Multitasking Damages Your Brain And Career, New Studies Suggest
10/08/2014 @ 12:21PM
Multitasking Damages Your Brain And Career, New Studies
Suggest
You’ve likely heard that multitasking is problematic, but
new studies show that it kills your performance and may even damage your brain.
Research conducted at Stanford University found that
multitasking is less productive than doing a single thing at a time. The
researchers also found that people who are regularly bombarded with several
streams of electronic information cannot pay attention, recall information, or
switch from one job to another as well as those who complete one task at a
time.
A Special Skill?
But what if some people have a special gift for
multitasking? The Stanford researchers compared groups of people based on their
tendency to multitask and their belief that it helps their performance. They
found that heavy multitaskers—those who multitask a lot and feel that it boosts
their performance—were actually worse at multitasking than those who like to do
a single thing at a time. The frequent multitaskers performed worse because
they had more trouble organizing their thoughts and filtering out irrelevant
information, and they were slower at switching from one task to another. Ouch.
Multitasking reduces your efficiency and performance
because your brain can only focus on one thing at a time. When you try to do
two things at once, your brain lacks the capacity to perform both tasks
successfully.
Multitasking Lowers IQ
Research also shows that, in addition to slowing you
down, multitasking lowers your IQ. A study at the University of London found
that participants who multitasked during cognitive tasks experienced IQ score
declines that were similar to what they’d expect if they had smoked marijuana
or stayed up all night. IQ drops of 15 points for multitasking men lowered
their scores to the average range of an 8-year-old child.
So the next time you’re writing your boss an email during
a meeting, remember that your cognitive capacity is being diminished to the
point that you might as well let an 8-year-old write it for you.
Brain Damage From Multitasking
It was long believed that cognitive impairment from
multitasking was temporary, but new research suggests otherwise. Researchers at
the University of Sussex in the UK compared the amount of time people spend on
multiple devices (such as texting while watching TV) to MRI scans of their
brains. They found that high multitaskers had less brain density in the
anterior cingulate cortex, a region responsible for empathy as well as
cognitive and emotional control.
While more research is needed to determine if
multitasking is physically damaging the brain (versus existing brain damage
that predisposes people to multitask), it’s clear that multitasking has
negative effects. Neuroscientist Kep Kee Loh, the study’s lead author,
explained the implications: “I feel that it is important to create an awareness
that the way we are interacting with the devices might be changing the way we
think and these changes might be occurring at the level of brain structure.”
Learning From Multitasking
If you’re prone to multitasking, this is not a habit
you’ll want to indulge—it clearly slows you down and decreases the quality of
your work. Even if it doesn’t cause brain damage, allowing yourself to
multitask will fuel any existing difficulties you have with concentration,
organization, and attention to detail.
Multitasking in meetings and other social settings
indicates low self- and social-awareness, two emotional intelligence (EQ)
skills that are critical to success at work. TalentSmart has tested more than a
million people and found that 90% of top performers have high EQs. If
multitasking does indeed damage the anterior cingulate cortex (a key brain
region for EQ) as current research suggests, it will lower your EQ in the
process.
So every time you multitask you aren’t just harming your
performance in the moment; you may very well be damaging an area of your brain
that’s critical to your future success at work.
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