07.07.2010 - Health

“Everything at once doesn’t work” study about multitasking reveals

As workloads and pressures increase – which seems to be the case almost everywhere – people will try to stay on top of things by doing several different tasks simultaneously. At home, this is exemplified by the modern mum, cooking dinner while checking emails on her laptop, talking to the school on the phone and keeping an eye on the baby. In the office, the phone is ringing, a new email pinging in your inbox, a colleague is asking you a question and all while you’re working to meet a project deadline this afternoon. Multitasking – working on several tasks at once – has become the order of the day. Men are said to prefer to do things linearly – one thing at a time – while women have been credited with a higher ability to multitask. This common myth is dispelled in a recent study by the Institute for Work and Health (DGUV) of the German Accident Insurance provider IAG. Trying to do too many things at once comes at a price – for men, women, young and old alike.

Renowned neuroscientists, such as Professor Ernst Pöppel from the Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich, have long been claiming that multitasking “doesn’t exist”. But it still remains a subject of much debate. According to Pöppel, the brain is simply not able to respond to several things at once. And multitasking is mainly about response, not about perception and processing. For the recent study, carried out on behalf of a group of German accident insurance providers, 32 male and 32 female subjects aged between 21 and 60 took part in simulated driving and office tasks. The study monitored their performance, their subjective experience and their physical reactions under multitasking conditions. The results were unequivocal: driving performance suffered under multitasking conditions, participants were more tense, their heart rate increased. During the simulated office tasks too, performance declined when several tasks had to be tackled in parallel, and the subjects became more tense and stressed. Dr Hiltraut Paridon, who led the research, explains: “If you have to complete several tasks at once your stress levels increase and you are more likely to make mistakes. This is bad for the individual, as constant stress puts your health at risk, and it is also potentially damaging to the business, as stress and mistakes increase the risk of accidents, which can be costly.”

Of course, multitasking cannot always be avoided. Dr Paridon therefore recommends some critical reflection. Especially in areas where safety is an issue, multitasking should be reduced to a minimum, not least to safeguard co-workers’ health and safety. However, some experts go a step further and warn that multitasking subtly alters our cognitive abilities. Researchers at the University of London have found that office workers who were distracted by incoming emails and phone calls showed a measurable decline in IQ. The psychiatrist Edward Hallowell refers to it as an attention deficit condition akin to ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder). American scientists believe that, in the long run, the brain loses its ability to focus. Burnout is the inevitable result. On the other hand, living in today’s increasingly networked society, we learn to single out the most important signals from the multitude of information, an ability that allows us to perform certain tasks in the first place – such as driving for example. “From a billion bits of information per second we filter out about a hundred that our brain is able to process,” says Professor Reinhard Oppermann from the Information in Context (ICON) division at the Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Information Technology (FIT) in Sankt Augustin. The constant participation in electronic media such as the Internet and email represents a kind of mental “channel surfing” that can lead to stress and an inability to focus, leaving only very small windows of actual productive work. The question remains to what extent we can learn to cope with this situation. If women are said to be able to absorb and process multiple streams of information simultaneously, then, according to the research, this is simply due to more practice, not an inherent superiority of the female brain. When it comes to conscious decision-making, however, there is no scope for working on several strands in parallel. “At that point, our brain can focus only on one single concept at any one time,” Professor Pöppel insists. W.O. Geberzahn