"doing several things at once can feel so productive. But scientists say switching rapidly between tasks can actually slow us down."
I know I'm totally guilty of multitasking. Right now, I have my work e-mail open, am writing this blog entry, and am trying to look at some sample pages. Part of me knows that I'm not devoting 100% to any of these tasks. But, I've always been like this...I can't just do one thing at a time (no, I don't drive and talk on my cell...that's where I draw the line). And now I know why. Apparently, the brain gets addicted to multitasking! Great. That totally scares me, especially after reading,
"Multitasking causes a kind of brownout in the brain. [...] the lights go dim because there just isn't enough power to go around. ... So, the brain starts shutting things down — things like neural connections to important information."There's a process called "spreading activation" that goes on when we're learning about a particular topic. So, when we multitask, the connections we were creating for, say, understanding what's being said in a complicated e-mail, get interrupted when we try to do something else in the midst of understanding that e-mail (say, read another e-mail, take a call, etc.). Thus, we have to recreate those connections in our brain when we try to go back to what we were originally doing. Efficiency goes down as a result. In short, that's making us work slower.
But, taken in small doses, multitasking isn't something we should totally discard. Like, listening to music, and doing work at the same time isn't a distraction. However, that's because it's not interrupting our consciousness, like seeing an e-mail notification might. We just have to learn to prioritize, not let those sorts of interruptions take over, and learn to say, "no, I'm not going to answer that right now."
Okay...I'll try that. Maybe my brain will thank me for it. :)
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