Being a college student, we are all incredibly busy. Whether it ranges from going to class, going to a club meeting, having a social life, hitting the gym, studying, or doing whatever it may be that consumes our time it seems as if there just isn’t enough time in the day to get it all done. Due to this struggle a lot of people resort to multitasking- whether it be catching up with friends by using the phone/social media while sitting in a lecture, or reading something for a class while on the elliptical machine we all try and multitask. The question I am imposing is are our brains and bodies truly capable of multitasking, or is it harming us in the long run?

What is multitasking? It is defined as the act of one person to perform two or more tasks simultaneously. I did some research and found the psychology behind the idea of multitasking to see if our brains were capable of it. Psychologists say “it shouldn’t surprise anyone that multitasking takes a toll on productivity”. They have found that the mind and brain were not designed to multitask and having a mind overload could lead to complete catastrophe. To prove it researchers conducted task switching experiments. They compared how long it took for people to get the tasks done and measured the cost in time. The independent variable being the tasks and dependent being how long it takes to complete them. They weighed the third variables as well ranging from complexity, and the cost of time it took to switch. Robert Rogers and Stephen Monsell teamed up and found that even when people knew they had to switch every few trials they were still slower on task-switch than task-repeat. The researchers found it hard for people to switch from one thing to the next simultaneously which led to them losing time, instead of staying on one task and completing them one by one. A person can only wonder how much time gets lost as tasks or the effort of the types of activities they are partaking in needs increases.

Instead of multitasking people also tend to switch from one task to the next often, just like talked about in the above study of tasks. Scientists say this is all a human delusion, the thought that we can multitask and are good at it. Earl Miller, a neuroscientist at MIT says “humans simply can’t focus on more than one thing at a time, but we can shift our attention very quickly from one thing to the next”. We aren’t able to focus our minds on two things at once due to interference between tasks. Researchers at the University of Michigan decided to use an MRI scanner to see if they can see the brain struggling by taking photos of the brain while it does different tasks. Daniel Weissman, a researcher in the study explained that the person laying in the scanner will be doing different tasks depending on colors of numbers on a screen. An example would be if one set of digits is green say which is numerically larger and red color you have to say which has a larger font size. The MRI showed the mans brain pausing to gather all of the information and push aside one of the colors to come up with an answer. Switching was seen and an even more overwhelmed brain was seen in this study. Some extraneous variables such as the task being difficult comes into play, but still it shows how the brain has trouble with switching so they can be ruled out.

Based on all of the evidence it can be ruled multitasking- or rapid switching of the brain is actually extremely harmful to us. I will take the researchers advice and extend it onto my peers to do things one at a time. As time consuming as it may seem switching and trying to multitask actually takes more time away from us. I will definitely start to focus on one thing and maybe I will actually see some benefits from it.