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Is the culture of multitasking a grand design to undermine human potential?

“What’s the craziest multitask you’ve ever pulled off?”

This was a question asked to the TV viewing audience during a recent episode of a popular daytime talk show.

To start off the segment, the hosts posted an image of a well known actress who admitted to eating her breakfast while she’s in the shower.

And then the solicitation: [Think this is crazy?] Tweet the craziest multitask you’ve ever pulled off.

Anxiously, the audience raced to tweet their craziest daily juggles, from the relatively reasonable to the downright ridiculous.

Multitasking has for years been revered as an ability or skill that we would do best to master.

In fact, many job descriptions list must have the ability to multitask in their skill requirements. Looked upon as a staple in order to get along in this fast paced society, there are some who insist that we’ve got it all wrong.

In an article entitled, Multitasking is Killing Your Brain, MIT neuroscientist Earl Miller says that our brains are “not wired to multitask well… when people think they’re multitasking, they’re actually just switching from one task to another very rapidly. And every time they do, there’s a cognitive cost.”

So humans determined to master the skill of multitasking are paying a dear price, but who is really cashing in on this unraveling of the focused mind?

In this edition of Conscious Commentary, I muse about the agenda to undermine the mind in order to keep people from realizing their true individual and collective power.

Some of the questions we need to be asking are:

• Is multitasking a natural phenomenon of the human species or something contrived by others?
• How are you feeling when you’re multitasking? Feeling confused, tired, stressed?
• How can we cultivate mindfulness when being challenged to do many tasks at once?
• Why are these behavioral tendencies paraded and promoted within mass media in the context of glorification?
• How is multitasking mutating your brain and your ability to come into your true power?

All of these are questions are worth pondering. But if your ability to be mindful has been replaced with multitasking, how will you ever arrive at the answer?

Additional reference: Humans have shorter attention span than goldfish, thanks to smartphones | The Telegraph

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Alexis Brooks is the founder/editor of HigherJourneys.com, #1 best-selling author of Conscious Musings – Contemplations to Transform Life and Realize Potential and is the host of the popular Higher Journeys Radio program, presented in association with Conscious Life News.  Visit Alexis on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube!