Multitasking More Dangerous than Cannabis? Check the Research
A study conducted at the University of London found that multitasking or someone's ability to do more than one thing at a time, regularly, like checking your phone while in a meeting, is more dangerous to IQ or your intelligence than from the effects of smoking marijuana.
In fact, multitasking can cause brain damage. However, indeed there is no scientific certainty related to the relationship between multitasking with one's intelligence level.
There are several studies related to multitasking, and this is just as bad as imagined. An Australian researcher, dr. Julia Irwin, recommends stopping the app you're using, turning off your phone and ignoring e-mail while you're concentrating on one task at a time. According to him, at the end of the day you will become much more productive.
"If you send an e-mail while doing other work, the weakness is that it will draw your attention from one task to another, breaking the brain's focus in a second, this is called a post-refractory pause," said Irwin. also a senior lecturer in psychology at Macquarine University.
Refractory or immune stimulation is a condition when the neural cell membrane is insensitive to stimuli, so the stimulus given to it can not trigger an impulse, "Over time this gap increases, possibly causing your mind to not work / sensitive to stimuli for some minute."
Dr. Irwin says that such a gap in the brain can be dangerous when you do something very important. Like watching a kid in a playground. "If, in the interval, your child is wobbling on his bike, this is clearly a concern, you are not focusing on such important things."
Another aspect is, if you're really focused on writing something then your attention is distracted by the e-mail you just entered. There are some findings, according to Irwin, which shows that when your attention is distracted from previous activities, it can take up to 15 minutes for you to regain the same level of focus.
The results of the actual study, by the Institute of Psychiatry in London involving more than 1000 workers as research publicity, did see IQ changes with multitasking activity with electronic media, but this did not affect female employees at all. In male employees it appears to lower IQ by about 10 points, but only during multitasking activities occur.
Mary Courage of Memorial University in Newfoundland has shown that multitasking may not have a negative impact on the capacity of a child's attention, and may even have an advantage if managed properly. Although performance with complicated work is almost always bad when attention is shared, with practice and proper use of strategies, the loss of multitasking can be minimized.
One of the reasons why multitasking is not as bad as you might suspect is that brain performance will change with practice, and exercise controlling attention will make you better. A study from the University of Madrid found that multitasking ability has a close relationship with memory capacity and work intelligence. This suggests that they have the same nerve mechanisms.
Your ability to hold and use information in a short period of time will affect almost everything you do. This will tell you how well you've set your focus and attention to phone calls and e-mail simultaneously. This mechanism is also capable of showing your IQ score.
However, multitasking activities have risks. Stanford researchers have found that people who work in the media and do multitasking, such as regularly checking many news and entertainment sources at once, have a really bad performance when switching from one task to another.
This is very surprising, since media workers are individuals with the most task or activity shift. Other research shows that when we are accustomed to receiving information from many places at once, we lose some of the ability to distract when we need it.
Then, what should be done?
Irwin's own research in Australia concludes clearly that in today's multitasking world, people have to turn off their devices when doing something that deserves their full attention.
Take control of the information you receive, because more is not always better. However, that does not mean you should not do multitasking activities. Sometimes, you need to do many things at once.