Questions 1-5
Choose the correct letter A, B, C or D.
1. What does the writer say about the impact of multitasking in the modern world?
A. Job applicants who can do several things at the same time have a big advantage. +
B. Achieving a satisfactory work-life balance can be stressful.
C. Being able to do what you want when you want is a great pleasure.
D. Technology has a bad effect on children’s performance at school.
2. What did David Strayer’s study reveal?
A. It is more dangerous to speak on a mobile phone while driving than to have drunk alcohol.
B. It is safe to drive while talking on a mobile if you have both hands on the steering wheel.
C. A driver’s reaction time is slower when speaking on a mobile phone.
D. Most people do not accept that total concentration is required when driving.
3. What was unexpected about Carson’s laboratory tests?
A. Being required to switch tasks made participants more creative.
B. The original ideas produced by participants bore little relation to genuine creativity.
C. Switching attention between different tasks led to higher levels of achievement overall.
D. An ability to switch tasks is a common feature of writers and artists.
4. What is the advantage of low latent inhibition?
A. It encourages us to ignore extraneous information.
B. It prompts us to abandon an activity which has become time-consuming.
C. It prevents us from becoming overstressed about what we are doing.
D. It gives us the opportunity to view a situation from a different angle.
5. What is the writer’s main purpose in the passage?
A. to explain the differences between multitasking and task switching
B. to highlight the dangers of working on multiple projects at the same time
C. to warn readers about the potential pressures of modern life
D. to increase awareness of the benefits of successful multitasking
Questions 6-9 Do the following statements agree with the views/claims of the writer? Write
YES if the statement agrees with the views/claims of the writer
NO if the statement contradicts the views/claims of the writer
NOT GIVEN if it is impossible to say what the writer thinks about this
6. Real multitasking requires one or both of the tasks to be done almost automatically. YES
7. Task switching is a way of coping with underlying anxiety about uncompleted work. YES
8. Paying attention to just one activity at a time should be a realistic goal in the modern world.
NO
9. Simultaneous involvement in different office tasks means very few are completed on time. NG
Modern life now forces us to do a multitude of things at once – but can we? Should we?
The superpower we all want is the capacity to do several things at once. However, unlike other
superpowers, being able to multitask is now taken for granted and widely regarded as a basic
requirement for employability. Fuelled by technology and social change, the boundaries between
work and play have become somewhat blurred. Because you can do your weekly shopping whilst
sitting at your desk and handle a work query while queuing at the supermarket, time once wasted
is now productive.
Nevertheless, it is perhaps only now that we are starting to concede that the blessings of a
multitasking life are not unmitigated. The majority of people living in more industrialised
countries feel overwhelmed by the sheer number of activities in which they might plausibly be
engaged at any one time. Equally, teenagers do their homework whilst simultaneously listening
to music, watching TV and chatting on their mobiles. Whilst youngsters might believe that they
are deftly managing all these inputs concurrently, various studies suggest otherwise.
Indeed, there is overwhelming evidence in favour of the proposition that we should only focus on
one activity at any one time. Consider a study led by Professor of Cognition and Neural Science,
David Strayer, who used a high-fidelity driving simulator to assess the performance of drivers
who were speaking on a mobile phone. While these drivers did not adopt the aggressive, risk-
taking style of drunk drivers, they were found to take much longer to respond to events outside
the car and also failed to notice many of the visual cues around them. Strayer’s infamous
conclusion: driving while using a mobile phone is as dangerous as driving while under the
influence.
Less famous was Strayer’s finding that it made no difference whether the driver was using a
hand-held or hands-free phone. The problem, it seems, with talking while driving is a shortage of
mental bandwidth rather than a shortage of hands. Yet this discovery has made little impression
either on public opinion, or surprisingly, the law. In the UK, for example, it is an offence to use a
hand-held phone when driving but perfectly legal to use a hands-free device.
However, before concluding that multitasking is wholly negative, it is probably useful to define
our terms. There are at least four different practices which fit under the label ‘multitasking’. One
is genuine multitasking, such as playing the piano and singing or patting your head while rubbing
your stomach. It is possible but at least one of the tasks needs to be so practised as to be done
without conscious thought. Then there is the challenge of creating a presentation while also
fielding phone calls and monitoring your email. A better term for this would be task switching,
as our attention flits between the different tasks. We do this because we can’t forget about all our
unfinished tasks. It is the overlapping possibilities that take the mental toll as our subconscious
keeps reminding us that the task needs attention. Of course, there is much to be said for ‘focus’,
but there is much to be said for immaculate handwriting too. People are not perfect and the world
has moved on. Whilst there is something rather appealing about blocking internet access, it is
also somewhat futile.
Task switching is often confused with a third, quite different activity, the guilty pleasure of
becoming distracted and disappearing down an unending click-hole of celebrity gossip and social
media updates. The final type of multitasking is simply the condition of having a lot of things to
do, which can in fact be highly productive. Coordinating multiple projects is not the same as
doing them all at once, and not necessarily a stumbling block to getting things done by the
deadline. In fact, when a team of psychologists interviewed almost 100 exceptionally creative
people, every one made a practice of keeping several projects going simultaneously.
Moreover, even frenetic flipping between Facebook, email and a document can be beneficial.
When psychologist Shelly Carson recruited subjects for a test of rapid task switching, each
individual was given a pair of tasks to do online: solve a set of anagrams and read an article from
an academic journal. Half the participants were presented with the tasks sequentially but the
other half had to switch between the two tasks every few minutes. As predicted, task switching
delayed the subjects and confused their thinking, leading to a poor performance. However, the
involuntary multitaskers produced a greater number and variety of answers and showed more
originality on tests of ‘divergent’ thinking, such as listing all the consequences of a world in
which everyone has three arms. One might reasonably object that these tasks are trivial measures
of innovative thinking but it appears that scores on these laboratory tests for divergent thinking
correlate with substantial creative achievements, such as creating an award-wining piece of
visual art. For those who insist that great work can only be achieved through superhuman focus,
think long and hard on this discovery.
Carson and colleagues have also found an association between significant creative achievement
and a trait which psychologists term ‘low latent inhibition’. Latent inhibition is the subconscious
filter that allows us to ignore apparently irrelevant stimuli and prevents us from being
overwhelmed by them. Yet people whose filters are a bit porous have a big creative edge. “The
act of switching back and forth can grease the wheels of thought,’ says psychologist John
Kounios. He suggests that doing something totally new can help us abandon bad ideas that we
are fixated on, leaving us free to solve the problem in another way.
It would seem that in an age where we face constant distraction, people who are particularly
prone to being distracted are in fact flourishing creatively.
