New research out this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences would seem to confirm what everybody that surfs the internet, carries a cell phone, carries a cell phone with the internet, and so forth already knows: multitasking blasts your memory. You know the feeling: you're juggling windows, answering a text, and walk to the coffee machine for some reason when you really meant to check the mail. Or some such thing.There's good news, at least if you're not old. In that case, the news is rather bad. The New York Times reports:Researchers said the key finding of the new study is that people between the ages of 60 and 80 have significantly more trouble remembering tasks after experiencing a brief interruption than do people in their 20s and 30s.Basically, what the research says is that when you're interrupted, it takes your brain much longer to recover from said interruption the older you are. Like, the part of the brain tickled by the interruption stays tickled too long and effects your brain in a bad way when you want a new part of your brain to be tickled by something new. This is how I might explain it to my grandma (who is actually awesome and would not appreciate the condescension).One of the researchers, Dr. Adam Gazzaley, explains that the problem is less strictly to do with memory than it is with the interaction between memory and interaction. "For example, a phone call or text that interrupts us on the way to the refrigerator will negatively impact our ability to remember what we were going to the refrigerator to get in the first place," he tells the Times.As one Times commenter points out, this all could have as much to do with just plain getting old as it does multitasking and tech bombardment and so forth. Though we already know the wired world makes us more distractable, so its ability to harm our memory, at any age, doesn't seem too much a stretch.Finally: insert joke about me forgetting what I was typing here, because it seriously happens all the fucking time—and I'm 30.Reach this writer at michaelb@motherboard.tv.
Advertisement
