Multitasking-Muddles-the-Brain

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In a third test, a different group of 30 high- and low-multitaskers were asked to identify target letters on a screen. As the test was repeated, they had to remember whether letters had also been targeted in earlier trials.

In every test, students who spent less time simultaneously reading e-mail, surfing the web, talking on the phone and watching TV performed best.

“These are all very standard tasks in psychology,” said Nass. “In the first, there’s lots of evidence that if people do poorly, they have trouble ignoring irrelevant information. For the second task, there are many demonstrations that this is a good reflection of people’s ability to organize things in their working memory. The third task shows how fast and readily people switch from doing one thing to another.”

As for what caused the differences — whether people with a predisposition to multitask happen to be mentally disorganized, or if multitasking feeds the condition — “that’s the million dollar question, and we don’t have a million dollar answer,” said Nass.

Wagner next plans to use brain imaging to study the neurology of multitasking, while Ness wants to look at the development of multitasking habits in children.

“The causality question is enormous here,” he said. “There’s a lot of social pressure to multitask. You’re getting tweets, e-mails, IMs from multiple people at once, and the web offers unbelievable opportunities for text and video. It may be thrust upon you.”

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