Human multitasking
Human multitasking is the concept that one can split their attention on more than one task or activity at the same time, such as speaking on the phone while driving a car.
[9] Researchers have long suggested that there appears to be a processing bottleneck preventing the brain from working on certain key aspects of both tasks at the same time[10] (e.g., (Gladstones, Regan & Lee 1989) (Pashler 1994)).
Many researchers believe that the cognitive function subject to the most severe form of bottlenecking is the planning of actions and retrieval of information from memory.
[11] Psychiatrist Edward M. Hallowell[12] has gone so far as to describe multitasking as a "mythical activity in which people believe they can perform two or more tasks simultaneously as effectively as one."
Walter Schneider and Robert Shiffrin performed an experiment in which they presented the participants with a memory set, which consists of target stimuli such as the number three.
According to a study done by Jordan Grafman, chief of the cognitive neuroscience section at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, "the most anterior part [of the brain] allows [a person] to leave something when it's incomplete and return to the same place and continue from there," while Brodmann Area 10, a part of the brain's frontal lobes, is important for establishing and attaining long-term goals.
Another study by René Marois, a psychologist at Vanderbilt University, discovered that the brain exhibits a "response selection bottleneck" when asked to perform several tasks at once.
Psychologist David Meyer, of the University of Michigan, claims that instead of a "bottleneck," the brain experiences "adaptive executive control" which places priorities on each activity.
These viewpoints differ in that while bottlenecking attempts to force many thoughts through the brain at once, adaptive executive control prioritizes tasks to maintain a semblance of order.
Brain scans of the participants indicate that the prefrontal cortex quickened its ability to process the information, enabling the individuals to multitask more efficiently.
For this reason, people alter information to make it more memorable, such as separating a ten-digit phone number into three smaller groups or dividing the alphabet into sets of three to five letters, a phenomenon known as chunking.
George Miller, former psychologist at Harvard University, believes the limits to the human brain's capacity centers around "the number seven, plus or minus two."
A French fMRI study published in 2010 indicated preliminary support for the hypothesis that the brain can pursue at most two goals simultaneously, one for each frontal lobe (which has a goal-oriented area).
Through the use of MRI brain scans, researchers have found that frontoparietal regions are activated which would include the inferior frontal junction and the posterior parietal cortex.
[22] Although some cultures believe that women are better at multitasking than men, there is little data available to support claims of a real sex difference.
[23] In 2013, a brain connectivity study from Penn Medicine found major differences in men and women's neural wiring that researchers suggested indicated that sex plays a role in multitasking skills.
They said that "[On] average, men are more likely better at learning and performing a single task at hand, like cycling or navigating directions, whereas women have superior memory and social cognition skills, making them more equipped for multitasking and creating solutions that work for a group.
[28][29][30] One story told by evolutionary biologists Silverman and Eals speculated that a sex-based division of labor into hunters and gatherers could favor the development of a difference in men and women's cognitive abilities, based on the hunter-gatherer tasks each sex performed in the prehistoric past.
[32] However, an attempted verification of this study found "that multiple methodological failures all bias their results in the same direction...their analysis does not contradict the wide body of empirical evidence for gendered divisions of labor in foraging societies".
[33] Author Steven Berlin Johnson describes one kind of multitasking: “It usually involves skimming the surface of the incoming data, picking out the relevant details, and moving on to the next stream.
[36] According to studies by the Kaiser Family Foundation, in 1999 only 16 percent of time spent using media such as Internet, television, video games, telephones, text-messaging, or e-mail was combined.
[2] The 2007 Harvard Business Review featured Linda Stone's idea of “continuous partial attention,” or, “constantly scanning for opportunities and staying on top of contacts, events, and activities in an effort to miss nothing”.
Many studies,[50][51][52][53][54] literature,[55] articles,[56][57][58] and worldwide consulting firms,[59] stress the fact that multitasking of any kind reduces the productivity and/or increases rate of errors, thus generating unnecessary frustrations.
