Multitasking makes us stupid?

I'm typing this while talking on my cell phone to one person and IMing another. Am I fooling myself that I can actually do these three things without a loss of quality? No... because I know I can't. I understand that what most of us call multitasking comes with a steep price tag.

But where I once believed that the myth of multitasking was about time (that doing four things simultaneously takes much longer than to do those same four things in sequence), scientists now know it's also about quality. And it gets worse... it's not just that the quality of those four things in parallel will suffer, it's that your ability to think and learn may suffer. Some researchers believe that all this constant, warpspeed, always-on multitasking is causing young people, especially, to become less able to follow any topic deeply. (more on that in another post)

Perhaps the biggest problem of all, though, is that the majority of people doing the most media multitasking have a big-ass blind spot on just how much they suck at it.

We believe we can e-mail and talk on the phone at the same time, with little or no degradation of either communication.

We believe we can do homework while watching a movie.

We believe we can surf the web while talking to our kids/spouse/lover/co-worker.

But we can't! (Not without a hit on every level--time, quality, and the ability to think deeply)

From the current cover story in Time magazine:

"Decades of research (not to mention common sense) indicate that the quality of one's output and depth of thought deteriorate as one attends to ever more tasks."

And according to Jordan Grafman, chief of the cognitive neuroscience section at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke:

"Kids that are instant messaging while doing homework, playing games online and watching TV, I predict, aren't going to do well in the long run."

And from this study on young people and media use:

"Nearly one-third (30%) of young people say they either talk on the phone, instant message, watch TV, listen to music, or surf the Web for fun “most of the time” they’re doing homework."

The news is not all bad, of course -- from the Time article:

"The breadth of their knowledge and their ability to find answers has just burgeoned...but my impression is that their ability to write clear, focused and extended narratives has eroded somewhat."

And yes, we are all able to do some form of multitasking--some can even win an Olympic gold medal listening to an iPod. But the brain science helps explain this--we can do two things at once as long as one of them is something we've practiced so much that it doesn't require any sort of cognitive planning (there's a lot about this in the Time article).

The main problem today is that cognitive overload--provoked by so much media to attend to--is happening at a pace our poor little hunter/gatherer brains never evolved to deal with, and there's only so much that neural rewiring can do. And of course this is all very recent. When I was in high school, there were no iPods. There were no cell phones. No web, email, or IMing. No blackberrys. No PSP. (How did we ever survive? asks my daughter.) Multitasking for me in high school meant a ripping game of 1-bit Pong while simultaneously flirting with the geek from my history class.

Whenever I talk about the big myth of multitasking, people always come up to tell me how they themselves just "have the kind of brain that can do this." Riiiiiight. They don't. I don't. You don't. And maybe you'd realize it if you turn off your cell phone, disable IM, mute the little "ding" alarm that says you've got email, and just sit there for a few moments.

The big problem for most young people, it seems, is that they don't know how to "just sit there." They get the shakes after just a few minutes without media stimulation. But that is also a whole separate topic I'll get to very soon...

One of the most interesting things discussed in the Time article is that neuroscientists have established the specific area of the brain responsible for context switching. And unfortunately for some of us, it appears that this part of the brain performs less well as our brain ages. In a nutshell, the older we get, the less quickly and effectively we can multitask. But... most parents of teenagers already know that we have no frickin' idea how our kids manage to do what they do simultaneously. The key issue, though, is that while we now know they're better at it than we (the parents) are, they aren't half as good at it as they think they are.

And chances are, you aren't as good at it as you think you are. ; )