How multitasking affects your brain?

On the laptop is open 20 tabs, and you leap from one to another, having time to read two sentences. At the same time throws remarks in chat, chew a sandwich and listen to your favorite track. It seems that you have time a lot, but in fact it is a very negative effect on brain activity.

Stanford professor Clifford Nass found serious reasons unlearn multitasking. Based on the study, he says, the more tasks you are performing at a time, the less you will be able to learn or remember. You do not work as it should concentrate on any matter.

Why it is necessary to engage with multi-tasking?

The news can lead as an example. If the speaker says something, and below flows with news about the line Football or the recent tragedies, you will be distracted and will likely not remember what broadcast from the screen. Why? Because the more tasks you perform, the more difficult the brain to filter unnecessary information.

In an interview with National Public Radio, Professor Nass told me that a person suffering from multi-tasking is not capable of:

1. Focus and filter out unnecessary. Professor tested the performance of two groups: the first people at all times perform several tasks at a time, in the second case it is extremely rare. According to the Nass, the difference in their abilities was huge.
   

   People accustomed to multitasking, could not weed out irrelevant information. Their memory is working much worse, and they have all the time distracted.

2. Anything do well. Solving even a single task, such people employ a significantly larger part of the brain than is actually needed, and it totally does not help them. When the researchers asked participants to perform multiple actions at the same time, they do not have coped with any one. Their mental and cognitive abilities have been violated.

Multitasking eats into the brain

When you have the whole day to perform multiple tasks at the same time, this bad habit directly It affects the brain and changing the ways in which information passes. After that keep the attention becomes impossible.

If you are at all times to perform multiple tasks, the brain becomes surprisingly plastic and adapted to a new way of thinking. To the old back will not be easy, even if you want it. The fact that the brain was plastic, but it is not easy to return to the previous form.

How does this affect your work?

In his blog, James O'Toole wrote about the dangers of multitasking. He called it the consequences are as varied as there are disgusting.

Multitasking makes you rude and unethical. Rather than focus on the person who sits opposite, you send a message, or doing something else, and it's really annoying.

Multitasking makes it difficult to control. The more action, the harder it is to sort information (think about simultaneous news feed).

Multitasking reduces creativity. To find a creative solution, you need to concentrate, and you can not concentrate on anything specific.