Multi-taskers pay mental price
Think you can talk on the phone, send an instant message and read your email all at once Stanford researchers say even trying may impair your cognitive control.
Attention, multitaskers (if you can pay attention, that is): Your brain may be in trouble.
People who are regularly bombarded with several streams of electronic information do not pay attention, control their memory or switch from one job to another as well as those who prefer to complete one task at a time, a group of Stanford researchers has found.
High-tech jugglers are everywhere -- keeping up several email and instant message conversations at once, text messaging while watching television and jumping from one Web site to another while plowing through homework assignments.
But after putting about 100 students through a series of three tests, the researchers realized those heavy media multitaskers are paying a big mental price.
"They're suckers for irrelevancy," said communication Professor Clifford Nass, one of the researchers whose findings were published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. "Everything distracts them."
Social scientists have long assumed that it's impossible to process more than one string of information at a time. The
