I knew it! Multitasking is for sucks. Focusing on one project at a time and asking one’s brain to dig deep, ponder and problem-solve like the higher-thinking Homo sapiens that you are is smarter, faster, better. I hate the spinning in circles aspect of juggling one’s entire life all day every day.

I lust after graduate study carrels, those delicious-looking closet-sized rooms in libraries reserved only for thesis- and dissertation-writing grad students. Holing up in a tiny, interruption-free room for hours to focus and solve the crap out of all problems on the list that day sounds divine.

Getting off on being alone to think about one item at a time made me L-A-M-E until this vindication-saturated article showed up. Ironically, I found it while multitasking on the Internet, but whatever.

The Decade Google Made You Stupid was written by Douglas Rushkoff, a professor of media studies at The New School University and producer and correspondent for the PBS Frontline Digital Nation project. In it, Rushkoff explains, with scientific evidence to back him up, that the whole Google/multitasking phase of mankind is making our grey matter work less efficiently and is wrecking our analytical processing abilities.

Cliff Nass, director of Stanford University’s Communication Between Humans and Interactive Media Lab (known as CHIMe Lab), has been studying the best multitaskers on the face of the earth: college students. “How do they do it? Do their brains work differently?” He, too, was shocked by his own research. “It turns out, multitaskers are terrible at every aspect of multitasking. They’re terrible at ignoring irrelevant information. They’re terrible at keeping information in their heads nice and neatly organized, and they’re terrible at switching from one task to the other. This shocks us.”

Nass split his subjects into two groups—those who regularly do a lot of media multitasking, and those who don’t. When they took simple tests comparing assortments of shapes, the multitaskers were more easily distracted by random images, and incapable of determining which data was relevant to the task at hand. And just because the multitaskers couldn’t ignore irrelevant data didn’t mean they were better at storing and organizing information. They scored worse on both sorting and memorizing information.

So what does it mean if we multitaskers are actually fooling ourselves into believing we’re competent when we’re not? “If multitasking is hurting their ability to do these fundamental tasks,” Nass explained matter-of-factly, “life becomes difficult. Some of studies show they are worse at analytic reasoning. We are mostly shocked. They think they are great at it.” We’re not just stupid and vulnerable online—we simultaneously think we’re invincible. And that attitude, new brain research shows, has massive carryover into real life.

I’m going to go out on a limb and say the increased dumbing down of the human race can’t be good for anyone.

Posted by Alexa Harrington

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