Studies to show that Multi Tasking is Counter Productive

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See the following scenarios:

1. You are sending text messages or emails while you are in meeting.
2. You are a busy computer geek and work on computer screens while taking a call
3. Conducting some intimate personal communication during speaking to a congressmen
4. You are 17, and you watch TV, whilst texting, downloading music for the iPod and catching up with things on Facebook. All of them together.

What are all of these above mentioned things? These are some scenarios of multitasking, which we witness almost everyday everywhere. It is almost de rigueur in current society it is on the rise. Is it good, let us see some of the studies which suggest something interesting and different.

1. At the University of California – Los Angeles, the scientists conducted an experiment in which they asked people to sort all the index cards in a proper order, while listening to specific tones within some random sounds. The brain reacted to complete these activities and shifted its emphasis from hippocampus, (part of brain which looks after facts storage and recall), to the striatum (place to handle repetitive tasks). The index cards were sorted but the people had difficulty in recalling what they have sorted.
   
   This study showed that if someone is trying to take information from multiple sources, he is bound to skimming and missing crucial details.
   
   
2. There is another research which suggested some alarming results. It shows that multi-tasking raises the stress hormones including cortisol and adrenaline. This particularly raises the friction in our brain and wears the system down.
    
3. University of Michigan experiments revealed that for clearly shown that for any types of tasks, people just lost time while switching their tasks. This time lost is increased with the complexity of the task performed simultaneously. The human the mind and brain were not designed for heavy-duty multitasking.
   
   Joshua Rubinstein, Jeffrey Evans, and David Meyer, all PhD researchers at the University found that even if the task switch costs  seems small, they can add up to create large differences. The message is clear. The hidden costs of multitasking may help you to select the ways to increase efficiency – by avoiding multitasking for complex tasks.
   

Final words on Multitasking

All the above mentioned studies are shown here to present the credibility of the facts found, across different universities. The message within all of them is - resist the doing several things at once will not save time. It causes attention deficit and important things will be missed.