Hey, concentrate for a second here. We know you think you can simultaneously text your boss, e-mail your girlfriend, post a school photo to your Facebook page and shop for shoes online better than doing it the old-fashioned way — one task at a time. |
Sorry. A team of Stanford University researchers says you can’t. |
More specifically, the team found that people who are HMM (heavy media multitasker in research parlance) do not pay attention, cannot control their memory or cannot switch easily from one job to another as adeptly as low-tech people who concentrate on one job at a time. |
“I found it very surprising,” said Eyal Ophir, the study’s lead researcher at Stanford’s Communication Between Humans and Interactive Media Lab who is admittedly a one-thing-at-a-time kind of guy. “We thought that multitaskers would have some kind of special ability. All we found were deficits.” |
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1 Comment
August 28, 2009 at 12:55 pm
Diane Rehm did a show on multi-tasking at some point in the past year…it’s far enough back that I’m too lazy to dig!
The point was even the very *best* multi-taskers did better when focusing on one task.
I’m one of those people who CANNOT talk on the phone and drive. I don’t know how some people do (my brother and BigMeanA are *excellent* at it).
Mostly, you see the people who can’t but think they can ;p