Every day we humans gleefully churn out yet more books and films and TV shows and videogames and websites and magazine articles and blog posts and emails and text messages, all of it hanging around, competing for attention. Without leaving my seat I can access virtually any piece of music ever recorded, download any film ever made, order any book ever written. And the end result is that I hardly experience any of it.
Just because technology grants us the ability to do 17 things at once doesn’t mean we can do those 17 things well… A study at the University of California found that multitasking impedes the brain’s ability to absorb information, while research by Glenn Wilson, visiting professor of psychology at Gresham College, London, showed that people’s problem-solving performance dropped by the equivalent of 10 IQ points when they multitasked, and their stress levels also rose.
Charlie Brooker and Giles Morris respectively, in today’s Guardian.
The Earthbound Report 