Multitasking Muddles the Mind?

Not that this is surprising, but a new study has indicated that the more we multitask, the more what we are doing suffers. It clearly indicates that our cognitive ability drops while we are multitasking.

The HMMs (heavy media multitaskers) did worse than the LMMs (light media multitaskers) across the board. Surprisingly, says co-author and sociologist Clifford Nass, "They're bad at every cognitive control task necessary for multitasking." They were more easily distracted by irrelevant stimuli, and although their memories were no worse than those of theLMMs, they had more difficulty in selecting stored information that was relevant to the task at hand. In one filtering test, for example, the LMMs took 323 milliseconds to discern the correct answer, but the HMMs averaged 400 milliseconds.

Nass says the study has a disturbing implication in an age when more and more people are simultaneously working on a computer, listening to music, surfing the Web, texting, or talking on the phone: Access to more information tools is not necessarily making people more efficient in their intellectual chores. Also disconcerting, he notes, is that "people who chronically multitask believe they're good at it." The findings are reported this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

In other words, if you think that by doing many things simultaneously will make you more efficient and finish those things faster, you're wrong.

Which brings us back to driving while talking on cell phones. This only confirms earlier findings that such multitasking should not be allowed.

Zz.