We’ve all tried juggling more than one task at a time. From working on several projects simultaneously to driving while listening to music, multitasking has become an integral part of our daily lives. Instinctively, we assume that performing two or more activities concurrently enhances our efficiency and productivity. A look at the multitasking brain, however, suggests quite the opposite.
What Is Multitasking?
Multitasking is performing two or more tasks simultaneously. At least, that’s what we think we’re doing. In reality, however, our brains are simply switching between one task and another. Multitasking is a misnomer, as our brains are not designed to perform more than one task at a time. For instance, if you were scrolling or playing a video game while talking to a friend, you would continuously shift your attention between these two activities rather than attend to both simultaneously. At any given moment, our neurological capacity necessitates that we are only focused on a single task. The speed with which we can switch between tasks or activities gives the illusion that we are performing them simultaneously.
Why Can’t We Multitask?
We can’t multitask due to the limitations of several brain systems responsible for attention and executive control—namely, the frontoparietal control network (FPCN), the dorsal attention network (DAN), and the ventral attention network (VAN). Imagine the FPCN as an office manager inside your brain. The manager’s job is to specify a goal and differentiate between goal-related and irrelevant information.
The DAN is the specialized focus team in your office. It is the source of sustainable goal-oriented attention, which acts as a spotlight for relevant information to the goal delineated by the manager. For instance, the manager could say “We are making a cup of coffee!”. The DAN would then highlight key ingredients in the kitchen such as sugar, coffee beans, or milk. The VAN is the brain’s radar system, which redirects your attention when there are unexpected stimuli. These three networks work together to complete any given task, but their workflow is radically disrupted when they’re juggling several goals at once.
Switching between several tasks, typically known as multitasking, significantly strains our processing power and executive function. The FPCN has a harder time filtering relevant information when it’s continuously switching between several tasks. Most importantly, our spotlight attention, the DAN, can only focus on one thing at a time. When it is pulled in all sorts of different directions, it stops functioning properly. Additionally, the VAN becomes easily distracted and often redirects our attention to information relevant to one task but disruptive to another. When we multitask, we create a chaotic situation where several competing streams of information and goals interfere with the proper interactions and functions of these three brain networks.
Is Multitasking Efficient?
Multitasking is not efficient. While we may think that shuffling several tasks simultaneously is time-saving, there is a price to multitasking that we tend to overlook. When you switch tasks, your brain takes time to reorient itself from one task to another. Psychologist David Meyer identified two distinct stages in this transition known as ‘goal switching’ and ‘rule activation’. ‘Goal switching’ is when your brain stops working on one task and shifts to another. ‘Rule activation’ represents a phase of switching from the necessary rules or conditions associated with the initial task to those of the new one. Together, these two phases can take a significant amount of time. According to Meyer, the cost of switching tasks can amount to 40 percent of one’s productive time.
Multitasking not only compromises our time and increases our stress levels, but also deteriorates the quality of our executive performance. Experiments that compared the performance of people switching between several tasks and those focused on a single task found that the former group inevitably completed their tasks with more errors and inaccuracies. In scientific literature, the negative consequences of working on several tasks are called ‘switch costs’. According to Madore et al., “a switch cost is a reduction in performance accuracy or speed that results from shifting between tasks” (Madore et al., 2019).
Now that you know the cost of multitasking, are you willing to pay the price?
