An ace multitasker? No, you really aren't

Chances are good you won't finish this article - at least not before you check your e-mail, send a text, or follow a tweet.

As technological distractions beep and ping their way into our consciousness, plenty of evidence shows that multitasking can pump up anxiety levels, increase errors, reduce attention spans, and affect working memory.

According to a study by Gloria Mark, a professor of informatics at the University of California, Irvine, the typical office worker gets only 11 minutes between each interruption, and it takes an average of 25 minutes to return to the original task after a distraction. A second study by Mark shows that interrupted workers work faster, but experience greater stress.

Even very brief interruptions of about three seconds - the time it takes to silence a smartphone - double error rates when performing sequential tasks on a computer, reports a 2013 study done by Michigan State University and funded by the U.S. Navy's Office of Naval Research. Participants were asked to complete an exercise in order, such as hitting a keystroke to identify whether a letter was closer to the start or end of the alphabet.

"When you're doing something and something else comes along to demand your attention, you need to essentially reactivate your brain to switch between neural networks," says Adam Gazzaley, director of the Neuroscience Imaging Laboratory at the University of California, San Francisco. "And that switching results in a cost to performance."

"We don't have a good record of distributing or dividing our attention," Gazzaley says. "If your goal is high-level performance, you should be aware that moving between high-level activities is detrimental."

"The brain has limited resources," concurs Ruben Gur, director of the Brain Behavior laboratory at University of Pennsylvania's Perelman School of Medicine. "When certain activities require too many resources, a distraction can reduce performance. Don't kid yourself thinking you can do two things of equal quality."

But can't people walk and chew gum at the same time?

"Multitasking gives the illusion that we're simultaneously tasking, but we're really not," says Edward Hallowell, author of Driven to Distraction and the founder of the Hallowell Center for Cognitive and Emotional Health in Sudbury, Mass. and New York City. "It's like playing tennis with three balls."

"For some people, listening to music while working actually makes them more creative because they're using different cognitive functions," he says. "But despite what many of us think, you can't pay full attention to someone on the phone if you are simultaneously doing e-mail. We're all familiar with the 'e-mail voice' when someone you're talking to on the phone suddenly sounds disengaged."

Frequent multitasking can lead to what Hallowell calls attention deficit trait (ADT), a high-anxiety response to the hyperconnected environment in which we live and work - in other words, brain overload. Core symptoms include distractibility, inner frenzy, and impatience.

"When people experience ADT, they have difficulty staying organized, setting priorities, managing time, and may even feel a constant pressure or anxiety," he says.

But while too much anxiety from interruptions may reduce productivity, a little stress from possible technological distractions may not be all bad.

An as-yet-unpublished study from Carnegie Mellon University's Human-Computer Interaction Lab found that moving between distractions and work definitely lowered performance. But researchers working on the study said that people were also able to learn how to cope with distractions.

Subjects were divided into three groups and asked to complete a test. The control subjects were not interrupted; those in a second group were interrupted; and those in the third group were told that they might be interrupted.

During the first part of the study, the interrupted group and the high-alert group were twice interrupted. As a result, their test scores suffered: They answered questions correctly 20 percent less often than those in the control group.

But in the second part of the test, the story changed. The interrupted group improved, answering questions correctly only 14 percent less often than the control group. And the high-alert group, not interrupted this time, scored a whopping 43 percent better, even outperforming the control group.

"The mere awareness that an interruption could occur may have increased their alertness (or anxiety) and improved their subsequent performance," says Eyal Pe'er, a senior lecturer at Bar-Ilan University in Israel and one of the researchers who worked on the study.

Gur, who was not involved in the study, notes that a certain amount of alertness - in this case anticipating an interruption that never came - can improve performance.

"In general, the brain acts like a waterbed," Gur says. "You push one area down and another will go up."

Yet the big question remains - do these constant technological interruptions and threats of distraction cause long-term changes to the brain?

"We don't really know what happens to a brain that is constantly made to multitask," says Gazzaley. "Does it lead to harmful consequences? It's a question mark, but at the moment, I'm not aware of anything in the behavior that causes harm to the brain. But it's something we need to study."

Gur doesn't see any long-term harm for multitaskers.

"It's part of our nature to be interrupted," he says. "Brains are sturdy things; a healthy brain can go through a lot without being damaged."

Meanwhile, Gazzaley - whose lab plans to investigate how attention spans and working memory may be affected by frequent interruptions - recommends multitasking when dealing with rote or boring tasks and turning off the electronics when deep focus is required to complete a project.

"People love things to be black and white, but that's not how the world works," he says. "Sometimes the consequences of multitasking are too high, such as in texting and driving. And it's certainly a problem when you're trying to get something done in an hour and a half and you're checking your Facebook page every five minutes.

"But," he adds, "if you're not on deadline or working on an important job that requires focus, multitasking can be a lot of fun."

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