Multitasking is accepted as a given in our modern technology-driven society. Anyone with a teenager has shaken his head at the sight of his child doing homework while listening to music at a loud volume through earphones, and at the same time carrying on multiple texting conversations and surfing the Internet. While a multicore computer can perform multiple tasks simultaneously, people have only one brain. Since multitasking is becoming so prevalent, it has been thought that some people are especially good at multitasking, or that people get better at it over time as they get used to doing several things at once. Others thought that multitaskers were actually really good at switching rapidly from one task to another, so it appeared that they were doing two or more things at the same time.
A Stanford University study has shown that this is not true. Stanford professor of sociology Clifford Nass, along with associates Eyal Ophir and Anthony Wagner, decided to investigate what it was that gave multitaskers the ability to do what they do. The researchers assembled two groups of people. One group included those who regularly did lots of multitasking, while the other group did very little multitasking. The first experiment tested the subjects’ ability to ignore extraneous information and focus only on what was important. The research team was surprised to discover that while those who did not multitask had no problem successfully completing the exercise, the mulitaskers were very distracted by extraneous information.
