It seemed to me that my local NPR station, WBUR in Boston, had been giving undue attention to the findings of a Stanford University study of “Cognitive control in media multitaskers,” recently published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Science. I first heard it reported on one of the news programs, Morning Edition or All Things Considered. Then Talk of the Nation did a show on it. Then a nationally syndicated show produced by WBUR, On Point. Counting them up, that’s only three times the story was featured, but it seemed like more, perhaps because I found it so disconcerting.

Anyway, the study found that “heavy multitaskers” have trouble filtering distractions and switching tasks compared with those who do it less. In other words, those who multitask most are the least proficient at it.

As someone who is myself a heavy but not particularly proficient multitasker, I found that surprising, but possible. I had thought it was just me. But the study also found that frequent multitasking affects cognitive abilities across the board, and this I found worrying. Is multitasking making me stupid? In trying to become more efficient, am I not only being less efficient, but also less able to follow an argument and to construct and argument?

At least that might explain some of the postings in this blog when I go back and read them. Blame it on the multitasking.

Here is the abstract of the article by Eyal Ophir, Clifford Nass and Anthony D. Wagner of Stanford.

Chronic media multitasking is quickly becoming ubiquitous, although processing multiple incoming streams of information is considered a challenge for human cognition. A series of experiments addressed whether there are systematic differences in information processing styles between chronically heavy and light media multitaskers. A trait media multitasking index was developed to identify groups of heavy and light media multitaskers. These two groups were then compared along established cognitive control dimensions. Results showed that heavy media multitaskers are more susceptible to interference from irrelevant environmental stimuli and from irrelevant representations in memory. This led to the surprising result that heavy media multitaskers performed worse on a test of task-switching ability, likely due to reduced ability to filter out interference from the irrelevant task set. These results demonstrate that media multitasking, a rapidly growing societal trend, is associated with a distinct approach to fundamental information processing.

Putting my personal anxieties aside and assuming the study replicated and the findings supported by other research, these are obviously findings that have enormous implications for educators. Unfortunately his is not the first study to suggest there are such problems with multitasking.
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In a 2001 study Joshua Rubinstein, Ph.D., of the Federal Aviation Administration, and David Meyer, Ph.D., and Jeffrey Evans, Ph.D., of the University of Michigan raised questions about the efficiency of multitasking. They used the metaphor of a “mental CEO” to describe brain’s prefrontal cortex and other key neural regions establish priorities among tasks and allocate the mind’s resources to them. They found that this process of allocation of resources reduces efficiency and slows down processes.

Earl Miller, a neuroscientist based at MIT dismisses multitasking as a myth, saying that what we are really doing is task switching. “People can’t multitask very well, and when people say they can, they’re deluding themselves…The brain is very good at deluding itself.”

Yet there is no question that multitasking is a fact of life, an increasingly unavoidable fact of life. March Prensky argues that the minds of those who are being raised with technology are changing (Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants, Part II: Do they Really think Differently? pdf file).

Technology has become such a major part of our lives that we sometimes forget how new it is. In 1991, the year that an 18 year-old first year college student was born, Microsoft had just released MS DOS 5.0, the internet was first made available for public use, and the first web browser was introduced. Windows 3.0, the first version of Windows to be widely accepted by the buying public wasn’t introduced until 1992. The participants in the Stanford study were college students. Some say the Digital Native was born after 1980, others say 1990. But if we use the analogy of language acquisition, today’s colleges students became fluent early, but still aren’t native speakers. Between 1990 and 1997, the percentage of households owning computers more than doubled, increasing from 15 percent to 35 percent, and in in 2000 that number was still only 60%.

Moreover, the capacity of computers to run multiple applications at the same time really efficiently is relatively recently. Remember how often Windows 95 crashed? AOL Instant Messenger only came into being in 1997, Facebook in 2004, YouTube in 2005. Text messaging via mobile phones, while possible for quite some time, is a very new phenomenon in the United States, not really taking off until 2004-2005. So perhaps the generation now in college are not yet digital natives. Or maybe they are, but they are the children of immigrants, and thus not quite acculturated.

Not matter what, the findings give me pause. Maybe I need to turn of my IM client and email notifications. It’s a start. I’ll be out of touch for the next hour or so.