Multitasking and Brain

Is multi-tasking bad for your brain?


Multi-tasking has rapidly taken over our lives, to the point where we look woefully lax if we’re doing just one thing at a time.

We think nothing of texting while also watching television, surfing the internet and talking to our family.

Indeed, drug companies are busy developing products to enhance our mental efficiency so that we can do even more.
Overload: Ironically, doing many things at once can make us less efficient

But scientists are discovering that today’s mania for cramming everything in at once is creating a perilous cocktail of brain problems, from severe stress and rage in adults to learning problems and autism-like behaviour in children.

It also, ironically, often makes us less efficient. Advances in medical-scanning technology mean we can now watch what happens in the brain when people try to perform more than one complex task at a time. And the news isn’t good.

The human brain doesn’t multi-task like an expert juggler; it switches frantically between tasks like a bad amateur plate-spinner.

The constant effort this requires means that doing even just two or three things at once puts far more demand on our brains compared with if we did them one after another