The Myth of Multitasking
We flit between apps, screens, and platforms under the illusion that we are accomplishing more in less time. We are wrong.
Author’s Note: One of my very clever readers pointed out that in the piece I wrote on capitalism and our attention spans, I stated a claim about the myth of multitasking and that it would be great to unroll a thread on that topic similarly as I did to our collective attention. This is that thread.
In our information-deluged world, we have come to celebrate multitasking as a revered skill — as a symbol of efficiency and productivity. We pride ourselves on juggling multiple tasks simultaneously, convinced that we are unlocking the full potential of our minds.
This is a façade.
The human mind is incapable of multitasking — rather, we switch between tasks quickly, and the mind attempts to paper over the gaps in our attention. The result is decreased performance, poorer memory, decreased creativity, and a drop in our IQs.
For 99.9% percent of human existence, our brains evolved amidst an environment that demanded focused attention — in the pursuit of prey over long distances, in the gathering of resources, or in spotting potential danger — our survival was predicated on our ability to attend to what was in front of us.
Today, we must navigate a different wilderness—one teeming with information and stimuli. The challenge lies in reclaiming our ancient ability to direct our attention purposefully.
In the book Stolen Focus by Johann Hari, the neuroscientist and MIT professor Earl Miller describes our belief in multitasking as a mass delusion:
‘There ‘s one key fact, he said, that every human being needs to understand’—and everything else he was going to explain flows from that. ‘Your brain can only produce one or two thoughts in your conscious mind at once. That’s it. ‘We’ve very, very single-minded.’ … This is because of the ‘fundamental structure of the brain,’ and it’s not going to change.
Attention is the currency that shapes our thoughts, behaviors, and, ultimately, our lives. Understanding how our hunter-gatherer minds interact with this attention economy is crucial for navigating the challenges of our time in an era of unparalleled connectivity and information overload, where we find ourselves entangled in a complex web of devices, each beckoning us with its own set of tasks and distractions.
We flit between apps, screens, and platforms under the illusion that we are accomplishing more in less time. We are wrong.
There are three ways, according to Miller, that task-switching degrades our performance.
The switch-cost effect
The screw-up effect
The creativity drain
(Hari added a fourth to this list which he calls the diminished memory effect)
The switch-cost effect is what researchers from the Federal Aviation Administration and the University of Michigan explored in their study, published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology.
Subjects were asked to tackle various challenges, like solving math problems or classifying geometric objects. The team measured their speed in completing tasks and noted the impact of complexity and familiarity. It turns out that every time we switch tasks, we lose precious time. And the more complex the task, the longer it takes to make the switch.
But how much of an impact does this task switching have?
A small study done by Hewlett-Packard tracked the performance of workers in two environments. They first tested workers’ IQs in environments free of distractions and then tested their IQs when they were interrupted by emails and phone calls. The result: in the distracted environment, the IQ of their employees dropped by 10 points — or as Hari notes:
“that is twice the knock to your IQ that you get when you smoke cannabis. So this suggests, in terms of being able to get your work done, you’d be better off getting stoned at your desk than checking texts and Facebook.”
But multi-tasking not only slows down our performance, it also degrades it (the screw-up effect).
Research conducted by Wang, Tchernev, and Solloway (2012) uncovers a disquieting correlation between heavy media multitasking and the erosion of overall performance (the study was done on college students).
They found:
Students who multitasked by chatting via instant messaging while reading a textbook took roughly 21% more time compared to those who were not multitasking.
Watching television while doing academic work has been found to harm performance on both reading comprehension and memory tasks.
Multitasking has been shown to impair the processing and verification of written information.
Heavy media multitaskers are more distracted by irrelevant stimuli than light media multitaskers and are less efficient at switching tasks.
According to Miller,
“Your brain is error prone. When you switch from task to task, your brian has to backtrack a little bit and pick up and figure out where it left off … instead of spending critical time really doing deep thinking, your thinking becomes more superficial, because you’re spending a lot of time correcting errors and backtracking.”
Additionally, the more we multitask, the worse we become at distinguishing what information is relevant (worth the interruption) or irrelevant (not worth the interruption … this is partly because we become addicted to the novelty of checking.)
That’s what Ophir, Nass, and Wagner (2009), in their study"Cognitive Control in Media Multitaskers," found — that individuals who frequently engage in media multitasking performed worse on tasks requiring attentional control compared to individuals who focused on single tasks and that heavy media multitaskers are more easily distracted by irrelevant environmental stimuli and irrelevant information stored in memory.
This is a surprising finding: heavy media multitaskers perform worse on task-switching tests due to their reduced ability to filter out interference from irrelevant tasks.
This results in Miller’s third cost: The creativity drain.
According to Miller (with Hari paraphrasing):
“Where do new thoughts [and] innovation come from? They come from your brain shaping new connections out of what you’ve seen and heard, and learned. Your mind’s free undistracted time will automatically think back over everything it absorbed, and it will start to draw links between them in new ways. This all takes place beneath the level of your conscious mind, but this process is how ‘new ideas pop together, and suddenly, two thoughts that you didn’t think had a relationship suddenly have a relationship.” A new idea is born. But if you “spend a lot of this brain processing time switching and error-correcting,” Miller explained, “you are simply giving your brain less opportunity to “follow your associative links down to new places and have truly original and creative thoughts.”
This leads us to our fourth and final cost of multi-tasking: the diminished memory effect.
Here Hari points to a study from Carnegie Mellon University, where they had students take a test — some had their phones turned off, and another received intermittent text messages. “The students who received messages performed, on average, 20 percent worse. Other studies in similar scenarios have found even worse outcomes of 30 percent.”
Jon Haidt found similar results in another study he references in his article: The Case for Phone-Free Schools: The research is clear: Smartphones undermine attention, learning, relationships, and belonging:
Consider this study, aptly titled “Brain Drain: The Mere Presence of One’s Own Smartphone Reduces Available Cognitive Capacity.” The students involved in the study came into a lab and took tests that are commonly used to measure memory capacity and intelligence. They were randomly assigned to one of three groups, given the following instructions: (1) Put your phone on your desk, (2) leave it in your pocket or bag, or (3) leave it out in another room. None of these conditions involve active phone use—just the potential distraction of knowing your phone is there, with texts and social-media posts waiting. The results were clear: The closer the phone was to students’ awareness, the worse they performed on the tests. Even just having a phone in one’s pocket sapped students’ abilities.
Hari’s conclusion, “It seems to me that almost all of us with a smartphone are losing that 20 to 30 perfect, almost all the time. That’s a lot of brainpower for a species to lose.”
Indeed.
