Study finds that people who multitask a lot are actually worse at it than those who do it less - http://news.stanford.edu/news...
Aug 30, 2009
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"To our absolute shock, we found that in any of the categories of activities that we thought their brain would be better at, that would enable them to manage multiple streams of information at one time, they're actually worse at all of them. So it's a great mystery what's going on. All we can say now is that multitaskers are lousy at multitasking." -- Prof. Clifford Nass (in the story's embedded video)
- Tom Stocky
"The researchers are still studying whether chronic media multitaskers are born with an inability to concentrate or are damaging their cognitive control by willingly taking in so much at once. But they're convinced the minds of multitaskers are not working as well as they could."
- Tom Stocky
I wonder how many people watched the video at the top of this article while they read the article.
- Michael Leggett
Michael, LOL. But this can't be new finding, can it? I've read about this conclusion so long ago I can't remember who said it first. David Allen's GTD tackles the multi-tasking weakness and the book is several years old. We are so bombarded with information/gadgets/tools etc. that we are actually slowed down because of them.
- Andre P. Siregar
Andre, I've seen past studies that showed that multitasking was inefficient due to switching costs, but this was the first study I've seen that compared heavy multitaskers with light multitaskers. You might think that heavy multitaskers would be more effective at it, but they found that the opposite was actually true.
- Tom Stocky
Now its interesting that they don't mention ADD as they seem better at multitasking and actually can thrive in that.
- Jonas S Karlsson
Even people with ADD might get bogged down with too many tasks at the same time. Yes they might not have the same attention span as others, but there's still an upper limit on their brain's ability to multitask.
- Pandu ● IT Optimizer