The point of my referral to Maurizio Corbetta’s research on post learning “spontaneous” brain activity [ http://esciencenews.com/articles/2009/10/09/scans.show.learning.sculpts.brains.connections ] was my inference that the establishment of new links among previously unlinked parts of the brain is a pervasive meta consequence of new learning, and that this function likely has significant implications for the future brain function of the individual – whether that is characterized as efficiency or capacity.

Multi-tasking, of a kind, was used by the researchers to establish the conditions they studied. “Two sets of brain areas were particularly active during the task: part of the visual cortex that corresponded to the portion of the visual field where subjects were looking for the “T”, and areas in the dorsal part of the brain involved in directing attention to the location on the screen.”

My inference is that many kinds of multi-tasking will have such effects, and that these effects will prove to be important features of (mammalian?) brain development generally. I can imagine that features of play behavior, and other early learning behavior in animals have evolved to encourage the development of these connections.

In this context, we could posit that multi-tasking might have positive effects on brain development, increasing the number of inteconnects between brain regions having different funcitons, and that these effects might be particularily strong in young, “designed for learning” brains. Ideally, following Northrop, a potentially differentiable continuum of weak interconnects would be selectively reinforced, ordered, and integrated into a structure designed for processing of information from the presented environment and active engagement with that environment.

This could be seen as standing the pop gut reaction to the effects of multi-tasking on the young brain on its head, but it’s early to come to that conclusion.

Still, taking early results like these and results on attention and multi-tasking together, there may be reason to explore the possibility of inherent conflict between goals for focused, attention dependant task accomplishment which is required over most of our adult lives and long term maintenance of a varied, flexible and adaptive complex of the kinds of interconnections established in the young, learning brain.

Good stuff. I’m with you on the critique of efficiency, as were a number of folks around the time the study was published. Multi-tasking and task-switching involve attention and awareness in ways not really vetted by the study. While many face to face activities are serial in nature and involving being “in time” with others for an episode of focused interaction, I don’t think we know enough about the learning processes in which multi-lateral and multi-modal mediated experiences play a role in getting “information.”

But in a communication context, or where social media are used for extended and distribtued social contact and communication, there’s a claim on attention that clearly can be distracting. This often comes up as “information overload” and is attributed often to realtime streams. Again, we don’t know enough about how the stream demands our attention in a distractive (it’s always on — whether content is relevant/interesting or not) sense or in an attentive sense. I’m not convinced we even make a clear distinction between paying attention and being distracted by the stream.

Furthermore, the realtime stream is integrated by a user in his/her own time — it’s not discontinuous when experienced. Five minutes on twitter is five minutes — all those separate messages are read in one stretch of time. (Likely it’s the time away from a tool that is distracting — for it’s then that many people seem to be distracted by what they’re not directing attention to but which they are in fact thinking about).

I think that when you go from viewing the stream as message or text to action system instead, you get a better sense of where our understanding breaks down and needs improvement. Here, I think it’s the de-coupling of action from immediacy and context, and from consequences/effects, that we become distracted and possibly inefficient. Human interaction is incredibly fast, but when mediated is subjected to gaps. I suspect that we’re inclined to closure of the gaps and to ongoing communication (or not) — and that it’s the waiting (the anticipation and expectation of responses) that is most distracting. For those folks who are less conversational in social media, and who use it more as a personal broadcast tool, unresolved communication would be presumably less a distraction than perhaps signs of success: views, new followers, subscribers, comments etc.

http://www.gravity7.com/blog/media/2009/09/social-interaction-design-beyond-use.html