Multitasking -- the Flip Side. (August 26, 2009)

Several years back Time magazine interviewed a number of well known individuals from corporate high fliers to celebrities and even a Nobel Laureate/university president (David Baltimore, Physiology or Medicine, 1975) on their methods of "multitasking". Professor Baltimore's answer was concise and unambiguous -- "I don't multitask".

He has been quoted with regard to his approach to tasking: "My desks, my chairs, my floors are cluttered, [and] you have a hierarchy of what's important, like your family, your dog, your friends and your students. As for the lesser matters, let them sit in the pile and see if they will go away."

Today ScienceNow's Constance Holden reports that "a team headed by psychologist Eyal Ophir of Stanford University... identified 19 'heavy media multitaskers' (HMMs) and 22 'light media multitaskers' (LMMs) among a group of students based on how often they reported simultaneously using media such as television, cell phones, computer games, and videos".

Co-author of the study and sociologist Clifford Nass summed up the findings: "They're bad at every cognitive control task necessary for multitasking," and according to Ms Holden the HMMs were more easily distracted by irrelevant stimuli, and although their memories were no worse than those of the LMMs, they had more difficulty in selecting stored information that was relevant to the task at hand. In one filtering test, for example, the LMMs took 323 milliseconds to discern the correct answer, but the HMMs averaged 400 milliseconds.

Ms Holden goes on to make the point that "It's still not clear, however, that multitasking really scrambles the brain. It's also possible that people with poor filtering and attentional abilities are more prone to multitasking to begin with" while Anthony Wagner, a psychologist in the Stanford group, told her he suspects that constant jumping among different media offers instant rewards that reinforce "exploratory" behaviour at the expense of the ability to concentrate on a particular task.

Professor Ophir said: "We knew that multitasking was difficult from a cognitive perspective. We thought, 'What's this special ability that people have that allows them to multitask?' ... Rather than finding things that they were doing better, we found things they were doing worse."

So far there is no published account on the work patterns of highly selected individuals like Nobel Laureates and Fields Medallists.