Abstract
I recently had the opportunity to view contemporary multitasking. I stood on a freeway overpass during rush hour and was able to be a voyeur into people's cars and lives. An astounding number (I don't have the statistics) were doing something other than driving. Most of them probably felt very satisfied that they were maximizing their time in the car. They ignored the fact that they were hurling down the freeway at 65 miles an hour while distracting themselves by performing tasks other than driving. The most usual was talking on the cell phone. Some women were applying makeup or lipstick, while other people were drinking coffee or reaching over to grab a bagel or sweet roll. Fortunately, there were only a few people who felt so confident at multitasking that they were reading.
It has recently been shown that multitasking is really nothing more than the ability to rapidly switch areas of concentration. Neuroscientists have long thought that the brain had the ability to process enormous amounts of data but suspected that a bottleneck was present. Recently, Paul Dux and Rene Marois, reported in the journal, Neuron, 1 that the lateral, superior, and prefrontal cortices were the areas of constraint. By the use of functional MRI, they showed that these areas are the bottleneck making it possible to process only one task at a time.
Young people who can juggle instant messaging, e-mail, hard rock music, and chewing gum impress some of us. However, instead of this being the ability to do many things at once, it is the skill of using a short attention span and surfing many events. The inability to concentrate on one task for a period of time may merely be a manifestation of watching too many TV sound bytes, or an overdose of 10-second Sesame Street type learning. I am glad to know that neuroscientists have confirmed some of my thoughts that multitasking actually slows you down and increases the potential for making an error. “Disruptions and interruptions are a bad deal from the standpoint of our ability to process information.” 2 Background music, which has lyrics or rapidly changing rhythms and sounds, is distracting. Soothing music may not be. I did not allow music while doing surgery, and this is the reason I was considered a hard-nose in the operating room. I didn't want my assistants tapping their toes or humming a lyric when they should be concentrating on the surgery. I didn't want the support staff to be doing anything except putting their attention into running the operating room smoothly.
It does not take much to cause a distraction. A paper soon to be published from the University of Illinois by Eric Horvitz and Shamsi Iqbal, 2 supports thoughts I have had for a long time that once your cognitive, creative process is disrupted it takes approximately 15 minutes to regroup. Their study noted that in a group of workers from Microsoft, it took on average 15 minutes after a disruption to gear back up again for serious mental tasks. These tasks were things like writing reports and computer coding. Interruptions could be as simple as an e-mail, instant messaging, or a colleague asking a question. This is the reason I have always sequestered myself, turned off the phone, and put the cat out when I was writing. The process of performing a creative or a concentration-sensitive task requires one to channel one's thoughts and direct them through the frontal cortex bottleneck. We see this in writers who go off to a special place to write, painters and sculptors who hide themselves during their creative processes, and composers who write in seclusion. A simple disruption truly “rattles your brain.” Rene Marois said, “the human brain, with its hundred billion neurons and hundreds of trillions of synaptic connections, is a cognitive powerhouse. But a core limitation is the inability to concentrate on two things at once.” 1
One should not try to write the discussion section of a research paper without a dedicated block of time. All too often I have edited papers that appeared to have been written by an author at the breakfast table while he was attempting to get three children up and ready for school. One must always remember that when juggling several tasks one can only concentrate on the one task at hand; the others are out of one's consciousness.
When combining a series of small tasks that do not require a great amount of cognitive activity, multitasking has its place. Watching a chef coordinate a kitchen to produce multiple gourmet dishes is to see a master at shortterm task concentration. He or she moves from one task to the other while retaining the memory of the previous one when returning to it. People are also familiar with the orchestration of multiple small tasks needed to manage a busy emergency room. Numerous small scenarios play out, all of which require attention. In both of these cases preemptive contemplative thought processes occur that are not done in the fray of multitasking.
Multitasking when running a busy meeting or managing a household can give one a feeling of smugness, superiority, and satisfaction, but when writing a scientific paper or performing an operative procedure one must give in to the frontal cortex bottleneck or risk receiving an editor's rejection note or a surgical complication.
We all think that by trying to perform multiple tasks simultaneously we can be more efficient and ring more out of the day. Having thought about this for over 10 years, my conclusion is that more often than not while attempting to multitask I end up dropping my charts on the floor, disconnecting my phone, or drowning my computer keyboard in a “latte”. 3