Mental Time-sharing

The chances are that at least one teacher has asked for your undivided attention. Although this seems like a reasonable request, it is not really a very good strategy. At least insofar as undivided attention means focusing exclusively on the words being heard (or read), the evidence indicates that very little is learned. The most familiar evidence is the skilled typist who obviously attends to each word of a manuscript but later remembers almost nothing about the content. In the laboratory, people have engaged in a shadowing task. This requires them to listen through earphones to a lecture and try to repeat it word-for-word. Although most people can do this task quite well, they learn very little of the lecture. This last evidence is especially relevant because many students diligently listen or read on a word-for-word basis only to find that they don't understand very much.

To learn while you are listening to a class lecture or reading a textbook, you need to process the information concomitantly with listening or reading. And because only one thing at a time can be at the center of your attention, you need to divide attention between the words themselves and processing their meaning. This is called mental time-sharing ...switching your attention back and forth between two (or more) on-going tasks.

Mental time sharing is pervasive in everyday life. You frequently carry on a conversation while walking, you probably listen to the radio while driving a car, and you may even sing in the shower. However, there is a limit to how rapidly a person can process information. You get confused if several people are talking to you simultaneously, or for that matter, if one person speaks too fast for you to follow what s/he is saying. You can carry on a conversation while driving a car unless the traffic is very heavy but you can't carry on a conversation while writing a theme or balancing a checkbook. The fact that we have a limited capacity for processing information constrains our ability to time-share several mental tasks.

Nevertheless, I believe that mental time-sharing is a learnable skill, one that can be improved with practice. By analogy, you might think of mental time-sharing as "juggling ideas." Now the reason you probably cannot juggle two or more balls is that you have never taken the time to learn how to do it. If you watch carefully, you will observe that a juggler only catches and tosses one ball at a time; the trick is to keep track of where the balls are, and to shift attention rapidly from one ball to the next. So too, the trick of mental time-sharing is to focus on one idea while keeping the other idea close to consciousness so that you can shift back to it rapidly. Although you have inadvertently developed some skill at doing this, deliberate practice at various tasks such as alternately counting and saying the alphabet will not only improve your skill in this particular task but also your general mental time- sharing ability.

Mental time-sharing is the secret to effective reading and listening. Do not just repeat the material word-for-word unless you need to memorize it. If you need to understand the material, you have to process the words while you are reading or listening so that the ideas will be meaningful to you.