Is multitasking good or bad?

Hello Steemians, Hope you are all wonderful. Today I was traveling my way home from the office. Suddenly this question came to my mind. I suddenly realized that it was as if I was multitasking when I was riding the bike. Some of my sense organs were heavily involved in this multitasking activity.

• Hands and Legs - Riding the bike
• Ears - Listening to a song
• Mouth - Singing the song
• Eyes - Observing activities on the road
• Nose - Breathing (We don’t even consider this as an activity as we are doing it all the time. But it definitely a task that needs consideration)
• Mind - Had lots of random thoughts (Maybe thinking about my next topic to write on Steemit)

Oh my god, did I really do all the above when I was riding my bike? It is awesome. I actually wanted to find out if it was really awesome and good to be a multitasker. That's when I came up with an idea of writing this article. I also realized that when there comes a situation where I had to hit the break and take a bend cautiously, my mouth automatically stops singing or slows down and it again resumes when everything is set and I'm again back to a smooth road. I feel during those situations the resources that are spread across all the sense organs are focused on the necessary thing and then again goes back to what they were doing initially. Today throughout my journey I was observing this and was amazed by all these things. I thought why not explore in detail on this topic and share the knowledge with you guys. Come let's jump in.

Image Source - CC0 License

What is multitasking?

Before we get into details on whether it is good or bad, it is very important to first understand what multitasking is all about. Let's just start with basics. Multi-tasking is nothing but doing more than one task at the same time. If you search for a definition online, you will first have to specify clearly whether it is human multitasking or computer multitasking, to be able to get the desired answer that you are looking for. For this article, we will completely ignore the computer multitasking and just focus only on human multitasking. There were experimental designs made by psychologists to understand more about human multitasking. [1]. PRP (psychological refractory period) effect was used as the simplest method to study the responses given by people, to two stimuli. It was identified that the second stimuli received a slower response compared to that of the first one. Let us now understand in detail about PRP.

Psychological Refractory Period

When the response to the first stimuli is still being processed, when there is a request for the second stimuli, the response to the second stimuli will be significantly slower. This period of time is known as Psychological Refractory Period or PRP. There are many areas which can be explored in detail with PRP where a multitasking is involved. The response time is greatly affected if an individual is exposed to divided attention.

Image Source - CC0 License

Model of the central bottleneck accounting for the psychological refractory period. Execution of one task requires three stages: Stage 1 entails the analysis of the perceptual characteristics of the stimulus, Stage 2 entails a decision about what the task-set requires, Stage 3 is the execution of the actual response. Shaded stages cannot overlap, but if they do, for example when the time intervening between the two tasks (SOA) is short, the one that has priority (i.e., the first task) will delay (SLACK) the execution of the second. This phenomenon is known as the psychological refractory period.

Some of the below factors were also identified and studied in detail to understand more about multitasking. PRP paradigm design was used by various researchers by relating with psychology to get more insight. The outcome of the research provided good details on how PRP delay created a negative impact. Some of these factors are as follows:

• Personality and intelligence - The PRP experiment was conducted on a different set of people and it was identified that personality and intelligence of a person were not affecting PRP. [2]
• Language - PRP can have an effect on language areas such as reading aloud and grammar part. [3]
• Driving - Complicated tasks like driving are also affected by PRP. Participants in a study were made to do multiple things during driving and their response had a significant impact and effect on PRP. [4]
• Alcohol and caffeine - Speed, accuracy and performance in the tasks are greatly affected by alcohol and caffeine. Losing focus on the things being done can have a great impact on PRP. [5]
• Aging - As people get older, the PRP effect can be evidently seen. It is also believed that people who are used to multitasking find it advantageous after aging. During the study comparisons were made between young and old adults and outcome was noted. [6]

Multitasking - A skill or a defect

Some people see multitasking as a skill because they are able to do multiple activities at the same time. Thought it looks like a skill, there is a high possibility of errors during multitasking and there are many studies and researchers explain why it is not a skill. Experts say that multitasking can lead to insufficient attention on a particular task thus creating confusions or error in the tasks. It may not be right to directly declare it as a defect but studies say that continuous practice of multitasking can lead to defects. Some scholars even argue that multitasking is a mere time waste and nothing more than that. Just above this paragraph, we saw in detail how PRP delay can happen during multitasking. An article from Forbes [7] says that multitasking can damage the brain and even career. If we check the functional aspects of the brain, it can be seen that different part of the brain is responsible for different things that we do. When describing the functional areas of the brain, we will be able to categorize areas of the brain dominant on a particular task. The below image shows the functional areas of our human brain.

Image Source - CC0 License

Multitasking may not be very comfortable all the time. When a person is doing multitasking the efficiency and performance of the task are highly affected. It is because of the fact that the design of our brain is in such a way to do just one task at a time. Even if you push your brain to do multiple tasks at a time, the capacity of the brain can be challenged and the task may not be completed successfully due to unorganized resource allocation. There is also a high possibility that if a person continuously tries to multitask, the IQ can be greatly affected. Next challenge comes in organizing the thoughts. When multitasking is initiated, brain struggles in organizing the thoughts and some tasks can get low resources from brain affecting the quality of the outcome. Some effects of multitasking may not be evident immediately and may be evident only in long-term. Researchers say that the brain is dumbed down during multitasking. [8]

Image Source - CC0 License

Conclusion

From all the researchers and studies described above, it is evident that multitasking can have both immediate and long-term effect on the performance of the brain. In some cases as mentioned above, the IQ of a person is also greatly affected by multitasking. To summarize multitasking can lead to the following:

• Waste of time
• Damage brain capacity in short-term or long-term
• Quality of the work will be affected
• IQ of the person will be affected
• Difficulty in organizing thoughts

If the focus is given to one task at a time, the time taken to complete a task can be very less compared to multitasking and you will also have lots of items covered in less time. Difficulty and distractions can also be avoided if the focus is more on just one task. Scheduling your tasks and prioritizing the work can be very helpful in avoiding multitasking.

Please share your views and suggestions on this topic in the comments.

References: [1], [2], [3], [4], [5], [6], [7], [8]

Follow @SteemSTEM team members to read more such interesting articles. Browse more articles in #steemSTEM tag or chat live with SteemSTEM members in discord.