by Nick Bilton
Dux and Marois found that although people absolutely could not perform both functions at once, they could, with repeated training, improve their ability to multitask and increase their speed and accuracy in processing information. In fact, participants actually improved their rapid switching abilities almost tenfold with continued training and practice over a few weeks. Dux and his colleagues were able to do this by essentially training the prefrontal cortex region of the brain, which is responsible for processing these multiple tasks, to work faster.
Of course, there are true human limitations to how far we can adapt, and for some people it’s always going to be easier than it is for others. Some of us have a very small attentional blink, whereas others show a large attentional blink. In a controlled lab setting, people with small attentional blinks are good at identifying symbols and letters quickly in studies using rapid switching. People with large attentional blinks have trouble identifying the second element.
Dux says that there are other key differences between these groups: “Subjects with smaller attentional blinks are much better at inhibiting distracting information. They can essentially suppress information that isn’t relevant to the task at hand. If a random image or color appears in the screen, they will simply ignore it.” But people with a large attentional blink become easily distracted when trying to perform a focused task. “Thus, the blink affects not just the processing of the person but also how the person copes with distractions,” Dux said.
With these distractions, people with smaller attentional blinks just “ignore and suppress them. It’s not that they don’t process them at all. They actively inhibit them.” That’s a subtle difference to point out and an important one in the understanding of how people process information. Dux theorizes that “it might be that the information initially gets in, but they’re very good at keeping that information out” that will interfere with other tasks.
That skill is sometimes known as the executive function: the way the brain organizes, plans, schedules, and handles distractions as well as multiple tasks. When a person’s executive function is humming along in good working condition, that person can stay focused on a job and push away impulses and distractions that might interfere. Not surprisingly, the skill has become a hot topic in schools, where exercises and lessons that improve executive function may help students learn more quickly and make them better at subjects like math.
This cognitive skill, which also helps us surf the Internet while watching TV, seems to emanate, according to the scientist John Medina, from the prefrontal cortex, the home to Brodmann’s area 10, our ever-important multitasking switch. Medina is a developmental molecular biologist who has focused a great deal of his research on the genes associated with the development of the human brain. He is also the author of a very colorful and fun book about the brain called Brain Rules.8 In a recent interview with me, Medina explained that the capability of the brain for consuming simultaneous pieces of information lies with Brodmann’s area 10. Animated about the potential and the limitations of Brodmann’s area 10, Medina cautions that multitasking isn’t necessarily the most productive way for people to work. He explained that each time we switch tasks, it costs us about 700 milliseconds of brain power, not a lot when you do it once or twice, but over an eight-hour workday, it adds up.
That 700-millisecond number goes back to a 2001 research paper written by Joshua Rubenstein of the Federal Aviation Administration and David Meyer of the University of Michigan. Rubenstein and Meyer were studying the effects of multitasking on pilots who have to pay attention to multiple inputs at once, including augmented information on the screen.9
I asked Medina and Meyer in separate interviews if this number could be increased, or does every human work exactly the same and can Brodmann’s area 10 shift rapidly shift between tasks only at 700-millisecond intervals? They both said that although modern research hasn’t proved this yet, it is probably true that the next generation’s task switching works a little more quickly. They both also said that maybe a brain like mine, which has grown up with computers and video games, could rapidly shift faster, maybe even as fast as at 350 milliseconds between tasks. But even if that is the case, Meyer cautioned, we do know you are eventually going to hit a ceiling limit. We can flip back and forth only so quickly.
Medina also noted that although it’s fine for people to engage in this kind of “rapid shifting” in a social setting, he believes it can have negative effects on the brain in serious professional settings, slowing us down or wasting valuable time when we are constantly switching tasks. In other words, multitask responsibly.
Multitasking Mirage
Medina, like Dux and Raymond, insists that our brains are processing just one job at a time—quickly maybe, but still just one thing at a time. “We can speed up the tempo of switching, but our brains will never be able to do these tasks simultaneously,” he says.
But, I wondered, we still seem to multitask. So how is it, I asked Medina, that as a kid, I grew up listening to my headphones while doing my homework or reading a book? If I sit in a quiet room trying to write, I easily become distracted. If instead I’ve got some music with words and lyrics playing in the background, I can sit and work happily for hours. Now, I can’t concentrate unless I’m doing those two different tasks at once.
Medina explained that I’ve become accustomed to working in this way, what he called “state-specific learning.” The music is essentially like white noise within my brain, distracting my distractions to help me concentrate. In other words, my brain has adapted to incorporate both of these things; though I’m really focusing on the task at hand, the music is mostly background noise.
What I did as I grew up is also quite similar to the way people have adapted over generations as new, more distracting technologies have come along. With each new technology, consumers have to figure out how to add it to their lives. They have to decide when they want to read or listen or watch. For most people, these new experiences don’t destroy a previous experience. They only fragment our current media consumption.
Clifford Nass, a Stanford University professor, developed what he calls “partial displacement theory” to explain that as new media such as television and the Internet develop, they don’t immediately replace older ones; we simply “displace” the new medium and meld it into our current habits.10 For a long time, many of you probably kept a cassette player in your car and used a CD player at home. Later, you probably had a CD player in the car and an iPod in your pocket. People didn’t stop listening to the radio when television came along; instead, they found a new time and place to consume the older medium. And as one kind of medium is displaced, it begins to overlap with others.
Just think about how many media are in our lives: magazines, newspapers, movies, TV shows, thousands of websites, friends’ chats or text messages—the list could go on and on. But there’s only a certain amount of time in the day to consume all of this. We have to work, we have to eat, we have to sleep.
Mechanizing the printing press during the Industrial Revolution produced far more printed material than the world had ever seen, forcing us to make choices about what we had time to read. (It was probably no coincidence that the Sears, Roebuck catalog was frequently found in outhouses in the early 1900s, where it provided reading material and the pages offered other uses in a pinch.) Radio, which became widely available during the 1920s, did not put an end to people reading books, newspapers, and magazines. Instead, it changed how much time we devoted to print experiences.
You’ve no doubt seen the images of a family sitting around the living room: Dad, Mom, three kids, all happily looking up at a giant box—staring at the radio. People would sit raptly listening to a radio program for an hour with full undistracted concentration. At first radio station options were limited. Then more stations and types of programming appeared, and we gradually started to listen to more radio. Soon, as more shows and options appeared, the “one hour of radio” in the evening turned into
two hours, then three, and soon people stopped staring up at that radio and instead looked down again, reading newspapers and books while listening—or, in a fashion, multitasking.
When the television arrived in a big way after World War II, it didn’t replace the radio, which until then sat comfortably in the corner of the living room, although plenty of people speculated that it would. The television did, however, change where and when we used the radio. Families now, for the most part, watched TV in the living room for a couple of hours a night and listened to the radio in the car, a technology that first became available in the late 1920s.
Although the television didn’t become widely watched for some years to come, it still signaled a new form of media for us to cram into our daily diet. In turn, this led to more time that would be taken up by news, information, and entertainment. What better way to handle all these forms of storytelling than to start consuming content in places people didn’t think they could engage with? Coupled with the time limits in a single day, they began to move through all at once. People listened to the radio while reading a book or watched TV with a computer on their laps and—voilà! They were media multitasking.
Rather than decide between a newspaper and radio, consumers chose to do both at the same time. Or rather than decide between surfing multiple websites on my laptop, watching a TV show, texting with a friend, and playing a video game, I’ll just do them all simultaneously. The coming generations will figure out even more consumption combinations and collectively will most likely become even more adept at juggling different types of media.
Our brains may be switching back and forth in milliseconds, but from a public perception, we seem to be growing accustomed to the changes—or at least comfortable with them. And although many scientists can’t agree on the negative-versus-positive aspect of this task switching, scientists, psychologists, and communications theorists all seem to agree on one thing: There’s no turning back the clock. Whether we want to call it multitasking or context switching—and whether it’s good for society or bad—is somewhat irrelevant at this point. We’re all engaging in multiple activities at once. That said, there is one solution that can help curb this rapid, unrelated multitasking, and that involves better, more immersive storytelling.
As research around the cocktail party problem (see this page) illustrates, our ability to register and process the task at hand can be more productive and useful if the tasks our brains are processing are related to one another. If content creators, teachers, or parents want to keep the people of the next generation engaged, they will need to create storytelling that takes advantage of their multitasking minds in a way that can relate to the information they are consuming. They need to learn how to talk to a generation that is “easily distracted” and whose “mind wanders too much.” For example, rather than only giving me the opportunity to send text messages and tweets while watching a documentary, why not create an experience in which my computer can call up additional information such as Wikipedia pages or commentary from other viewers, thereby creating a fluid multiscreen experience?
Generation Multitask
Perhaps no group has embraced multitasking more than the young, those now in high school, in college, or in their early twenties. In a 2006 look at “The Multitasking Generation,” Time magazine science editor Claudia Wallis profiled how junior high, high school, and college students jumped from medium to medium, instant messaging and working on homework while iTunes played on the computer or even flowed into an earbud stuffed into a single ear.11
Researchers were shocked and surprised by the youngsters’ overwhelming need to indulge in several tasks at once—to the exclusion of family dinners or even pleasant conversation. They saw it as the biggest change in family dynamics over the last couple of decades. We also see it with adults. In the middle of a meeting or lunch they pull out their BlackBerry or iPhone to check an e-mail and tell you, “I’m listening.”
The young people appeared to be impressively good at juggling multiple media at once. According to a study by the Kaiser Family Foundation, the time young people spent with media was holding steady with previous surveys at six and a half hours a day.12 But by IM-ing or listening to music while they watched TV or worked on the computer, the young people were fitting eight and half hours of media exposure into that period. (The study referenced in the article was released in 2005; these numbers have continued to grow rapidly since then!)
In the Time article, Pier, a fourteen-year-old boy, explains how he does his homework: “I usually finish my homework at school, but if not, I pop a book open on my lap in my room, and while the computer is loading, I’ll do a problem or write a sentence. Then, while mail is loading, I do more. I get it done a little bit at a time.”
Some of us know that feeling well. Your computer has twenty tabs open on several browsers. You’ve checked e-mail in the middle of an instant message exchange. Then you’ve popped over to an article to try to read a few more lines before heading back to something else. You’ve gotten pretty good at it, right?
But are you and all those young people really better at multitasking? For all the neuroscience studies proving that we can perform multiple tasks better with practice, there are some communications studies that say it’s not practical to switch between tasks. For example, a recent paper published by Eyal Ophira and Clifford Nass for the National Academy of Sciences suggests that maybe you’re fooling yourself.13
Nass and Ophira are both researchers at Stanford University in the Communication between Humans and Interactive Media Lab. Nass, currently the lab’s director, has spent his career looking at the effects, both positive and negative, that computers and media have in our lives. Byron Reeves and Nass’s book The Media Equation: How People Treat Computers, Television, and the News Media Like Real People looked at the advent of the television age on our culture.
When Ness and Ophira began, in 2009, to study whether multitasking made people better on cognitive tests and in memory skills, their assumption was that those who moved easily from job to job would perform better than those who burrowed into a single task, just as practice had improved some of the dexterity and responsiveness of video-game players. The team of researchers assumed that people who engaged with multiple media were actually better at keeping out distracting information.
The tests used in the research involved showing the participants a series of red and blue rectangles on a screen. The participants were asked to ignore the blue rectangles as they flashed around a screen and pay attention to only the red ones. The subjects who said they were low multitaskers had no problem ignoring the blue rectangles. Those who said they were high multitaskers were distracted by the blue rectangles. These tests were performed using letters and speed, too, but each time the low multitaskers performed better than the high multitaskers.
The results were surprising: “Heavy media multitaskers performed worse on a test of task-switching ability, likely due to a reduced ability to filter out interference from the irrelevant task set.” In other words, heavy media multitaskers were much worse at concentrating than were light media multitaskers. Nass explained that the heavy media users were easily distracted and actually slower.
Still, all the researchers I interviewed agreed that we can’t place a stake in the ground when it comes to multitasking until there is more research. Even Nass, whom I spoke with several times about his and others’ research, said that it will take years before we know the reality and limitations of our brains in a multitasking society.
A study released in 2010, just one year after Nass’s multitasking research, by two University of Utah researchers showed that a small segment of society is truly capable of multitasking. The research involved two hundred college students and their ability to talk on a cell phone while using a driving simulator. Nearly all of them failed miserably—not surprisingly. But a very small number—2.5 percent—had a “super-tasking” ability to drive and perform other tasks without any decline in results. These extr
aordinary multitaskers even repeated their strange skill on a second test. Unfortunately, there were few clues to help the researchers figure out which drivers would have superior skills—and many people assumed they were one of the rare few.
Although young people—say, those under twenty-five—may seem to be more attuned to this kind of switching than their parents, multitasking isn’t just a generational characteristic. L. Mark Carrier and Nancy Cheever from the Department of Psychology and the Department of Communications at California State University, recently surveyed 1,319 people who were split into three different segments based on age: baby boomers (born between 1946 and 1964), Gen Xers (born between 1965 and 1978), and Net Geners (born after 1978). The survey asked questions related to the experiences they engage in simultaneously, such as listening to music while playing video games and texting or e-mailing while watching TV.14
The researchers found that some tasks just don’t mix, regardless of age. That is, very few people said they play video games and chat on instant messenger screens at the same time. And as you might expect, very few people read books for pleasure while texting or e-mailing. But the study showed a very high level of multitasking across all generations. The researchers pointed out that some multitasking is mindlessly easy, no matter how old you are; for example, all generations could listen to music or eat along with other tasks.
Carrier originally hypothesized that the majority of media multitasking took place among the younger generations. He also believed that this younger group would be much better at performing any two tasks at once. Instead, the researchers discovered that everyone engages in multiple variations of media simultaneously, though baby boomers found more tasks difficult to perform simultaneously.
