Gotta stop multitasking. You should too.

Yesterday I was listening to the excellent BBC Science in Action podcast and on of the pieces was with an investigator who is writing a paper about multitasking. If I remember it correctly, the study started because of his perception as a teacher that many people, including his under-graduate students, are pressed into multitasking. Either on their jobs or on their leisure times, people increasingly multi-task through their lives. This was puzzling because every psychology study written on the subject to this day seems to clearly state that the human brain can't multi-task. It's not physiologically prepared for that kind of processing. So he (and a team, I think) started comparatively studying high and low multitasking individuals. He identified three characteristics needed for multitasking and compared the test subjects on them. The characteristics are:

1. Ability to filter irrelevant information - this should be one of the main characteristics for a multi-tasker. When provided with different sources of information the perfect multi-tasker should be able to discard irrelevant information and concentrate on the most important data.
   
2. High capacity to change between tasks - changing from one task to the other should be a fast and effortless process.
3. Using good mental sorting, storage and accessing strategies and capacities - since information is gathered from different sources, the perfect multi-tasker should be able to mentally sort and store that information in "brain cabinets" and should also be able to find and access that information in a fast and efficient way.

Now, funny enough, when comparing the heavy multi-taskers to the serial-taskers, the second group evidenced better ratings at all the three multitasking required characteristics. This means that heavy multi-taskers are terrible at multitasking. And this raises some interesting questions. If people are so bad at multitasking, why do they do it? Since they can't really do things faster by multitasking, do they get some other rewards instead? Do they get pleasure from the constant flow of information without even a reasonable processing of that information? And many more interesting questions he must have thought about, I'm sure.

After listening to that podcast I thought about how it applies to me. It's true I've been adopting a more multitasking posture. I'm reading mails, twits, looking for articles, following links. Looking back a bit, I think I need to change my stance towards Twitter. Many times I end up reading a number of articles for which I don't really care about. It's like since I've been made aware of a certain article I feel a certain obligation to read it. Which is silly, of course. Another thing that is worrying me is that I've been feeling a certain degradation on my mental capacities. For instance, last Monday something funny happened to me. I had this DVD to return to the rental club. I should also get the groceries that my wife had left in the car. I take these opportunities without the wife and children to get up-to-date with my podcasts so, before leaving, I set up the headphones on my HTC and started a podcast. Half the way driving to the DVD rental I look down to the passenger seat. Hmm... so where's the DVD I should be returning? I turn back, get the DVD, walk to the rental only to find out that it closes at 2300 hours. Great, not only did I spend the diesel for nothing, now I'll have to pay double for the rental. I drive home, park the car in the garage, take the elevator, open the door.

- Didn't you return home a while ago? - asks my wife.
- Yeah (grumble).
- Don't tell me you forgot the DVD?
- Yeah (grumble).
- Oh. I thought you had gone back to get the groceries...
- OH FOR CRYIN' OUT LOUD!!!

So, I had two tasks to perform and ended up forgetting about them both. I didn't forget about my podcasts, though. I got the impression from the BBC podcast I mentioned, that, not only does multitasking not help in accomplishing more tasks done in less time, it might even hurt our brains. In face of this I think I'll adopt the following measures:

• Change my current policy on mail checking. This means lowering mail priority;
  
• Really rethink my usage of Twitter. I don't really need a social network and I definitely can get the good articles I get through Twitter by using other, less attention intensive means;
• Try to concentrate more on single tasks.

Hopefully I'll be able to increase my short term memory performance, which has been scary for some time now.