Eli sucks at multitasking

Mostly, like a computer with a fast processor and no memory, he ends up spending all his time thrashing, so it was a happy day to read Rudy Baum's latest tirade in C&E news

We know from personal experience and from recent studies that multitasking while driving is a bad idea. Cell phones, iPhones, BlackBerrys, and the like just don’t mix with driving. People talking on cell phones while driving are as dangerous as people who are legally drunk. People who are texting are much more dangerous.

Multitasking outside of cars, however, is a different story. We’ve all been told that the ability to process multiple streams of information, most of it digital, is the wave of the future. Teenagers and young adults, we are told, have developed the ability to do homework, browse the Web, listen to music, watch television, and instant message simultaneously, packing so much more into every hour than we old-school unitaskers. . .

Guess what? It doesn’t work. The Aug. 30 New York Times carried a story on “The Mediocre Multitasker” that led: “Read it and gloat. Last week, researchers at Stanford University published a study showing that the most persistent multitaskers perform badly in a variety of tasks. They don’t focus as well as non-multitaskers. They’re more distractable. They’re weaker at shifting from one task to another and at organizing information. They are, as a matter of fact, worse at multitasking than people who don’t ordinarily multitask.”. . .

Chronic multitaskers do process information differently. They do it badly. The research definitively shows that multitaskers “have greater difficulty filtering out irrelevant stimuli from their environment … they are less likely to ignore irrelevant representations in memory … and they are less effective in suppressing the activation of irrelevant task sets.

Eli is getting to like that fellow Baum