“I love having 10 different things cooking at once, but for me it’s all moving in little pieces, and when it comes time that there are big deliverables needed, I don’t have to scramble at the last minute,” Sallee said. “It’s an hour of combining all the little pieces into one thing, and it’s done.”

It’s not news the “always-on network” is eradicating the borders between home and office, and changing the way people work and play. But how much distraction can one person take? Research is still in the early stages, and there is little hard evidence that 24/7 access to information is bad for you. But the image of frantic, distracted workers scrabbling harder than ever for ever-diminishing social and economic returns is an attractive target for critics.

Not only is it annoying to see people chatting on cellphones in the popcorn line at the cinema, these devices — and the multitasking they encourage — could be taking a massive toll on our psyches, and perhaps even fundamentally altering the way our brains are wired, some dystopian-minded critics suggest.

Is the smartphone –- like Google, TV, comics and the movies before it –- actually making us dumb?

Fractured Concentration?

Some of the latest arguments to critique this 24/7 online culture include the book The Shallows by Nicholas Carr, who argues that the internet is rewiring us into shallow, inattentive thinkers, along with a New York Times feature series by Matt Richtel titled “Your Brain on Computers,” a collection of stories examining the possible negative consequences of gadget overload.

(Disclosure: I’m currently writing a book called Always On that explores similar topics.)

Giving credence to such claims, an oft-cited Stanford study published last year found that people who were rated “heavy” multitaskers were less able to concentrate on a single task and also worse at switching between tasks than those who were “light” multitaskers.

“We have evidence that high multitaskers are worse at managing their short-term memory and worse at switching tasks,” said Clifford Nass, a Stanford University professor who led the study. He’s author of the upcoming book The Man Who Lied to His Laptop: What Machines Teach Us About Human Relationships.

One test asked students to recall the briefly glimpsed orientations of red rectangles surrounded by blue rectangles. The students had to determine whether the red rectangles had shifted in position between different pictures. Those deemed heavy multitaskers struggled to keep track of the red rectangles, because they were having trouble ignoring the blue ones.

To measure task-switching ability, another test presented participants with a letter-and-number combination, like b6 or f9. Subjects were asked to do one of two tasks: One was to hit the left button if they saw an odd number and the right for an even; the other was to press the left for a vowel and the right for a consonant.

They were warned before each letter-number combination appeared what the task was to be, but high multitaskers responded on average half-a-second more slowly when the task was switched.

The Stanford study is hardly undisputed. A deep analysis recently published by Language Log’s Mark Liberman criticized the study for its small sample group: Only 19 of the students who took the tests were deemed “heavy multitaskers.”

He added that there also arises an issue of causality: Were these high multitaskers less able to filter out irrelevant information because their brains were damaged by media multitasking, or are they inclined to engage with a lot of media because they have easily distractable personalities to begin with?

“What’s at stake here is a set of major choices about social policy and personal lifestyle,” Liberman said. “If it’s really true that modern digital multitasking causes significant cognitive disability and even brain damage, as Matt Richtel claims, then many very serious social and individual changes are urgently needed.”

“Before starting down this path, we need better evidence that there’s a real connection between cognitive disability and media multitasking (as opposed to self-reports of media multitasking),” he added. “We need some evidence that the connection exists in representative samples of the population, not just a couple of dozen Stanford undergraduates enrolled in introductory psychology.”

Other research also challenges the conclusions of the Stanford study. A University of Utah study published this year discovered some people who are excellent at multitasking, a class whom researchers dubbed “supertaskers.”

Researchers Jason Watson and David Strayer put 200 college undergrads through a driving simulator, where they were required to “drive” behind a virtual car and brake whenever its brake lights shone, while at the same time performing various tasks, such as memorizing and recalling items in the correct order and solving math problems.

Watson and Strayer analyzed the students based on their speed and accuracy in completing the tasks. The researchers discovered that an extremely small minority — just 2.5 percent (three men and two women) of the subjects — showed absolutely no performance loss when performing dual tasks versus single tasks. In other words, these few individuals excelled at multitasking.

Also in contrast with the results of the Stanford study, the supertaskers were better at task-switching and performing individual tasks than the rest of the group.

The rest of the group, on the other hand, did show overall degraded performance when handling dual tasks compared to a single task, suggesting that the vast majority of people might indeed be inadequate at processing multiple activities. But the discovery of supertaskers argues with the ever-popular notion that human brains are absolutely not meant to multitask, Watson and Strayer say, and it shows that this area of research is still very much unexplored.

“Our results suggest that there are supertaskers in our midst — rare but intriguing individuals with extraordinary multitasking ability,” Watson and Strayer wrote. “These individual differences are important, because they challenge current theory that postulates immutable bottlenecks in dual-task performance.”

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Authors: Brian X. Chen

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