The chaotic busyness occurring throughout the atrium of the Schine Student Center at the end of the day is a rush of students coming and going. The casual lunch hours when people linger doing simple work or chatting with friends is long over. Now, few stop for anything as they scramble through the building.

Yet, none of this commotion can match the girl sitting behind the enclosed desk in the middle of the room. Peering into the square formed by four wooden-paneled walls with an attached desk, known as The Info Center, there is a flurry of action and organized disorder, all from a single seat.

Papers are spread out across the desk, which are a combination of work, class and personal. The focus of the moment from the center’s lone inhabitant, a girl, is on the glowing computer screen in front of her. There she is watching not just one Web page, but three different ones that are strategically positioned to be able to be seen simultaneously.

Two pages are Internet Explorer windows with SYR Web sites open, helping her do her job. The third is a Firefox screen, entirely for personal use, which in itself has four different Web pages marked off by tabs.

As she switches from one to another, reading e-mails and checking Wikipedia, the bottom of the computer starts to flash. Without missing a beat, she brings up an AIM screen and begins a quickly-typed conversation with a friend. That’s all done over a period of 10 seconds, but it’s clear she’s been doing exactly this, and more, since she took over the post hours ago.

While intense, the sight may be hard to notice. The girl, small, thin, with a messy mane of long brown hair, could be any college student. No one asks for her name when they come up to the desk with a question, and she doesn’t give it. Instead she just adds solving their problems to the long list of things she is doing at once.

It doesn’t end when the job does. The girl, Ainsley Bartholomew, a senior fine arts and television, radio and film dual major, will immediately immerse herself in iPod music or a cell phone conversation during her walk home, possibly while finishing the abandoned newspaper. Then there’s homework to do, so she’ll fall back on an old routine: the computer will be loaded up (complete with music and conversation software), the TV will be turned on, food will be made and the homework, finally, will be taken out and arranged within the mess.

Bartholomew isn’t anything special when it comes to doing work in this fashion. She is just one of her generation who is not only accustomed, but also seemingly addicted to multitasking.

‘We’ve gotten to the point where everything is being done right then, right there and it makes us so ADD … in the fact that we can’t focus as well,’ Bartholomew said. ‘I personally can’t help but multitask; if I don’t have more than one project going at once, I can’t focus. And I think that’s just how our culture is.’

Examining habits

Bartholomew couldn’t be more right; this culture is obsessed with multitasking, according to many studies done in the past years by regarded sources like The American Psychological Association, CNN, National Public Radio and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration Ames Research Center.

People have always tried to save time by doing more than one thing at once. What differs for this generation is the technology. Through interactive items like computers and the accompanying Internet, compared to passive older media like television and film, we are able to do so much so fast, and are limited only by our own ability.

‘I think our society, as a whole, is more concerned with speed as far as completing tasks in concerned,’ said Randy Newman, a junior photo illustration major. ‘Our generation wants to say, ‘the more we can get done the better rather than the quality of what we produce.’

There’s a second half to the study that is even more important. It’s not enough to find out if we are multitasking, but rather if it’s helping us to get more done. And the answer is, unequivocally, no.

Every person who multitasks to get more work done is, in the long run, doing less. In fact, almost five times less, according to David Meyer, Ph.D., director of the Brain, Cognition and Action Laboratory at the University of Michigan, who was part of the team that conducted the last major research on the subject for the APA in 2001.

In this study, Meyer, along with Michigan colleague Joshua Rubinstein, Ph.D. and Jeffrey Evans, Ph.D., a former Michigan professor and a current Federal Aviation Administration safety advisor, conducted four experiments in which young adults multitasked between different actions.

Meyer and his team proved throughout the trials, each participant took longer to finish when switching from one task to another than when completing one task after another. Even worse was the fact that as the tasks took longer, the participants became more frustrated and began to shut down, which added more time.

‘You (can) suffer from mental overload when multitasking,’ Meyer said. ‘It’s kind of a vicious circle; you feel anxious because you have lots to do, so you try to do lots more and … you get more anxious. It’s bad for your health in the long run.’

Multitasking on the Brain

The brain is an extremely complicated and mysterious organ, and a lot of its functions are still unknown. Yet, scientists have a decent idea of how the brain handles multitasking, or more specifically, how it doesn’t handle it.

Jordan Grafman, chief of the cognitive neuroscience section at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, has recently been studying this problem. His team has discovered that a person who switches tasks uses Brodmann’s Area 10, a part of the brain’s frontal lobe, which is located behind the forehead.

It’s this part of the brain that allows a person to stop a task before it is finished and return to it later, Grafman said. Every time someone ends one task and moves to another, the brain must shut down the first before moving on. Meyer compares it to a basketball game in which, before any activity happens, there has to be a warm up and cool down period. And during this time, little to no activity occurs.

This research proved a person will lose time when multitasking, but to a varying degree. The more complicated the task, the harder it is to toggle between activities and more time will be lost when getting work done, said Paul Verhaeghen, associate professor in psychology who is studying this topic.

‘Whenever you switch between two sources of information, there is a cost, and the cost is measurable,’ Verhaeghen said. ‘When I walk around campus and someone in front of me gets a call on their cell phone, they slow down typically. It’s hard to even talk and walk at the same time.’

Ironically, three things happen almost simultaneously to the brain when it multitasks. It has to keep track of what is going on overall, it has to switch between the tasks and the combination of these two activities causes the body to become fatigued. Each of these causes miniscule time lapses in productivity. They may not be noticeable when they occur, but they make a difference in how much a person gets done in the long run, Meyer said.

These also greatly affect the quality of what is being done. For example, according to Verhaeghen’s studies, trying to drive and talk on the cell phone at the same time will cause a person to have the same reaction time as if they drove after taking two shots of whiskey.

It is worth noting, however, that the more familiar a person is with the task, the easier it is to do, even when multitasking. Verhaeghen gives another example of driving a car. At first it’s very difficult to do all the things at once that are needed to drive, but over time, it becomes second nature.

Still, he is quick to point out the type of work college students have is rarely this repetitive or simple, making it counterproductive to multitask.

The Myth Behind Multitasking

If study after study proved multitasking doesn’t get more done, why are so many people absolutely sure that it does?

‘It’s an illusion, in part,’ Meyer said. ‘The mind is easily deceived by stuff that takes place in the external environment and in consciousness. We’re fooled all the time, in terms of how our mental process works. Because you are trying to do two things at once, you infer that you are making more progress then if you were just concentrating on one task.’

Multitasking is not just something college students picked up, but have been conditioned to do. This can be very harmful to someone’s ability to focus later on in life, Grafman said.

‘I love being busy,’ said Paola Mora, senior nutrition major. ‘If I have one minute of slow time, its not that I hate it, but I get really, really antsy.’

Society is also a large factor. With the current generation raised on doing multiple things at once by parents who were also constantly doing multiple things at once, it’s a habit that’s easily conditioned and hard to break.

This is true for people in college now as well as the younger children, according to Jeffery Good, a research fellow at the University of California Los Angeles’ Center of Everyday Lives of Families, who is currently studying the effects of multitasking through an intensive, four-year study of modern family life.

‘There’ a sense that everyone is trying to … get more accomplished and therefore you have to do more at once,’ Good said. ‘Everyone is feeling more pressure at work and their studies. … it creates this sense that there is a lot going on, and everyone has to multitask.’

And, of course, there’s technology.

‘As soon as you have a browser and a computer that’s capable of keeping five things open at the same time, you will probably do it,’ Verhaeghen said. ‘This generation is very good at multitasking and having short bursts of attention but there might be a problem with sustained attention.’

In fact, this is a fear for many researchers who are studying multitasking. Studies have proven that over the last 40 years, college students make more errors and they are slower when they have to do two things at once, Grafman said.

‘You are defaulting to the multitasking, and believe me, over time it’s going to be harder to get away from that,’ Grafman said. ‘If you can’t think deeply, you are less likely to have any sort of inventiveness or creativity. And that’s a danger for our culture.’

Answering the Question

While Bartholomew feels like she’s being more productive sitting at her desk and doing 10 things at once, she thinks this may be something she’s been conditioned to believe. She is one of the few who realizes this may be a problem.

‘It’s an important topic and (learning about it) is important,’ Meyer said. ‘You need to appreciate this most of all because …you guys are going to have to develop new ways to deal with it or your lives will be messed up. It’s already messing up people’s lives of my generation. And the first step to solving (this) problem is to realize there is one.’

SIDEBAR: Proof to the Facts

Here’s a good example from David Meyer, Ph.D., director of the Brain, Cognition and Action Laboratory at the University of Michigan, to show how difficult it is to actually multitask:

Step 1: Time yourself counting, as fast as you can, from one to 10.

Step 2: Time yourself saying, as fast as you can, the letters A to J in order.

Step 3: Time yourself switching between the letters (A to J) and the numbers (1 to 10) one at a time (example: A1, B2, C3, etc).

Both Step 1 and 2 should have taken you about 2 seconds each, which means if they were done one after another they should have taken a total of about 4 seconds. Step 3, if done without making any mistakes, should have taken about 20 seconds. This is five times the amount of time it took to integrate and multitask the two steps than if you had concentrated on one and then the other.

SIDEBAR: Tips to Quitting Multitasking

There are some steps that can be taken in order to keep from losing so much time. If cutting out multitasking altogether is out of the question, then take a break when frustration or fatigue kicks in. Getting some rest, or ‘incubation’ as it’s technically known, is able to replenish the mind and get someone focused again, said Paul Verhaeghen, an associate professor in psychology.

Another key element is time management. Learn what tasks require heavy concentration and give them the focus they need. Be closed off from interruptions, whether they are external, like someone coming into the room to talk, or internal, like having the television on and zoning out to it. Make a schedule and keep to it, and productivity will increase.

Published on February 6, 2007 at 12:00 pm