Here They Go Again: Multitasking Is The Devil

I guess I shouldn’t be surprised, but it continues to amaze me how quickly the media will pull some scientific research result out of context and use it to claim that napping causes Alzheimers or masturbation leads to poor dental hygiene.

The bête noire in this case is multitasking, which is a regular foil for the Sunday supplement types.

Matt Richtel starts out by linking to a bunch of his own pieces which link multitasking with all sorts of ills, based on his cherry picking of research. Then he reports on a new study about interruption, in which older people were shown to have more difficulty remembering what they were doing after being interrupted than young people.

Matt Richtel, Multitasking Takes Toll on Memory, Study Finds

Researchers said the key finding of the new study is that people between the ages of 60 and 80 have significantly more trouble remembering tasks after experiencing a brief interruption than do people in their 20s and 30s.

During the study, subjects were asked to look at a scene, then were interrupted for several seconds by an image of a person’s face. They were asked to identify the person’s gender and approximate age, and then returned to answer questions about the earlier scene. Older subjects found it much harder to disengage from the interruption and reestablish contact with the scene, the researchers found.

Even though the study did not revolve around interruptions from cellphones or other gadgets, one researcher said the results provide a “clear extrapolation” to the impact of a stream of incoming rings and buzzes.

“Technology provides so much more of an interference than what we did here,” said the researcher, Dr. Adam Gazzaley, a neurologist at the University of California at San Francisco. Indeed, the paper argues that studies like this are becoming increasingly important as aging adults spend more time in a work force with heavy multitasking demands.

“This issue is growing in scope and societal relevance as multitasking is being fed by a dramatic increase in the accessibility and variety of electronic media,” Dr. Gazzaley said.

Note that the study did not involve technological interruptions of any sort, but Richtel and ‘one researcher’ had no trouble trumpeting this as another proof about the dangers inherent in technological multitasking.

Some old duffer who forgets what he wanted to do in the kitchen because his short-term memory is glitchy is not some definitive proof that mutlitasking — texting while in a conference, or listening to music while doing homework — leads to permanently diminished cognition, even if the neighbor’s dog barked as he walked down the stairs.