Professor Dan Siciliano from Stanford University delivered a talk on how people are impacted by technology especially senior level directors, both inside the board room and generally in our daily life. He decoded the myth of “multi-tasking”. Used for decades to describe the parallel processing abilities of computers, multitasking is now shorthand for the human attempt to do simultaneously as many things as possible, as quickly as possible, preferably marshalling the power of as many technologies as possible.
In addition to heavy use of mobile devices such as Blackberry and iPhone, numerous studies have shown the sometimes-fatal danger of using cell phones and other electronic devices while driving. Professor Sicilinano played a number of real-life video clips to demonstrate the pros and cons of multitasking.
The video of “Monkey Business Illusion” is a very good example showing the ability of human being to focus simultaneous attention across multiple tasks. Our intuition that we will notice something as visible as a gorilla is a hard one to overcome as almost all audience missed seeing the gorilla. A lot of people confuse have the misconception that we can do one task and then another, switching back and forth among them, we falsely believe we can do two at once.
Judging from the applause, the talk was a hit with the 50+ audience!
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