A Master of Multitasking? Hmmm, Let's See
As amazing, astonishing, and incredible as our brain is, when it comes to multitasking – not so much!
It was and maybe still is a common practice that companies looked for in their employees was the ability to multitask. What a valuable asset to have – the ability to work on multiple tasks at the same time and get more done in less time! Well, neuroscience has blasted that myth right out of the water.
Wikipedia describes multitasking as “the apparent performance by an individual of handling more than one task at the same time”. That isn’t anything we didn’t already know. But the definition goes on to include: “multitasking can result in time wasted due to human context switching and apparently causing more errors due to inefficient attention”! That doesn’t sound very good so let’s dig deeper. From the American Psychological Association we find that multitasking has two complimentary stages. One stage recognizes that we are going to stop on one task and do another task. The other stage has us discarding the rules of the first task to take on the rules of the next task. This process gives us awareness of the switch between the two tasks. What happens then when your brain is frantically switching tasks?
The switch cost for the brain multitasking is a few tenths of a second. That sounds negligible until you realize how much multitasking you engage in. The switch cost can add up to large amounts when you keep going back and forth between tasks. This may seem like an efficient business practice but it may actually take more time to perform the tasks and involve more errors than doing tasks sequentially. Mental blocks that occur through multitasking can account for a 40% reduction in someone’s productive time. The physiological outcomes from multitasking can be:
Far more drain on your brain
Concentrating on two tasks at once can cause processing overload
The brain slows down – it wears out
Stress hormones – cortisol and adrenalin – are released
Researchers found that after 20 minutes of uninterrupted performance, people report significantly higher stress levels, frustration, workload effort, and pressure. We can become more inefficient and the quality of the work declines.
Now there is one area of multitasking we all have probably participated in. Driving a car and talking on a cell phone is an accident waiting to happen. Driving your car is a complex cognitive function. Multiple areas of your brain are in play to ensure that you see everything, react accordingly, and drive successfully. When you are on your phone your brain is not able to process all of the information it is receiving. Research shows that a car crash is four times more likely to happen if you are on your phone. The research also states that it didn’t make any difference if the phone was hand-held or hands-free. The conversation is what interrupts your attention to driving. Drivers on cell phones are slower to react, and slower starting up after a stop. Since all of the testing demonstrated the same results for hands-on and hands-free phones, it was determined that the interference in driving was cognitive.
There is a phenomenon that occurs when someone is on their phone while driving. Inattention blindness is when a driver, using a cell phone, fails to see information in the driving scene because they don’t encode it in working memory since they are distracted by conversation. Cell phone use can also cause a type of tunnel vision in the driver’s useful field of view. Driver’s on phones tend to look straight ahead and don’t see or react to anything in the periphery of their sight. Catastrophic results such as, hitting a pedestrian, missing a road sign, and not seeing cross traffic are common with tunnel vision caused by talking on the phone.
So as much as we think we are in full control with multitasking – our brain is on a different page. Our brains weren’t meant to multitask. This is something we need to remember!
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