostly ignoring is the same thing as multi-tasking.
    - nickphx 6y ago
      I would say it's not. To me, multi-tasking implies you're completing a task, you have a set goal in mind with a series of steps or focused work required to achieve the goal or end result of the task.
foobarian 6y ago
Similar situation, second grade son. I like to think that when not going outside a bunch, where the sensory bandwidth is immense, they have an easy time replacing it with streams of digital input like that. Sure they are able to do all these things simultaneously that seem impressive, but we would be able to instantly gauge how far a dozen points of interest are, notice tracks on the ground, unusual plants, hidden animals, hear animal calls, etc.
weird-eye-issue 6y ago
I'm in my 20s and actually I do the same thing your son does pretty regularly. If it's a game I need to pay attention to then I wouldn't be watching a video though.
Broken_Hippo 6y ago
Realistically, this is having friends over while playing a game and tv/music on in the background. It really isn't all that out of the ordinary, and something we've done for quite some time. Heck, we did a version of this while getting very, very stoned and playing a PS1. None of it requires a lot of attention: You can rewatch/relisten to folks on youtube. Games don't need a lot of sounds, and if you die, you can restart. Friends will repeat if asked.
- jayd16 6y ago
  Or knitting in front of the tv while chatting as another example.
lordnacho 6y ago
What about school itself? Why is it that you go for 45 minutes of English, then math, then French, then art, and PE? Strikes me as the worst context switching waste imaginable.
- smichel17 6y ago
  My middle school had 48 minute blocks like this. 7 per day, if my memory serves, with 3 minutes between periods to change classes and I don't remember exactly how lunch worked. My high school had four 90-minute blocks. 7 minutes between. 3rd period was actually 2 hours, and you'd have one of four half-hour lunches (so, sometimes 90-30 and sometimes 60-30-30, and each of those reversed). I hated the middle school setup, in which settling down took the first 15 minutes and the last 10 were spent packing up (since the time between was so short, you had to be packed when the bell rang). High school was so much better... but my brother hated it, because focusing on the same topic for 90 minutes straight with no breaks was difficult. (And it made scheduling difficult, but that's tangential here). So I think the moral of the story is that there's no silver bullet, and breaks are important, even if you don't change topics.
Graffur 6y ago
That is possible because your son doesn't HAVE to do any of those things. He wants to do them. There's no external pressure - deadlines, impressions. There's no reluctance. There's no examination of how well he listened to any of it.
megaframe 6y ago
I think this is similar to sitting in a coffee shop doing work with a coworker. The game is the work you're primarily focused on. Your coworker is there but only occasionally engaging between thoughts. The Video is the background activity of the coffee shop, it's there but you're not that focused on it unless something unusual occurs.
bredren 6y ago
Could be generational, and it reminds me of when CNN added the scrolling news ticker to the bottom of all programs. It drove my grandpa nuts, and he literally taped paper over the bottom of his television screen so he could watch Larry King in peace. Now you watch some Minecraft PvP influencer’s YouTube channel and they can’t make a statement without running around playing the game while they do it.
- olyjohn 6y ago
  Holy shit, CNN and Fox News. Nothing gets my anxiety up like those fucking 24 hour news channels. The one that really gets my goat is Fox, because 100% of the time there's a big red box on the screen that says ALERT. There's always a fucking alert, even when nothing is happening. It's like you turn it on and suddenly the entire world is on fire. All this spinning shit all over the screen and graphics flying around, people screaming at each other, 62 tickers on the screen showing you totally irrelevant information. No wonder people who watch these channels are so fucking anxious.
- suzzer99 6y ago
  I'm convinced that growing up constantly flipping channels on cable TV gave my generation ADD/ADHD. I went to college in 1987. You could tell the kids who didn't grow with cable. They couldn't multi-task. But they could focus on one thing much better than the cable kids.
FalconSensei 6y ago
Doing all those things at once is one thing. My question is: how well they understand (and enjoy) the audiobook, how much they remember from the podcast/youtube video, or think before sending a message to their friends? or how is their performance on the game while doing that vs if they are focusing? My wife multitasks like this all the time (tv + phone), but then she has to ask me something about what's on the TV because she missed it or didn't understand well
HellDunkel 6y ago
Its hard to picture your son doing his homework in the same way.
hnick 6y ago
I am late 30s and do that. I think it is a learned dysfunction / habit / stimulatory addiction. Just last night my wife asked how I can play a game (Path of Exile) and watch YouTube on my other screen. It was a little hard to explain but I mentioned I tend to watch videos I don't really need to look at (in this case it was just the relaxing tones of LockPickingLawyer) and I was kind of playing in a flow state in PoE so it didn't need my full attention. What is really concerning is when I am watching something I actually want to pay full attention to on YouTube/Netflix, and I find myself opening a fresh tab to load up a second video before catching myself and realising it's ridiculous listening to two videos at once talking over each other. Putting the speed up to 1.75x or so helps with this if it suits the topic. In fact that was one habit I built during COVID, and going from YouTube videos at 1.75x to voice meetings with slow-talkers back in the office I found myself reaching for a speed button that didn't exist.
- mjevans 6y ago
  That speed button is forcing async communication and having the ideas written out, or if they really insist, a presentation (with a transcription or at least the slide notes).
  - hnick 6y ago
    Many of the offending meetings start with "let's jump on a call to nut it out" so unfortunately it's always a waffle in those cases without much useful prep work, but it's hard to say no because sometimes it really is the best course. I think we have a few people with a deficit of human interaction over the last year, doing their best to make up for lost time.
- solipsism 6y ago
  I was kind of playing in a flow state in PoE so it didn't need my full attention. That's not a flow state. That's autopilot.
  - hnick 6y ago
    Yeah, this is correct. I don't think flow applies if attention is divided.
Aeolun 6y ago
I’ve seen my youngest sibling do this and I agree it breaks my brain. Can’t imagine you get anything done like that.
wlll 6y ago
I bet they're not taking a lot of it in. Youth might convey certain enhanced abilities to switch between tasks efficiently denied to older people, but I'm willing to bet that even at the simple level of "computer game while on a call" sacrifices some of the attention of one of those things. Related, my kids make grumpy faces when I tell them to turn off "background" Netflix or YouTube while they're doing their homework. Semi related, my wife's friend came over and it was suggested we watch a film. "Aliens" was chosen as the friend and my wife hadn't seen it before. I put it on, they started chatting. When they started chatting I paused the film. They stopped chatting and asked what was up. I said that you started chatting so I figured you weren't watching the film, and I was actually trying to watch it. They promised to stop chatting. I played the film, they started chatting again after a short pause. We went through the pause/explain/promise cycle again and I played the film. They both promptly fell asleep.
- TchoBeer 6y ago
  I know this is supposed to make them come off as distracted, but it seems like they just weren't so into the movie but you just come off as a bit of a knob.
  - wlll 6y ago
    It was made as a comment on another comment about "media being put on as background", an activity which I believe my wife's friend buys into. If that wasn't clear then perhaps you could have enquired rather than being so fucking rude.
- ganzuul 6y ago
  > Related, my kids make grumpy faces when I tell them to turn off "background" Netflix or YouTube while they're doing their homework. Are you aware of the reason why you are doing this? Have you examined your reasoning as thoroughly as the faces of your children seem to tell you? Do parts of your body feel numb?
  - wlll 6y ago
    > Are you aware of the reason why you are doing this? Have you examined your reasoning as thoroughly as the faces of your children seem to tell you? What? It's simple isn't it? Multitasking doesn't work, all having these things on in the background will do is distract from the homework they need to do. This is literally a comment on an article about how multitasking doesn't work. > Do parts of your body feel numb? What the hell sort of question is this?

wvenable 6y ago

I've noticed the exact same thing. My son will constantly be doing multiple things at once -- watch a youtube video while playing a game, etc. Although when I was a kid a literally did everything with the TV on in the background.

AnimalMuppet 6y ago
And I did college physics homework with the tape deck running. (I'd turn it off when I really needed to focus, though...)
- Moru 6y ago
  I would turn the stereo on so I could focus for homework. Always needed something in the background. I'm 47. 20 years ago I had no problem having three to five conversations running in private chats mediating between guild members, keeping notes about them so I could remember for next session and still grinding XP in demanding highlevel areas of an MMORPG. Now? All quiet and maybe I can concentrate enough to finish one task at a time. When I visit people with TV on in the background I have a very hard time to talk to anyone.

periheli0n 6y ago

It would be interesting to see how much of all that information is actually retained. I bet kids are much better at filtering out background noise than grown-ups are.

mvanaltvorst 6y ago

I wonder if brain structures of children are getting wired differently to better accommodate for multitasking in the modern Information Age. I would imagine that if you multitask all day, your brain would adapt to do this context switching more effortlessly, probably at the cost of something else that the brain judges as less important. Not saying that that's a bad thing, I'm just curious.

imwillofficial 6y ago
It strikes me as a sensory immersion overload. The rise in ADD and other attention related issues seems to be related. Never in history have human animals been exposed to such levels of stimuli at such a young age.
- touisteur 6y ago
  I'm not sure the stimuli of open nature, danger, the elements isn't higher. One element that seems striking is how predictable and repetitive the modern stimuli are. If you can autopilot through a game, it must be quite constrained and your estimation/prediction abilities must be highly trained (or consistently doing 'good enough'). Movies, cartoons are all animated images that reward a good predictor, from image to image, from word to word. Open nature seems more chaotic, less... repetitive and predictable. I'm just saying, different kind of sensory stimulation...
papito 6y ago
I doubt it. We have known for a while that the brain is not multithreaded. The kids that can focus - they are the ones that will lead, build, and succeed. It's amazing what you can achieve in a short period of time with a quieted down brain.
- selfhoster11 6y ago
  While I agree with the part about the brain not being multithreaded, I cannot agree with the rest. Leading, building and succeeding doesn't seem like something that is predicated on the ability to focus.

pizza 6y ago

Why be in a single state of flow when you can dip into and cycle through multiple flow states simultaneously. Only saying this semi-sarcastically. There is a kind of janky skill of knowing how to allocate attention while 'multiconsuming', but I'd be wary of doing it for anything that matters/multitasking simply because you start wading into the risk of unknown-unknowns territory, when you ignore crucial potentially info

jacobsenscott 6y ago

Sure, but these are all just fun things, none of which really require any focus. My kid does this too, but when it is time to do homework even having music on has an immediately obvious negative effect.

bluefirebrand 6y ago

That's a pretty wide amount of tasks, and more than that it's a lot of sensory input. It makes me wonder if they are actually processing any of it or just letting it sort of wash over them. Like at the end of it could they give you a detailed report about what happened with any one of those things? Even just asking for the gist of things, I imagine at least one of those things is being tuned out entirely. For instance, I often game and talk with friends at the same time. That's pretty normal I think, especially if we're playing the same game together. I could easily have a podcast on and a youtube video playing, and from my girlfriend's perspective I'd look like I was trying to do it all at once. But realistically there's no way I'd be able to give the podcast or the YouTube any attention. They'd just be on.

tshaddox 6y ago
This sounds more like entertainment or leisure time, so I don't know how important "processing any of it" really is. Giving a detailed report about what happened certainly doesn't seem to be a goal, and I don't see why it ought to be. If you're trying to relax or be entertained, and you are succeeding, that seems fine to me.
- bluefirebrand 6y ago
  Sure, but that has nothing to do with why I wrote my comment. It's fine for people to spend their leisure time however they want. If you want to focus on a single thing like reading a book, or sit in a room in quiet contemplation, or turn on every electronic in your house, I don't care. I'm just curious if the latter is really the same as multi-tasking. It's reasonable to question if having a lot of sensory input thrown at you that you are mostly ignoring is the same thing as multi-tasking.
  - nickphx 6y ago
    I would say it's not. To me, multi-tasking implies you're completing a task, you have a set goal in mind with a series of steps or focused work required to achieve the goal or end result of the task.

foobarian 6y ago

Similar situation, second grade son. I like to think that when not going outside a bunch, where the sensory bandwidth is immense, they have an easy time replacing it with streams of digital input like that. Sure they are able to do all these things simultaneously that seem impressive, but we would be able to instantly gauge how far a dozen points of interest are, notice tracks on the ground, unusual plants, hidden animals, hear animal calls, etc.

weird-eye-issue 6y ago

I'm in my 20s and actually I do the same thing your son does pretty regularly. If it's a game I need to pay attention to then I wouldn't be watching a video though.

Broken_Hippo 6y ago

Realistically, this is having friends over while playing a game and tv/music on in the background. It really isn't all that out of the ordinary, and something we've done for quite some time. Heck, we did a version of this while getting very, very stoned and playing a PS1. None of it requires a lot of attention: You can rewatch/relisten to folks on youtube. Games don't need a lot of sounds, and if you die, you can restart. Friends will repeat if asked.

jayd16 6y ago
Or knitting in front of the tv while chatting as another example.

lordnacho 6y ago

What about school itself? Why is it that you go for 45 minutes of English, then math, then French, then art, and PE? Strikes me as the worst context switching waste imaginable.

smichel17 6y ago
My middle school had 48 minute blocks like this. 7 per day, if my memory serves, with 3 minutes between periods to change classes and I don't remember exactly how lunch worked. My high school had four 90-minute blocks. 7 minutes between. 3rd period was actually 2 hours, and you'd have one of four half-hour lunches (so, sometimes 90-30 and sometimes 60-30-30, and each of those reversed). I hated the middle school setup, in which settling down took the first 15 minutes and the last 10 were spent packing up (since the time between was so short, you had to be packed when the bell rang). High school was so much better... but my brother hated it, because focusing on the same topic for 90 minutes straight with no breaks was difficult. (And it made scheduling difficult, but that's tangential here). So I think the moral of the story is that there's no silver bullet, and breaks are important, even if you don't change topics.

Graffur 6y ago

That is possible because your son doesn't HAVE to do any of those things. He wants to do them. There's no external pressure - deadlines, impressions. There's no reluctance. There's no examination of how well he listened to any of it.

megaframe 6y ago

I think this is similar to sitting in a coffee shop doing work with a coworker. The game is the work you're primarily focused on. Your coworker is there but only occasionally engaging between thoughts. The Video is the background activity of the coffee shop, it's there but you're not that focused on it unless something unusual occurs.

bredren 6y ago

Could be generational, and it reminds me of when CNN added the scrolling news ticker to the bottom of all programs. It drove my grandpa nuts, and he literally taped paper over the bottom of his television screen so he could watch Larry King in peace. Now you watch some Minecraft PvP influencer’s YouTube channel and they can’t make a statement without running around playing the game while they do it.

olyjohn 6y ago
Holy shit, CNN and Fox News. Nothing gets my anxiety up like those fucking 24 hour news channels. The one that really gets my goat is Fox, because 100% of the time there's a big red box on the screen that says ALERT. There's always a fucking alert, even when nothing is happening. It's like you turn it on and suddenly the entire world is on fire. All this spinning shit all over the screen and graphics flying around, people screaming at each other, 62 tickers on the screen showing you totally irrelevant information. No wonder people who watch these channels are so fucking anxious.
suzzer99 6y ago
I'm convinced that growing up constantly flipping channels on cable TV gave my generation ADD/ADHD. I went to college in 1987. You could tell the kids who didn't grow with cable. They couldn't multi-task. But they could focus on one thing much better than the cable kids.

FalconSensei 6y ago

Doing all those things at once is one thing. My question is: how well they understand (and enjoy) the audiobook, how much they remember from the podcast/youtube video, or think before sending a message to their friends? or how is their performance on the game while doing that vs if they are focusing? My wife multitasks like this all the time (tv + phone), but then she has to ask me something about what's on the TV because she missed it or didn't understand well

HellDunkel 6y ago

Its hard to picture your son doing his homework in the same way.

hnick 6y ago

I am late 30s and do that. I think it is a learned dysfunction / habit / stimulatory addiction. Just last night my wife asked how I can play a game (Path of Exile) and watch YouTube on my other screen. It was a little hard to explain but I mentioned I tend to watch videos I don't really need to look at (in this case it was just the relaxing tones of LockPickingLawyer) and I was kind of playing in a flow state in PoE so it didn't need my full attention. What is really concerning is when I am watching something I actually want to pay full attention to on YouTube/Netflix, and I find myself opening a fresh tab to load up a second video before catching myself and realising it's ridiculous listening to two videos at once talking over each other. Putting the speed up to 1.75x or so helps with this if it suits the topic. In fact that was one habit I built during COVID, and going from YouTube videos at 1.75x to voice meetings with slow-talkers back in the office I found myself reaching for a speed button that didn't exist.

mjevans 6y ago
That speed button is forcing async communication and having the ideas written out, or if they really insist, a presentation (with a transcription or at least the slide notes).
- hnick 6y ago
  Many of the offending meetings start with "let's jump on a call to nut it out" so unfortunately it's always a waffle in those cases without much useful prep work, but it's hard to say no because sometimes it really is the best course. I think we have a few people with a deficit of human interaction over the last year, doing their best to make up for lost time.
solipsism 6y ago
I was kind of playing in a flow state in PoE so it didn't need my full attention. That's not a flow state. That's autopilot.
- hnick 6y ago
  Yeah, this is correct. I don't think flow applies if attention is divided.

Aeolun 6y ago

I’ve seen my youngest sibling do this and I agree it breaks my brain. Can’t imagine you get anything done like that.

wlll 6y ago

I bet they're not taking a lot of it in. Youth might convey certain enhanced abilities to switch between tasks efficiently denied to older people, but I'm willing to bet that even at the simple level of "computer game while on a call" sacrifices some of the attention of one of those things. Related, my kids make grumpy faces when I tell them to turn off "background" Netflix or YouTube while they're doing their homework. Semi related, my wife's friend came over and it was suggested we watch a film. "Aliens" was chosen as the friend and my wife hadn't seen it before. I put it on, they started chatting. When they started chatting I paused the film. They stopped chatting and asked what was up. I said that you started chatting so I figured you weren't watching the film, and I was actually trying to watch it. They promised to stop chatting. I played the film, they started chatting again after a short pause. We went through the pause/explain/promise cycle again and I played the film. They both promptly fell asleep.

TchoBeer 6y ago
I know this is supposed to make them come off as distracted, but it seems like they just weren't so into the movie but you just come off as a bit of a knob.
- wlll 6y ago
  It was made as a comment on another comment about "media being put on as background", an activity which I believe my wife's friend buys into. If that wasn't clear then perhaps you could have enquired rather than being so fucking rude.
ganzuul 6y ago
> Related, my kids make grumpy faces when I tell them to turn off "background" Netflix or YouTube while they're doing their homework. Are you aware of the reason why you are doing this? Have you examined your reasoning as thoroughly as the faces of your children seem to tell you? Do parts of your body feel numb?
- wlll 6y ago
  > Are you aware of the reason why you are doing this? Have you examined your reasoning as thoroughly as the faces of your children seem to tell you? What? It's simple isn't it? Multitasking doesn't work, all having these things on in the background will do is distract from the homework they need to do. This is literally a comment on an article about how multitasking doesn't work. > Do parts of your body feel numb? What the hell sort of question is this?