September 30, 2009, 02:00 PM ET

Multitasking Is Dangerous to Your Health

At first I thought that multitasking was just a bogus concept, on the one hand an obvious truth and on the other an obvious falsehood. If multitasking meant reading a book while listening to music, of course it happened, and had happened long before the term "multitasking" ever came along. But if multitasking meant talking on the phone while doing email, or doing homework while watching TV, or carrying on six chats on your laptop -- no way. Those activities exercise the same parts of your brain, and in order to do them you don't multitask, you switch-task. And the bad part is that in the switching process you have a warm-up time with the new task before you reach full engagement with it. Doing those things at the same time actually ends up taking longer than doing those things one after the other.

But the dangers of multitasking go beyond inefficiency. Here's a page from the New York Times entitled "Driven to Distraction." It presents a series of reports and stories on "the dangers of drivers using cellphones and other electronic devices." Many people think that talking on the phone and driving are activities that don't interfere with one another, but the accident statistics don't lie. One story there notes that Utah has a new state law decreeing that drivers who text and cause fatal accidents are subject to a 15-year prison term and $10,000 fine.

Another story finds that most people are, indeed, aware of the driving-while-tasking problem, but they just can't help doing it anyway. Take away the freedom to text while driving and people get nervous. I felt it last summer when I left a talk-all-you-want state (Georgia) to live in California for a month, where no handheld devices are allowed.

The health problems don't apply only to driving. Here's a study out of Stanford that announces,

Media multitaskers pay mental price, Stanford study shows

Think you can talk on the phone, send an instant message and read your e-mail all at once? Stanford researchers say even trying may impair your cognitive control.

The primary finding was 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." When people spend months and years trying to multitask, their mental habits follow. Most important, their capacity to filter out distractions and irrelevant items deteriorates. As one of the researchers put it, "They're suckers for irrelevancy." The researchers set up experiments that isolated the ability to ignore things that didn't help subjects complete a problem, and low-multitaskers did well, high-multitaskers poorly.

They also did some memory tests. Result: "The low multitaskers did great," [researcher] Ophir said. "The high multitaskers were doing worse and worse the further they went along because they kept seeing more letters and had difficulty keeping them sorted in their brains."

Finally, they did a test of concentration and the pattern held.

"Again, the heavy multitaskers underperformed the light multitaskers. 'They couldn't help thinking about the task they weren't doing,' Ophir said. 'The high multitaskers are always drawing from all the information in front of them. They can't keep things separate in their minds.'"

So all those fans of multitasking who claimed that the interactive, multiplicitous Web was altering people's brains may have been right. Altering them, though, for the worse.

E-mail

Comments

1. goxewu - September 30, 2009 at 04:16 pm

I've quit trying to walk and chew gum at the same time.

2. michalkro - October 01, 2009 at 08:06 am

Does the study prove causation or just correlation? It stands to reason that people who prefer "multitasking" would have these limitations in the first place.

3. dank48 - October 01, 2009 at 08:39 am

What strikes me is the irrelevant criticism of the Welsh police commercial. If it keeps one distracted moron from killing one other person, it will have succeeded.
Particularly poignant is the notion that some people "just can't stop." One used to hear that nonsense about people who "just couldn't stop" drinking and driving. Once we get over the witless belief that people have a Constitutional right to do whatever they want, regardless of the consequences to others, we'll make some progress.
From what I've seen in forty-plus years of driving, simply getting a vehicle from point A to point B without a collision is quite enough challenge for most of us. And in the most general terms, multitasking is just a vogue term for "screwing up more than one thing at a time."

4. thomaslawrencelong - October 01, 2009 at 09:32 am

What drives me nuts are the pandering "experts" on the "Millennial Generation" who tell us that young adults are "differently wired" from the rest of us.

Differently habituated maybe, but I don't think their neurological structures have undergone an evolutionary Great Leap Forward in the past 20 years. (Brain plasticity, notwithstanding.)

5. dank48 - October 01, 2009 at 10:50 am

I think Thomaslawrencelong is on the money here. It doesn't make a lot of difference when a person was born if that person is engaging in reckless behavior, whether it's drinking and driving or texting and driving or phoning and driving. Most of us, myself definitely included, are lucky if we're capable of unitasking effectively.

6. timebandit - October 01, 2009 at 02:39 pm

Indeed. I hope this study checked for ADD symptoms as a control prior to grouping them as multitaskers vs. single taskers. (I'll also be more convinced if we also do a similar study with random assignment into multitasking or single tasking strategies.)

7. tech2doc - October 02, 2009 at 06:28 am

Working in IT support, multitasking was a necessary evil. Those with the ability to remember and deal with several problems at once could excel in the field and become a valuable resource for managers who priotized their employees' workload but expected them to keep track of the issues on a regular basis.

When I went back to school, I had a very difficult time at first. Only upon taking some time out to read several books and making them my singular focus for the day was I able to get back into study mode. I have seen other stories and other op-eds about this topic. I agree that multitasking can really impair ones ability to study, but I do not believe it is a completely useless skill. Some artists paint in lines and have to follow strict patterns to complete their pieces, others create new pieces in unique ways each time.

Parents should certainly be aware of this, and encourage their kids to focus solely on studying without distractions, but there is probably a time when each person has to decide for themselves if they can handle "multitasking". Some health care professionals fall apart in truama and ER situations...others thrive on it. Those who are skilled at getting input from multiple sources and prioritizing quickly are valuable in many fields; they wouldn't be able to do the job well without some kind of "multitasking" ability.

8. charliemarlow - October 02, 2009 at 10:33 am

don't have time to reply now

9. drj50 - October 02, 2009 at 03:59 pm

I don't disagree with the overall concern, but I suspect that the ability to multi-task, like most (all?) other abilities, varies from person to person -- and task to task. I suspect some are "wired" to multitask this better. I suspect ability decreases with age (i.e., chronological age and not just one's generation play a role). I remember once losing (badly) a game of chess in which I was fully invested while my friend was simultaneously studying for a fairly advanced math course. The studies cited could use a little more sophistication.