People's Ability To Multitask Well

Psychology, what do we know about the mind? In my project, I will determine if people can actually pay attention to two things at once. To expand my knowledge, I must start at understanding what exactly multitasking is. In a nutshell, multitasking is the act of doing multiple things at once. People are constantly trying to accomplish as much as possible in short amounts of time which then results in multitasking. In hopes that we complete tasks quicker, our mind divides our attention among the task which is rarely more effective. I believe that it IS possible to do two things at once however when the attention is divided, you’re more prone to making mistakes and in the long run, it takes you longer to complete the tasks.

When you multitask, it is believed that you are never actually multitasking. Your brain cannot physically pay attention to two things at once. What actually happens is your brain is switching attention from one thing to another. Since it happens in about one-tenth of a second, you don’t actually notice it happening. This leaves you to believe you are multitasking.

Many of us find ourselves thinking we are multitasking because we have learned to “pay attention” to what is going on in front of us, while either responding to a text message on our phone or clicking on a notification of a social media account. Research of cognitive science, conducted over the time span of over half-century done by “Harvard Business Review” tells us that “multitaskers do less and miss information.” If I can be honest, I myself have proven this to be factual. Many times I have been in a group of friends or in the car carrying on a conversation with those around me when my phone notifies me of a message. I decide to continue engaging in conversation and also respond to the message on my phone. As I am typing, I look up to respond and suddenly realize I have no clue what the last person just said. Embarrassed to respond to what I believed the conversation was about, I have to ask them to repeat what was just said. I definitely missed the information.

Their research goes on to say that “multitasking does not exist”. Although our brains like to think it is doing several things at once, instead it switches tasks. The brain chooses, depending on our decision, which information to process. An example they gave was if a person is talking on the phone and working on the computer, they hear less of what is being said on the phone as the visual cortex takes over what is being done on the computer.

In the past, there have been multiple science projects done on this same subject. An example would be an experiment that was done by Julie A. Fukunaga in 2010 for the California State Science Fair. The title of her project was ‘The Effects of Multitasking on Human Memory. To begin, she designed a website with a few different experiments. Using this, she tested 76 volunteers ranging from youth to elderly. She had them do various activities involving multitasking and gave them a minute and thirty seconds to memorize 15 items. Two of the experiments involved multitasking and the other one did not. She then counted how many items were memorized and recorded them between the different age groups. The task that did not require multitasking was successful with most volunteers memorizing all 15 objects. When the second and third experiments came along, the results dropped by 30%. By the end of the project, she then concluded, that they were able to memorize items better when they were not multitasking. This proves my hypothesis that multitasking is not actually a thing because, in reality, it’s just distracting your brain with different tasks.