What Multitasking Does To Your Brain
Having
20 tabs open on your laptop while Snapchatting with your best friend, eating a
sandwich, and listening to Taylor Swift is overwhelming. And makes you mean.
In
case we needed another reason to close the 15 extra browser tabs we have open,
Clifford Nass, a communication professor at Stanford, has provided major
motivation for monotasking: according to his
research, the more you multitask, the less you're able to learn, concentrate,
or be nice to people.
Our
brains are plastic but they're not elastic.
For
a case study, turn to your nearest broadcast news station (and don't say Fast
Company didn't warn you): if the talking head on the screen is accompanied
by a "crawler" at the bottom blurbing baseball scores and the day's
tragedies, you'll be less likely to remember whatever the pundit is saying.
Why? Because, research shows that the more you're
multitasking, the less you're able to filter out irrelevant information.
As
Nass told NPR, if you think you're good at multitasking,
you aren't:
. .
. We have scales that allow us to divide up people into people who multitask
all the time and people who rarely do, and the differences are remarkable. People
who multitask all the time can't filter out irrelevancy. They can't manage a
working memory. They're chronically distracted.
They
initiate much larger parts of their brain that are irrelevant to the task at
hand. And . . . they're even terrible at multitasking. When we ask them to
multitask, they're actually worse at it. So they're pretty much mental wrecks.
When
we multitask all day, those scattered habits literally change the pathways in
our brains. The consequence, according to Nass's research, is that sustaining
your attention becomes impossible.
"If
we [multitask] all the time--brains are remarkably plastic, remarkably
adaptable," he says, referencing neuroplasticity, the way the structures of
your brain literally re-form to the patterns of your thought. "We train
our brains to a new way of thinking. And then when we try to revert our brains
back, our brains are plastic but they're not elastic. They don't just snap back
into shape."
As
James O'Toole notes on the strategy+business blog, the dangers of
multitasking are as multifarious as they are nefarious.
Multitasking
stunts emotional intelligence: Instead of addressing the person in front of
you, you address a text message.
Multitasking
makes us worse managers: The more we multitask, the worse we are at sorting
through information--recall the broadcast news kerfuffle above.
Multitasking
makes us less creative: Since attention is the midwife of
creativity, if you can't focus, that thought-baby isn't coming out.
By:
Drake Baer http://www.fastcompany.com/3019659/leadership-now/what-multitasking-does-to-your-brain?partner=newsletter
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