Research confirms what I learned the hard way:
It's nearly impossible to effectively study and learn challenging material while your consciousness is being bombarded with external stimuli. I learned the hard way that learning challenging material is impossible with a lot going on around you. I wasted lots of money learning it, too. Dorms rooms, you see, are full of external stimuli. The best studying sessions I ever did were in some of the quiet study rooms in the Tosteson Medical Education Center at Harvard Med. Chalkboards, no distractions and plenty of space to spread out. I even engaged in some *ahem* extracurricular activity there once or twice upon a time. (Study break, you know.) It was awesome. I loved studying there.
In any event, the research confirms what most of us who have completed or are are in the process of completing a rigorous course of study learned at one point: it's easier to study when it's quiet. Teenagers and 20-somethings know this, too, despite their assertions to the contrary. (See what they do to the volume on their car stereos when they're driving somewhere they've never been, and they're on the lookout sometime…)
The fulltext of the study may be found here (PDF).
The results are consistent with the notion that declarative and habit learning compete to mediate task performance, and they suggest that the presence of distraction can bias this competition. These results have implications for learning in multitask situations, suggesting that, even if distraction does not decrease the overall level of learning, it can result in the acquisition of knowledge that can be applied less flexibly in new situations.
This quote from the WaPo article makes me laugh, because she's obviously not doing much that requires deep concentration.
You could even concede you know about people like Lauren Kyla Pitts, a 19-year-old junior at the University of Maryland, College Park, who insists that listening to music (pop, R&B, "all kinds," she says) and IM'ing with her friends are important parts of her college study routine. "For the most part I think it helps me concentrate and avoid daydreaming, which can be really distracting to me," she says.
Hah! As someone in an interrupt-driven job, my tolerance for interruptions when I'm doing things like reading or writing has grown less and less over the years. I absolutely detest interruptions when I'm at home. Consequently I try to chunk my time as efficiently as possible so that I don't annoy the people around me by telling them to leave me alone, and so I can be maximally effective while I'm actually working intently. It's all about the balance and chunking.
There's an inherent overhead while task-switching. It's not possible to multitask, so it means you're merely switching from one task to another quickly. Doing this is only marginally as effective as concentrating on one thing, then switching mental gears once to do another. People in other industries are experimenting with times where knowledge workers aren't to be interrupted. I've imposed similar restrictions and it works beautifully. The key, of course, is managing times when you're not going to frustrate the people around you.
[tags]Medicine, science, studying, productivity[/tags]
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