Business, Society - Written Wednesday, September 2, 2009 by Tim Bevins - 6 Comments

Multitasking May Not Be All That Good for You

My son multitasked his way through high school and into the mechanical engineering program at a very good university not far from home. Whenever I walked past him at the computer while he was in high school – he used the living room for his “office,” so I did get the chance to walk past him – I admit to having worried at times about his brain on the simultaneous combination of World of Warcraft, calculus homework, continuous IM’ing on AOL, and checking weird and sometimes creepy videos on eBaum’s World. But he’s managed to stay on the Dean’s List for all four semesters at college so far and landed a nice first coop job at a pretty cool, very innovative engineering company. So, I should stop worrying about that multitasking way of life, right?

Stanford University researchers might advise me not to. In research findings published in the Aug. 24 edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers Eyal Ophir, Clifford Nass, and Anthony Wagner say that multitasking is bad for your brain and that multitaskers are actually not so good at multitasking. “They’re suckers for irrelevancy. Everything distracts them,” Ness says in an article published by the Stanford News Service. The researchers conclude that “people who are regularly bombarded with several streams of electronic information do not pay attention, control their memory or switch from one job to another as well as those who prefer to complete one task at a time,” writes Adam Gorlick of the news service.

The Stanford researchers tested some 100 students. For each test, they split test subjects into two groups: people who regularly do a lot of media multitasking (“heavy multitaskers”) and those who don’t (“light multitaskers”). In every test, the heavy multitaskers group performed poorly and lagged significantly the light multitaskers group. Continue…