The Multitasking Myth: What the Brain Can—and Can’t—Do

di P. Agrawal (Autore)

P. Agrawal, 2025

The Multitasking Myth: What the Brain Can—and Can't—Do is a clear-eyed, compassionate guide to reclaiming attention in an age that treats it as endlessly divisible. It dismantles the cultural fantasy that doing many things at once is the badge of modern competence and shows, with science and lived experience, why the brain's powers are brightest when focused, not fractured. Grounded in cognitive psychology and everyday realities, the book explains how attention actually works: the mind's spotlight can move quickly, but it cannot genuinely split across demanding tasks. What passes for multitasking is rapid task-switching—each switch incurring hidden tolls in time, accuracy, memory, and energy. From the first chapters, readers learn why errors multiply under divided attention, why working memory falters when overloaded, and how mental residue lingers after each interruption, quietly eroding quality and stamina. The narrative then widens from laboratory to life. In workplaces, "always-on" cultures mistake movement for progress, privileging responsiveness over results. Meetings proliferate, emails drip, dashboards blink; strategic thinking thins as attention shatters. At home, multitasking wears a kinder mask—care—but extracts the same costs: shallow presence, preventable mistakes, exhausted evenings. On the road, distraction becomes dangerous, revealing the unromantic math that speed multiplied by inattention creates risk. In classrooms, the myth of the "digital native" collapses under evidence: fluency with devices isn't immunity to cognitive limits, and learning needs undivided time for attention, working memory, and consolidation to do their work. Rather than scolding, the book offers a humane blueprint for doing better. It reintroduces monotasking as an ethic of depth, not austerity: designing a day so that the mind can descend below surfaces and stay long enough to produce work that doesn't need apologies. Practical chapters translate principle into practice—time blocks and thresholds, batching communication, clean toolscapes, ritualized beginnings and endings, breaks that rinse cognitive residue, and device settings that serve chosen modes instead of sabotaging them. For leaders, educators, and families, it proposes covenants that normalize focus: fewer, clearer meetings; asynchronous by default; study that honors sleep; dinners that protect presence; and environments—physical and digital—shaped as quiet collaborators in attention. Looking ahead, the book examines automation and AI with uncommon clarity. It argues that as tools accelerate routine work, human value shifts toward framing, judgment, ethics, and relationship—the parts of thinking that need slowness at the right moments. It shows how to calibrate trust in systems, design interfaces that grade alerts by consequence, and educate for workflow literacy rather than mere tool fluency. In education, it replaces surveillance and speed with curiosity and critique, asking learners to defend ideas, interrogate sources, and create artifacts that resist automation because they require genuine attention. The Multitasking Myth ultimately reframes limits as guides. The brain is not a server rack; it is a bright, finite lamp. When protected, it sustains deep concentration, generates original ideas, learns thoroughly, and offers the rare gift of undivided presence. This is a book of relief and resolve: relief that exhaustion is not a personal failure but a mismatch between design and biology, and resolve to build rooms, routines, and relationships where attention is treated as soil—tended with care so that everything else can grow.

• Autore: P. Agrawal
• Anno edizione: 2025
• Editore: P. Agrawal
• Formato: EPUB2 con DRMFREE
• Compatibilità: Tutti i dispositivi (eccetto Kindle)
• Layout: Reflowable
• EAN: 9798232569594

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