
Heavy multitaskers have reduced memory - cabinguy
https://news.stanford.edu/2018/10/25/decade-data-reveals-heavy-multitaskers-reduced-memory-psychologist-says/
======
cgriswald
I used to have 'buckets' I would stick things into, and they would stay there
forever. Context switching was not a problem. Whatever I had put in that
bucket was so strongly associated with the context, that when I switched, the
bucket would be there waiting for me. I think I basically had built something
like a memory palace before I had the concept of a memory palace.

Best way I think I can discribe it... it's almost like in my short term memory
rather than trying to cram in every individual variable, I was just including
a pointer to a struct containing the variables for those contexts. When I
would call up that pointer, I'd get the entire struct and just keep going.

I'm not sure if it's age, alcohol use, stress, always-on internet, genetics,
or what, but now I'm lucky if I can remember what task I'm in the middle of if
I start thinking about something else while doing it. I find myself just as
able to solve problems _when I can remember things_ , but a lot less able to
remember things, making me feel a lot stupider and/or slower than I used to
be. Context-switching is a real challenge now. FWIW, I used to be A LOT better
at tuning out the world/distractions than I am now; I feel like that changed
when my kid was born.

~~~
munchbunny
That used to be my experience as well. However, I do think two different
things happened. One is that I'm getting older. I'm not in my mental prime
anymore.

But the second is that everything is more complicated. In high school, you
could just sit down and crank out some homework while watching Youtube videos
and chatting with friends. And you would just sit down and crank out some
homework.

Yesterday, I got into work thinking I was going to write some code, and... oh
wait, this depends on chasing down an issue in code owned by someone else, and
I need to get answers to some questions about how this other component works
that I depend on, and this other piece of code I need to modify doesn't
actually work the way I thought it did. Even within the same task, I'm
constantly context switching between mental modeling, communicating with other
people, and code reading/writing. Also, I'm reconciling all of this against a
multi-stage rollout plan where different people will see different behaviors.
It's complicated in a way that teenage me never really had to deal with.

It's no wonder I've spent several days feeling like I got nothing done. I did
a lot of unwinding hidden dependencies, but very little of it was actually
writing code. Most of my time was spent figuring out what questions were the
right ones to ask in order to get the answers I needed, which might not end up
being what I thought I needed.

Teenage me never had to deal with that kind of complexity.

~~~
elihu
I suspect that when most organizations hire software developers, they're not
really looking for great programmers. What they're really looking for is
people who are capable of dealing with enormous complexity without getting
confused. Those things might sound related, but I don't think they're the same
thing. I expect that most software developers don't spend most of their time
designing beautiful, elegant solutions to interesting problems; they spend
their time blundering around in an over-complicated and poorly designed code-
base using tools that barely work and trying not to trip over myriad corner
cases or buried in technical debt. (Even in well-designed systems, you're
often still dealing with mountains of technical debt inherited from the
industry at large.)

Maintaining bad code is in a lot of ways harder than creating good code. Or at
least, a person good at one of those things might not be good at the other.

I have a related theory that software development as a profession is starting
to increasingly resemble being an air-traffic controller; as the actual
programming parts get easier (languages, tools, and libraries get better,
awful code-bases notwithstanding), the non-programming tasks tend to take up
more and more time. So, you end up spending a lot more time talking to people
and figuring out what to build.

~~~
trylist
I'm starting to look at it from a different perspective. I don't necessarily
think bad is actually bad, or a better way to put it, there's no such thing as
"good" code. What I usually find people calling bad code is just not easily
understandable. We as programmers started programming with really comfortable
abstractions for easy problems and we expected things to continue like that.

When we go into the world of unsolved problems that someone solved and we have
to maintain them, and we can't understand them immediately, we call them bad.
It's my gut reaction almost every time I'm confronted with something that
doesn't immediately enlighten me, even thought I know it's the wrong reaction.

We are always comparing everything to the simplest and most solved problems
that were easy for us to understand. When it isn't so easy we call them "bad".

~~~
clarry
> When we go into the world of unsolved problems that someone solved and we
> have to maintain them

I don't believe in this world of unsolved problems. Most codebases reinvent
the wheel like they've never seen one. Most "problems" are just a problem of
picking one from known solutions and gluing it all together. People don't
always pick the right solution, or they start gluing at the wrong place and
won't stop once they realize it, so the end result is a mess. And then you can
ask, why did they do it like this? This is not good!

If you're a programmer, you've hopefully tried to rewrite some bit of code of
yours a few times until you've arrived at something that eliminates redundant
logic, is more readable and less buggy than the previous versions.. don't tell
me they're all just equally bad?

~~~
XorNot
But there's a reason for this too: deadlines.

I have written all sorts of implementations for things that I'm positive
there's a library or existing example out there that is just plain better and
more thorough.

The problem is, I don't know what it is. I don't know where it is. And finding
it will take time, take effort to evaluate the non-good implementations, and
take effort to integrate with other systems.

Whereas I can write code now which is "good enough" (or worse, just not good
at all but exists and does something right now) and then move on and hope I'll
find the "better" I'm looking for later.

------
Kaveren
> "in heavy media multitaskers because they have a higher probability of
> experiencing lapses of attention. When demands are low, they underperform.
> But, when the task demands are high, such as when the working memory tasks
> are harder, there’s no difference between the heavy and light media
> multitaskers.

I'm surprised no one brought this up. This seems to indicate that it's
possible that multitasking only effects tasks that aren't very important or
hard, and that they have no trouble concentrating on tasks which require
involvement. Seems to be an argument here that heavy multitasking isn't nearly
as bad as the rest of the article makes out?

------
lordnacho
Article says it's too early to draw conclusions.

It could well be that your memory gets worse because you rely on technology to
remember things for you. And because you know how to do that, you can switch
between more tasks.

There are stories about how people used to remember lots of things back when
it wasn't so easy to store information. And also stories about tribal people
who haven't yet developed literacy being able to remember lots of stuff.

------
b1gtuna
I try to avoid leaving a game or Youtube video open when I am "working". When
I try to multitask, I get more frustrated. In the long run, the frustration
turns into depression. So I try to tackle one task at a time nowadays. The
difficult part is ignoring the phone. It is always within my view, if not
within my arms reach. Just the sheer sight of my phone seems to take attention
away from me. I don't know what to do with it though... I can't take it
offline because my family needs to reach me. Perhaps a smartwatch would help?

~~~
rifung
Have you tried meditating? If I understand correctly it is supposed to train
you to do exactly what you want: to be able to focus intently on one thing and
not get distracted.

~~~
ericmcer
I thought the purpose of meditation was ultimately loss of ego, gaining
perspective and understanding of our endless yet futile cravings and desires.

It’s pretty funny that we have adopted it as a tool for self improvement. If I
meditate I can work harder, have less stress and better output! The reality is
If you step into meditation wondering what personal gains you will get out of
it you are already failing in a way.

~~~
rifung
> I thought the purpose of meditation was ultimately loss of ego, gaining
> perspective and understanding of our endless yet futile cravings and
> desires.

Not the ones I have been to.

> The reality is If you step into meditation wondering what personal gains you
> will get out of it you are already failing in a way.

Well that is subjective isn't it? I enjoy meditation and feel like it has made
me calmer and less depressed. I certainly do it because I think it helps my
mental health and it seems to be working. I would personally consider it a
great success.

------
taneq
Heavy multitaskers have reduced... what now?

What does 'memory' mean? In this case it's "simple memory tasks" but that's
not what these people have optimised themselves for so it's unsurprising that
they'd perform worse at it.

"Leading triathletes do worse at 100m sprint" Oh no.

~~~
chki
To me the connection between performing multitasking and therefore loosing
your ability to memorize things is not at all obvious. And for it to be
obvious (I think) one would probably need to know a lot more about the brain
than we currently do.

I mean: your example of a triathletes doing a sprint might be true (although a
triathlete is probably still a lot better at that than an untrained
individual). But there it is easy to see a connection (different muscle mass,
different exercises to know what to do in a sprint). But why should there be a
similar connectivity between different brain functions?

------
sys_64738
Multi-tasking it is not but task-switching it is with a heavy penalty for the
context switch.

In other words, the sum of the task-switching is much less than focus on a
singular task.

------
Aloha
So, I'm a frequent multitasker, but I generally arrange my tasks by likeness -
so I'll do programming, then documentation, then design, then reading, and
then perhaps troubleshooting. I guess it's a form of pipelining.

The context switch penalty between like tasks is small, the context switch
between dissimilar tasks is enormous and generally will cause me to completely
lose state on whatever I was working on, which requires me to rethread the
needle, and restart.

------
kzrdude
Have they controlled for sleep? This year I've made so many gains by sleeping
well, that everything looks like a sleep problem to me.

------
rednerrus
Memory is about focus and observation. It shouldn't come as a surprise that
people who are not focusing or observing are not going to remember very well.

The same thing goes for the discovery yesterday that not being able to hear
and see when you are older affects your memory.

------
Eli_P
Considering natural property of brain's neuroplasticity and adaptation, you
can rewire and retrain your brain. The title is just saying: if you lift
weights three times of yours, you can't go to marathon.

There're approved exercises to train your operating memory set like N-Back[1]
and others, and bunch of free apps, I liked the least boring of them[2].

But, all that does at least minimum sense if you can change your working
routine. These apps can be thrown to trash if you are a fullstack developer
with infinite backlog of projects. And I can't maintain hanging myself on
these training apps because it makes me feel like a lab rat.

Finally, I think the root of all that attention problems is boredom, anxiety
and other social crap which never going to have been cured by any science. I
wonder what results would be if somebody would try to find correlation on per
country working time hours and playing online games. I wage that people who're
supposed to focus on some boring work are either go find some freelance
payload or kill some time playing games.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N-back](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N-back)
[2]
[https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.owlie.brai...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.owlie.braingame&hl=en)

~~~
anontechworker
On the note of brain games, there have been studies on their effectiveness.
You can read more from the Washington Post:
[https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/to-your-
health/wp/2017/0...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/to-your-
health/wp/2017/07/10/brain-training-games-dont-really-train-brains-a-new-
study-suggests)

------
zappo2938
I reason I work in fields that require multitaskers is because I have very
poor memory. The code I was given to work with is incredibly complicated. Few
people can work with it. Not having good explicit memory forces me to organize
my own work and detect patterns. I describe my ADHD not as being aware of one
thing then another thing, but rather, being aware of all things at the same
time. Do they compare memory before multitasking and then after multitasking?

~~~
Aloha
You raise a good point - are people multitasking because they have poor
memory, or do they have poor memory because they multitask?

~~~
bflesch
That's exactly in line with what the researchers state: "It’s too early to
definitively determine cause and effect."

------
systematical
Not even a processor can multitask. Why would you think humans can. I love
explaining that to people and destroying the computers can multitask myth.

~~~
usaphp
From the article:

> Well, we don’t multitask. We task switch. The word “multitasking” implies
> that you can do two or more things at once, but in reality our brains only
> allow us to do one thing at a time and we have to switch back and forth.

------
jaxtellerSoA
I would argue that humans can't multitask at all, period, full stop. At best
we can rapidly switch what our brain is focused on.

~~~
jventura
I can walk and talk at the same time, two tasks. Maybe we could say that
humans can't do many cognitively hard tasks at the same time..

------
gamesbrainiac
What I have found very help is keeping a log of everything that I am doing on
a single task. So ever 15 minutes or so, I just write done a small paragraph
or even a sentence of what is going on for a particular task. I find that
doing this really helps me get back on track if I am disturbed or have to
focus on something else for a short while.

------
jcims
I think i've multitasked my way out of having sufficient functional memory to
remember multiple simultaneous tasks.

------
known
Women's brain is horizontally wired for multitasking.
[http://www.webmd.com/balance/features/how-male-female-
brains...](http://www.webmd.com/balance/features/how-male-female-brains-
differ)

------
kintai_bridge
I've always been good in Jeopardy. I suppose I'm a well of useless trivia.
Well, the other night I tuned in to Jeopardy after years of not watching the
show. (Literally years because I've been busy with my job and life.) I was
surprised at how quick I was, as before, and didn't skip a beat. Somehow I can
retrieve the same data after stagnant use in my brain. The reason I'm pointing
this out is because I'm also a classic multi-tasker at my developer job and
can relate to this article. The difficulty I have is not from a memory
decline, but something else. The nature of work has changed. It's like the
quest for higher profits--same with work.

~~~
notfed
The article mentions that there are different types of memory, and that
"working" memory, i.e. short-term, is the type that was found to be "reduced"
by the study.

Jeopardy trivia is almost certainly a different type of (long-term) memory.

------
agumonkey
Is multitasking impossible ? Singer/player do multiple things on near parallel
if not fully so.

~~~
agumonkey
ps: to be serious, I even think that either use a very peculiar abstraction
layer of the brain (juggling multiple inertial bodies while keeping some sort
of coherent space-field [aka rhythm]). It would be quite interesting to read
about that if possible.

------
polskibus
Seems like most managers should fall into reduced memory category. They have
to juggle more things during the day (on average) than specialists. A random
email, meetings, etc. all contribute to this. I also wonder how smartphone
usage worsens memory loss.

------
StanislavPetrov
>but in reality our brains only allow us to do one thing at a time and we have
to switch back and forth.

Completely unsupported and untrue supposition. Many people regularly perform
multiple complex tasks simultaneously.

------
chiefalchemist
Wouldn't neuro plasticity dictate that something is gained from the loss? That
is, as the brain re-wires itself memory is shifted to the more immediate need.
That is processing power.

------
matachuan
Well my first thought on this is multitaskers have reduced their RAM size and
I'm completely lost.

------
Jenz
Oops, I should be worried, but very shortly, I might have forgotten about
this.

------
andy_ppp
I think I'll switch on _noprocrast_ then...

And maybe leave my mobile at home tomorrow!

------
polskibus
Shouldn't the title be updated to mention media multitasking?

------
vectorEQ
if you do multiple things at once you divide your focus over these things, and
thus retain less of each. seems reasonably logical??

~~~
Dylan16807
It's not "while multitasking". It's a stable attribute.

------
Foobar8568
One thing I wonder, if IQ would play something in this...

~~~
jshowa3
In general, yes. A higher IQ is correlated with handling more complexity.

~~~
astrodust
It's just one factor in the barrel of nonsense that standardized IQ tests are.

Chimpanzees utterly destroy people in certain memory tests:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JkNV0rSndJ0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JkNV0rSndJ0)
That makes them exceptionally intelligent by that narrow metric.

In others they're unable to keep up with some birds.

