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 e-mail and instant message convversations
at once, text messaging while watching television
and jumping from one website 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 are published in the
Aug. 24 edition of 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 brain just can't do
it. But many researchers have guessed that people
who appear to multitask must have superb control
over what they think about and what they pay attention to.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/08/090825113133.htmLink
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