Hello multitasker, if you are doing something else while reading this right now, you might want to drop whatever else you are doing and pay attention (if you manage).
Newsflash, your gift of multitasking is costing you a hefty price: your brain.
Living in our fast-paced, technology-imbued society, we are becoming every day more of a multitasking expert: texting behind the wheel, watching tv while plowing through schoolwork, writing up e-mails during a meeting. We take pride in being able to do multiple things at the same time without underperforming.
For a time, the media even came up with a name for it: the supertasker. Many job vacancies now require candidates to possess the "ability to multitask" as one of the major assets.
As a general misconception, we understand multitasking as the ability to do multiple things at once. However, neuroscientists show that in reality, we are simply switching in rapid successions from one task to another, and it's draining our brain energy.
This isn’t the new discovery of the century, however. From as early as the 1990s, many researchers have already begun to show supporting results that it actually takes people longer to complete tasks when they’re rapidly switching from one task to another. Our brains just can’t do it.
Multitasking as a time-saving asset? Looks like we’ve been duped by our own perception.
Is there a positive side to multitasking?
As with all things, there must be a good side to multitasking. Professor Clifford Nass and his team set out to find out what positive skills people have may have gained from multitasking everyday.
They couldn’t find any.
Professor Nass and his team asked about 100 Stanford students to complete a series of cognitive tasks and found that multitaskers are not only unable to focus on the task at hand, they are easily distracted by all the irrelevant information around them, and perform poorly in just about everything.
In the first experiment, the Stanford students were showed 3 sets of red rectangles surrounded by blue ones, and each set is flashed for a certain amount of milliseconds. They were told to ignore the blue rectangles (the distractors), focus on the red ones (targets), and to report whether or not the red
rectangles have rotated during the millisecond exposure.
“This is a task that you would think an average 7 year-old would be able to navigate without difficulty,” said Professor Nass.
The multitaskers performed horrendously.
While the Low Media Multitaskers (LMM) performed just as well regardless of the number of distractors shown, the High Media Multitaskers’ (HMM) performance skydive as the number of distractors increase on screen.
And it just keeps getting better (or worse)…
The team pressed on with their search, there must be something good about multitasking.
Could it be that multitaskers have better memories?
Nope.
The HMMs (high media multitaskers, in case you missed it earlier) performed horribly when asked to identify a string of letters and ignore distractors. In fact, the longer the experiment went on, the poorer the HMMs performed, their brains are incapable of filtering out irrelevant information from their heads as more letters kept piling on.
Okay, so high multitaskers are bad at remembering relevant things too. Could it be that they’re more effective at switching from one task to another then?
In the third string of experiment, the students were tested to see how fast the HMMs are able to switch from one task to another compared to the LMMs. They were told to concentrate on the number or the letter shown on screen, and simply say whether if the letter is a vowel or consonant, or whether the number is even or odd. Can you guess which category of participants took the longest time to respond?
The HMM team lost to the LMMs, again.
The high multitaskers’ brains are actually slower at recognizing a new task and react accordingly, whereas the low multitaskers’ brains show capacity to quickly process relevant information and focus on what needs to be accomplished right away.
The cost of multitasking is your brain
These experiments unanimously show that participants who chronically multitask are mentally unable to filter out distractors that are irrelevant to the matter at hand. They can’t stop thinking about everything that they are currently not doing, and it’s impeding their performance in even very simple tasks.
In a fMRI brain scan, Professor Nass showed what the brain of a LMM looks like compared to that of a HMM when switching from one task to another. The LMM brain showed activation in the left prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain that is associated with encoding meaningful stimuli into memory.
The HMM brain, however, showed a vast activation in various parts of the brain trying to process all the stimuli, doing everything except processing the information necessary to their performance.
“As a result, they do much worse in their thinking,” said Professor Nass.
Meanwhile, the University of Sussex published a study in 2014 that showed lower grey matter density in the part of our brain that is associated with cognitive and emotional control, for people who chronically multitask. Researchers suggest that these people show poor attention when there are distractors in their environment, and they tend to suffer more from emotional problems like depression and anxiety.
These are powerful claims.
We could be unknowingly rewiring our brains, and that of our children’s right now, by allowing ourselves be distracted by everything that are irrelevant to our daily performances and what truly matters in our lives.
So next time your phone rings with an incoming call, e-mail or message, try to suppress the urge to check them right away and focus on finishing your task at hand instead. You may find that you end up accomplishing more with better performance in less time. Plus, your brain will thank you for it.
Now that’s something to pay attention to.
Kailing Huang is the corporate communications manager at Youna International Health Solutions. She has written for the United Nations magazine, contributed to the Lonely Planet and regularly collaborates with government ministries on worldwide health insurance schemes. Kailing holds a BA in Psychology (Concordia) with a specialization in neurology and a Master's degree from the University of Geneva.