On Multi-Tasking

The Myth of Multitasking
Christine Rosen
The New AtlantisIn 2005, the BBC reported on a research study, funded by Hewlett-Packard and conducted by the Institute of Psychiatry at the University of London, that found, “Workers distracted by e-mail and phone calls suffer a fall in IQ more than twice that found in marijuana smokers.” The psychologist who led the study called this new “infomania” a serious threat to workplace productivity. One of the Harvard Business Review’s “Breakthrough Ideas” for 2007 was Linda Stone’s notion of “continuous partial attention,” which might be understood as a subspecies of multitasking: using mobile computing power and the Internet, we are “constantly scanning for opportunities and staying on top of contacts, events, and activities in an effort to miss nothing.”

Dr. Edward Hallowell, a Massachusetts-based psychiatrist calls multitasking a “mythical activity in which people believe they can perform two or more tasks simultaneously.”

One study by researchers at the University of California at Irvine monitored interruptions among office workers; they found that workers took an average of twenty-five minutes to recover from interruptions such as phone calls or answering e-mail and return to their original task.


Changing Our Brains

David Meyer at the University of Michigan research has also found that multitasking contributes to the release of stress hormones and adrenaline, which can cause long-term health problems if not controlled, and contributes to the loss of short-term memory.


Russell Poldrack, a psychology professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, Even if you learn while multitasking, that learning is less flexible and more specialized, so you cannot retrieve the information as easily.” His research demonstrates that people use different areas of the brain for learning and storing new information when they are distracted


Paying Attention

When asked about his particular genius, Isaac Newton responded that if he had made any discoveries, it was “owing more to patient attention than to any other talent.”


Advances in computer technologies . . . allow people to perform multiple activities at the same time. However, people’s cognitive capabilities have not increased. As a result, interruptions have been found to cause serious problems for effective functioning in work situations such as piloting a plane.



Teens are reporting difficulty with concentrating on their schoolwork, with 15-year-olds experiencing
more difficulty concentrating than 10-yearolds.  Larson attributed this developmental difference
to a decrease in intrinsic motivation in school-based tasks. However, it could also be that teens are multitasking while doing their schoolwork or that over time, the multitasking that young people are doing is taking a toll on their ability to focus attention on one activity in depth. “Habitual multitasking may condition their brain to an overexcited state, making it difficult to focus even when they want to.”