"One such study analyzed the behavior of hundreds of students, dividing them into groups based on the number of things they tended to do at once. **The students who were the most addicted to multitasking typically alternated among more than four tasks**; for example, taking notes while reading a textbook, listening to a podcast, answering messages on their smartphone, and sometimes checking their [[Twitter]] timeline. "Each group of students was shown a screen with several red and several blue arrows. The objective of the exercise was to count the red arrows. "At first, all the students answered correctly right away, without much trouble. As the number of blue arrows increased (the number of red arrows stayed the same; only their position changed), however, the **students accustomed to multitasking had serious trouble counting the red arrows in the time allotted, or as quickly as the students who did not habitually multitask, for one very simple reason: They got distracted by the blue arrows!** Their brains were trained to pay attention to every stimulus, regardless of its importance, while the brains of the other students were trained to focus on a single task—in this case, counting the red arrows and ignoring the blue ones." --- **Tags** -- [[quotes]], [[focus]], [[dealing-with-social-media]], [[attention]] **Source** -- [[202501221126 - B - Ikigai]]