Category Archives: Models

Examples we can productively study

The Myth of Successful Multitasking

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Source: Centers for Disease Control
                       Image: Centers for Disease Control

As researcher Clifford Nass famously noted, multitaskers are “suckers for irrelevancy.”  Because “everything distracts them,” their intellectual performance on important tasks deteriorates. 

As more of my students bring laptops and phones to class, their abilities to concentrate and retain even simple instructions delivered face to face seem to be under assault.  In many cases these are traditionally “strong” students: top-ranked in their high school classes, ambitious, and often intent on pursuing advanced degrees in medicine and other fields. Why are so many not retaining important conclusions or pieces of information?

There is no question a laptop is a great note-taking device. Many of us can type faster than we can write.  But one would have to believe in the tooth fairy to accept the premise that computers in the classroom are only used to deal with the material covered on a given day.  The sacred cow of full connectivity on campus makes it a virtual certainty that students may be placing their bodies in the classroom, but taking their minds elsewhere. Multi-tasking is the norm.  One Stanford faculty member notes that his research indicates a full quarter of his students are trying to use four different media at the same time while there are ostensibly focused on writing term papers.  We’ve all read the results of that kind of writing, and it’s usually not pretty.

The fundamental problem is that almost no one is good at multi-tasking.  We are simply not wired to split short-term memory between a variety of stimuli at once.  We may think otherwise. But there’s near unanimity in the literature on comprehension that critical thinking declines when we fragment our attention. To put it simply, multitasking makes us just a little bit stupid. As researcher Clifford Nass famously noted, multitaskers are “suckers for irrelevancy.”  Because “everything distracts them,” their intellectual performance on important tasks deteriorates.  Sometimes the person addicted to a digital stew of stimuli is the last to know that they have become intellectually impaired.  It’s a common mistake to assume that being “busy” means being “fully engaged.”  We perform our busyness as a badge of honor.  But it’s closer to the truth to conclude that the more we construct lives where external stimuli are a constant, the less we are able to get past the self-induced noise that complicates the completion of an important task.

Try a simple experiment.  Try to read your e-mail or a series of text-messages while also listening to someone explain how to get to an address on the other side of town.  No GPSs allowed. An active and full-time listener will probably process the directions correctly, or ask questions until they have the mental map they need.  The split-time listener is more likely to end up lost, often compounding their addiction to distracted multi-tasking by calling from from a moving car to get new directions.

Of course there are many significant exceptions to acknowledge: those from all walks of life who still have the will to track the explication of a complex idea for an extended period; younger readers happily caught in the thrall of a writer or literary genre; newspaper consumers who will follow an investigative story across three pages of a broadsheet; or the curious who are sufficiently engaged to listen to another for a sustained amount of time. But these individuals increasingly seem to be cultural outliers. We now tend to notice a special passion for thirsty listening and reading.  They stand out from the norm.

So the caution stands: the fragmentation of daily life into competing multiple activities undermines competencies we should want to nurture and protect.  The things worth doing in life –if they are truly worthy of our time–are too important to be compromised by incessant (and non-linear) distraction.  My guess is that Franz Joseph Haydn would have never gotten around to writing those fabulous hundred and six symphonies if he owned a smartphone and an e-mail account.  How would he have had the time?

Words and Music

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Pete_Seeger2_-_6-16-07_Photo_by_Anthony_Pepitone
Photo: Anthony Pepitone

The song “To My Old Brown Earth” was actually written by Pete Seeger in 1958, after the death of a friend.  But for all of us with an awareness that we would someday lose this beloved man, the song was the perfect eulogy for Pete himself.  

We usually assume that language has a specific and stipulative function to communicate directly and without adornment.  But that’s obviously an incomplete view.  Words set to music often have more power over us.  The ear so readily learns to love the nondiscursive forms of organized sound.  It follows that meaningful ideas underscored by the right music can be transcendent:  actualizing feelings that might otherwise be out of reach.

As the Greek poets and others like Walt Whitman used the term, a “song” can be a kind of spoken elegy.  His Song of Myself from Leaves of Grass (1855) is a meditation on his own young life and its possibilities.  In his case, the music was wholly in the words, even though others like the composer Ralph Vaughan Williams created stunning soundscapes inspired by them.  Williams’ massive A Sea Symphony (1910) soaks us in the sense memory of being at the edge of the water.

In our more prosaic uses of “song” today, the music is more literal, and the words are often forgettable.  But not always.  Early in the last century Oscar Hammerstein was writing music for the theater that fully exploited the power of lyrics to carry the emotional impact of a story.  There would be no embarrassing opera librettos for him. The words of Showboat’s ‘Ole Man River (1927) eloquently explains the burdens of Joe, the weary African American deckhand who knows all too well the narrow boundaries of his life.  The song structure written by Jerome Kern heightens its power even more.

The unadorned voice is sometimes a limited instrument.  Music has a way of augmenting feelings  that can energize an idea.  Hammerstein’s You’ve Got to Be Taught from South Pacific (1949) was in its own way a more effective tract against racism than the more discursive efforts of reformers spoken in set speeches.  The transformation of a statement  conscience into an effective anthem is a powerful thing.

The power of worthy thoughts carried higher of the right melodic and rhythmic structure became clearer to many of us this year with the death of the singer and activist, Pete Seeger.  He was 94.  The writer of If I had a Hammer and Where Have all the Flowers Gone? was our contemporary Whitman, somehow finding the right sonic forms to gently challenge the nation’s drift away from its core ideals.  That he became the musical consciousness of social progressives while also publishing guidebooks on how to play  the American banjo somehow completed the circle.

A day after his death on January 27 many of us who followed his career found a copy of one of his tunes attached to an e-mail copy of his obituary.  Provided free to the public by his friend Paul Winter, To My Old Brown Earth was actually written by Seeger in 1958, after the death of a friend.  But for all of us with the awareness that we would someday lose this beloved man, the song was the perfect eulogy for Pete himself.

The words on the page are graceful:

To my old brown earth
And to my old blue sky
I’ll now give these last few molecules
of “I” 

But when sung by the man who was clearly feeling the burdens of his many years, the simple words on the page seem to transmute into a something more elevated and universal. The simple wish of the song to “Guard” “the human chain” is somehow remade into a more durable testament to the living legend we were not prepared to lose.  When a chorus finally picks up the theme, the effect is both poignant and heartbreaking.