In an article "How to Do One Thing at a Time", written by Nancy Jones, she introduces us to our reality. Jones writes about our habits of multitasking, and shows us examples of studies that prove to fail of being a multitasker. Students at a Stanford University were split into two groups, one that had to do 3 things at the same time, the other had 10 minutes for each task. Guess who did better? The group that had 10 minutes for each task did better. "A tremendous amount of evidence shows that the brain does better when it's performing tasks in sequence rather than all at one"(Nass).
Multitasking seems efficient for many people, they feel as if doing many things at the same time, they accomplish more. I guess our brains are not that advanced as we would like them to be, because talking on the phone and driving or texting and walking on the street, makes us focus on one of the tasks more than on the other.
It is against the law to hold a cellphone and drive a car, there were many accidents caused by that. The reason is, the driver was probably focused on holding the phone and talking rather than steering the wheel and paying attention to the traffic. My dad got into an accident because he forgot his bluetooth, but had to make a call. He was not injured, but the car was and his insurance went up. But do the bluetooth devices help? Maybe a little, but some people get too involved into their conversations.
I have seen people, mostly teenagers, who were engaged in texting that they forgot they are on the street. Once, this guy was on his phone and texting. When he got to the street and started crossing it on red light, a car came but it stopped just in time. The guy got so scared by the honk that he dropped his phone on the ground and i shattered into pieces. It made me laugh so hard, my dad thought I was crazy.
From my experiences and observations, I am sure that multitasking is not possible. It's either we do those things not 100% right, or we might cause an accident. We can't walk and text or drive and be on the phone, because we are putting ourselves and people around us in danger.
Hi this is Trevor, a student here at LaGaurdia revising your work on "How to Do One Thing at a Time". Your summary to this article on mulitasking was very informative and teaches the reader of how our brain functions when given tasks. Drawing a relationship to the article is very important though. Experiances are always very beneficial in letting the reader understand what point of view you are heading in.
ReplyDeleteThe example with your dad sends a powerful message but ultimately it is not what a summary is when it comes to interpreting "exactly" what you see. In the article it talks about people's "cognitive limits". When summarzing it would be helpful to give an explination to what it means, for it was not mentioned once within your summary.I see that bluetooths could add into the danger but try not to get carried away with that idea. Stating that bluetooths are dangerous is not at all related to the topic for it does not state that at all within the actual context of the article.
If you want to talk about the danger talk about how the author describes texting and talking on the phone while driving. Don't get fixated on the thought of what is moral and lawful in this summary. Stick to the facts and know that the topic is about managing tasks in our heads, not about what is legal. When you bring in the example of teenagers, once again i do not see anything in the text that adresses them as a group or within a experiment in the article. When it comes to the conclusion you should go step by step with the information which you had read.
Talk about how some experts believe that we can eliminate our multi-tasking and sharpen our attention on one isolated task istead of so many. My advice for this summary is to stick towards the text and leave your personal experiances out when doing this. Remember that a summary is based on the text, not outside information that is not in relation to it. I wish you good luck on this assignment and know that you will make excellent strides as long as you stay focused of what is in front of you, leaving personality out of it.