Multi-screening may mess with your memory
cosmosmagazine.com
Multi-screening may mess with your memory
1–10 of 37 posts
Re: Multi-screening may mess with your memory
#2"Multi-screening" in this case means multiple devices, not 2+ displays of the same device, although I have my suspicions about that.
Re: Multi-screening may mess with your memory
#3> Results showed that attention lapses in the moment prior to remembering impacted on behavioural and neural memory signals and were associated with greater likelihood of forgetting.
Can anyone translate this for me? This sounds like someone throwing a bunch of big words together to me.
I don't have a Nature subscription but this seems like another non-study, 80 adults in a contrived experiment with flashing images then given a "questionnaire" with which conclusions are drawn...
Re: Multi-screening may mess with your memory
#4"Multi-Screen" is too broad a term. I have caught myself sometimes drifting in thoughts because there was something else going on other than work. Having two different agendas and juggling them using two or three different work environments is the attention killer for me.
As consequence I have bought a KVM switch and hooked it up to my main screen. Anything else not related to the current agenda gets shut off, or muted, or plainly ignored no matter what happens there. Works so far for me.
Re: Multi-screening may mess with your memory
#5What's the distinction between multi-screening and multitasking in general? Is there something about "media" multitasking that specifically affects memory?
Re: Multi-screening may mess with your memory
#6"Multi-Screen" is too broad a term. I have caught myself sometimes drifting in thoughts because there was something else going on other than work. Having two different agendas and juggling them using two or three different work environments is the attention killer for me. As consequence I have bought a KVM switch and hooked it up to my main screen. Anything else not related to the current agenda gets shut off, or mut…
This is exactly why I've gone back to using just one (admittedly, big ass 32") screen whereas before I had three (one was attached to a separate device where builds occured). I do have one other display, but it's stacked high enough up on my vesa pole above %PRIMARY_DISPLAY% so I have to tilt my head up quite a bit to look at it. Note taking app, a small monitoring dashboard, email, and a music player are up there.
This means if it's not on my main screen, it's not on my mind until I make the conscious decision to move something over to it, or I need to drag something off of it. It's a behavior I had to force myself to train and become disciplined at.
If it needs to come down to the main screen, it should under no circumstances STAY there if I'm not working on it.
Benefits: attention is more intentional and deliberate, I can quickly glance up at something if needed, but I'm not straining my neck looking up because it's happening so infrequently.
Intentionality is king.
(edit: the only real problem with this particular bit of home office design is my macbook stays shut in a vertical dock, and since I haven't really made myself buy an external webcam, there are times I have to unhook things just to bring the Macbook out because there are people who are weirdly hung up about being able to 'see everyone's faces' on Zoom calls just to conduct an outage post mortem, which is annoying--but not annoying enough that it's made me want to spend even $20 on an external webcam)
Re: Multi-screening may mess with your memory
#7> Results showed that attention lapses in the moment prior to remembering impacted on behavioural and neural memory signals and were associated with greater likelihood of forgetting. Can anyone translate this for me? This sounds like someone throwing a bunch of big words together to me. I don't have a Nature subscription but this seems like another non-study, 80 adults in a contrived experiment with flashing images t…
If somebody distracts you while you're trying to remember something, you won't remember it as well.
Re: Multi-screening may mess with your memory
#8This sounds like it is talking about people using a phone and watching TV at the same time. Not using multiple monitors at work as the title lead me to think.
Re: Multi-screening may mess with your memory
#9As a chess player, I was considered to have good memory. It was indeed very good, but multi-branch version control sabotaged it. Now, I'm constantly thinking: "I know I fixed that code before... but on which branch ?"
Re: Multi-screening may mess with your memory
#10What's the distinction between multi-screening and multitasking in general? Is there something about "media" multitasking that specifically affects memory?
Multi-tasking is good because it implies you're working harder. Multi-screens are bad beacuse it implies you're playing more.