RESPOND TO THE DISCUSSION AND REPLY IN THE POINT OF VIEW OF A 20 YEAR OLD MAN.
1A: Multitasking Can Make You Lose…Um…Focus
1. The central piece of this piece is no matter how time saving multitasking can be, you truly will never be focused on more than one task which causes people to lose concentration.
2. This essay has multiple sources of scientific evidence to back up this main thesis. In the essay, it states “Dr. Hallowell has termed this effort to multitask “attention deficit trait.” Unlike attention deficit disorder, which he has studied for years and has a neurological basis, attention deficit trait “springs entirely from the environment,” he wrote in a 2005 Harvard Business Review article, “Overloaded Circuits: Why Smart People Underperform.” “As our minds fill with noise – feckless synaptic events signifying nothing- the brain gradually loses its capacity to attend fully and gradually to anything,” he wrote. Desperately trying to keep up with a multitude of jobs, we “feel a constant low level of panic and guilt.”‘ (Tugend, 2013, p.783)
3. There is scientific evidence in this passage included by another scientist, a counter argument in my opionion, who states we can multitask. Tugend includes in this essay that “Earl Miller, the Picower professor of neuroscience at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, explained it this way: human brains have a very large prefrontal cortex, which is the part of the brain that containsthe “executive control” process. This helps us switch and prioritize tasks. In humans, he said, the prefrontal cortex is about one-third of the entire cortex, while in dogs and cats, it is 4 or 5 percent and in monkeys about 15 percent. “With the growthof the prefrontal cortex, animals become more and more flexible with their behavior,” Professor Miller said. We can do a couple of things at the same time if they are routine, but once they demand more cognitive process, the brain has “a severe bottleneck,” he said.” (Tugend, 2013, p.781)
Source: Tugend, A. (2013). Multitasking Can Make You Lose…Um…Focus. p.779-783.The Norton Field Guide To Writing With Readings (5th ed., pp. 883-889). New York, NY: W.W Norton & Company, Inc.
