HOW DO WE PLAY?

Last summer I sat down on the floor with Grant, our then three-year-old grandson, as he was playing with his Matchbox cars and trucks. I asked him quietly, "Grant, may I play with you?" The opportunity to enter his world of child play wasn’t an everyday occurrence for me, so I was relieved when I received an enthusiastic "Yes!". Having received permission to join him, I proceeded to ask another question, "Grant, how do we play?” Without hesitation he replied, "We just sit down and don’t think about anything else.”

From the lips of children and infants You have ordained praise. NIV Psalm 8:2

Stunned by Grant’s profound answer, I sank into the floor as if God Himself had spoken. I felt my insides melt like ice cream on a warm summer day. This simple definition of play sucked the work and worry out of my flakey versions of sophisticated play.

I have to admit that I don’t play very well by Grant’s definition. Thoughts of unfinished projects and endless to-do lists creep into time intended for rest and relaxation. Work-related thoughts so easily rob me of the benefits of fully engaged play. I actually pretend to play while my mind continues to slave over solutions to never-ending problems.

We so easily deceive ourselves by thinking that we can both work and play well at the same time. It is a form of multitasking, attempting to do two or more tasks at the same time. Some people are better at it than others. No one is as good at it as they think they are, according to recent studies.

In October of last year William Deresiewicz, formerly an associate professor of English at Yale University, delivered a lecture to the plebe class at the United States Military Academy at West Point in which he said:

"A study by a team of researchers at Stanford came out a couple of months ago. The investigators wanted to figure out how today’s college students were able to multitask so much more effectively than adults. How do they manage to do it, the researchers asked? The answer, they discovered - and this is by no means what they expected - is that they don’t. The enhanced cognitive abilities the investigators expected to find, the mental faculties that enable people to multitask effectively, were simply not there."

In other words, people do not multitask effectively. And here’s the really surprising finding: the more people multitask, the worse they are, not just at other mental abilities, but at multitasking itself.

One thing that made the study different from others is that the researchers didn’t test people’s cognitive functions while they were multitasking. They separated the subject group into high multitaskers and low multitaskers and used a different set of tests to measure the kinds of cognitive abilities involved in multitasking. They found that in every case the high multitaskers scored worse. They were worse at distinguishing between relevant and irrelevant information and ignoring the latter. In other words, they were more distractible. They were worse at what you might call “mental filing”: keeping information in the right conceptual boxes and being able to retrieve it quickly. In other words, their minds were more disorganized. And they were even worse at the very thing that defines multitasking itself: switching between tasks.

Multitasking, in short, is not only not thinking, it impairs your ability to think. Thinking means concentrating on one thing long enough to develop an idea about it. Thinking is not learning other people’s ideas, or memorizing a body of information, however much those may sometimes be useful. Thinking is about developing your own ideas. In short, thinking for yourself. You simply cannot do that in bursts of 20 seconds at a time, constantly interrupted by Facebook messages or Twitter tweets, or fiddling with your iPod or watching something on YouTube[1]

Wow! I don’t know about you, but it sounds like I need to go through a treatment program for multitasking. It is time to reverse many of those distracting trends and start concentrating on one thought or project at a time. By concentrating on one task at a time, you and I will be safer, smarter and more enjoyable.

By the way, take time this summer to play. But remember: play begins when you “don’t think about anything else.”

Jim Anderson - June - 2010

[1] Solitude and Leadership. Posted by William Deresiewicz on March 1, 2010 @ 3:18 pm. In Spring 2010, Top Story, Lincoln the Persuader.