[taneq]

Heavy multitaskers have reduced... what now?

What does 'memory' mean? In this case it's "simple memory tasks" but that's not what these people have optimised themselves for so it's unsurprising that they'd perform worse at it.

"Leading triathletes do worse at 100m sprint" Oh no.

[chki]

To me the connection between performing multitasking and therefore loosing your ability to memorize things is not at all obvious. And for it to be obvious (I think) one would probably need to know a lot more about the brain than we currently do.

I mean: your example of a triathletes doing a sprint might be true (although a triathlete is probably still a lot better at that than an untrained individual). But there it is easy to see a connection (different muscle mass, different exercises to know what to do in a sprint). But why should there be a similar connectivity between different brain functions?

[stinos]

Those simple memory tasks may very well be representative for whetever definition of memory you want to use - as long as that definition is close enough to the definition as found in dictionaries etc, and which is the general and established term for what is meant here.

You make it sound like the gist of this article is obvious, in reality it's not, at least not for everyone. And even if it were you need research to actually prove it, that is how science works.

Calling being able to switch tasks fast, and a lot, an otimization is in a lot of cases a bridge too far probably. It's only optimal if you actually need it. While there are enough jobs which rather benefit from detailed attentaion to just one thing, not multiple. And not all people knowingly train themselves to be able to multitask, rather they fall into it because of addictions etc.

[commandlinefan]

I wonder if the cause and effect is backwards here - maybe people with poor memory multitask because they can’t concentrate.