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.



www.forbes.com/sites/travisbradberry/2014/10/08/multitasking-damages-your-brain-and-career-new-studies-suggest/

Why Multitask wen you are not an OS.... Abi you wan become Robotic?

Which one do we believe?

I'm a good multitasker and I don't believe multitasking can be this bad. The only thing I've noticed is that it requires just about the same time you'd use to complete the tasks one after the other, and in a more efficient manner too.

Everyone multitasks!

Noted!

Do we have anyone moderating this board? Push this thread to FP pls.

But I'm good at doing that, I will consider this post and reduce the rate of doing it.