Multitasking and its impact on the brain

Multitasking is the condition of paying attention to more than one stimulus or to a stimulus that is presented in more than one modality. Multitasking occurs when mental focus is directed towards multiple ideas, or tasks, at one go. This skill is also known as divided attention, which people often carry out without realising it. A great example of this would be singing a song while driving a car.

Multitasking is an important factor in academic and professional settings. Being able to understand what the boss is saying while explaining and taking notes are tasks that are essential to successful learning. This may be one of the reasons why people with attention disorders perform poorly in school.

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’s Area 10, a part of the brain’s frontal lobes, is important for establishing and attaining long term goals.

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Multitasking requires attention and various advanced cognitive processes. Moving from one task to another also requires complementary stages of goal shifting and rule activation. When conducting more than one task simultaneously, the interrelated cognitive processes establish priorities among tasks and allocate the mind’s resources to them. With the explosion of digital media and the market’s craving for the attention of customers, media multitasking has become rampant. One might be completing his work assignment, and Spotify or Netflix could be in the background.

Changing our focus keeps us from relying on automatic behaviors to finish tasks quickly. When we are focused on a single task that we have done before, we can work on “autopilot,” which frees up mental resources. Switching back and forth bypasses this process, and we tend to work more slowly as a result.

A switching cost is a reduction in performance accuracy or speed that results from shifting between tasks. The behavioral costs of task switching are typically unavoidable: individuals almost always take longer to complete a task and do so with more errors when switching between tasks than when they stay with one task.

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Our minds are taxed by multitasking. When we attempt it, we must engage in task switching, placing increased demands on neuro-cognitve systems that support control and sustained attention. While engaging these systems can partially mitigate its behavioural costs, multitasking is not free––we pay a price in increased demands on these systems and some performance deficit typically occurs. However there are certain domains––like creative problem solving ––that may benefit from task switching by reducing fixation on a problem. Individuals should be thoughtful about the degree to which they engage in media and other forms of multitasking. In this era of “attention economy”, as consumers of knowledge, we should be aware of the potential relationships between task-switching, brain, and behaviour, while multitasking. Weighing the costs and benefits of multitasking is of paramount importance.