From US News and World Report:
… New research shows that students who did the most multi-tasking were less able to focus and concentrate — even when they were trying to do only one task at a time.
“The human mind is not really built for processing multiple streams of information,” said study author Eyal Ophir, a researcher at Stanford University’s Communication Between Humans and Interactive Media Lab. “The ability to process a second stream of information is really limited.”
… Frequent multi-taskers took longer to answer [test questions] than lighter multi-taskers, indicating they had a more difficult time switching between numbers-based and letters-based tasks.
“This was shocking,” Ophir said. “You’d think multi-taskers would be better at task-switching, but they were slower.”
The reasons for the decreased cognitive control are unclear, Ophir said. Researchers cannot say if the multi-tasking itself damages cognitive control — and if so, how much multi-tasking it takes for damage to occur — or if those who tend to multi-task with media have less cognitive control to begin with.
“Either way, the prescription is to multi-task less,” Ophir said. “The big take-away from me is to try to build periods of focus, to create times you are really focused on one thing.”
Media multi-tasking includes doing one or more activities at once, including e-mailing, surfing the Web, writing on a computer, watching TV, texting, playing video games, listening to music or talking on the phone…
August 25th, 2009 at 6:52AM
At least a dozen of my advisees will be getting a copy of this in the very near future.
August 25th, 2009 at 7:08AM
I think maybe there are a couple of different kinds of multitasking, to wit:
1)Multiple simultaneous activities in support of a common higher-level activity…for example, an air traffic controller may be reading the position of one airplane on his screen while talking to another on the radio and picking up the flight strip for a third..all as part of maintaining a safe and efficient traffic flow.
2)Multiple simultaneous activities in support of unrelated higher-level activities…for example, driving while conducting a conversation on a cell phone.
I bet the loss of efficiency from multitasking in type #1 still exists, but much less so than in type #2.