PASSAGE 2.
In modern times, hurry, bustle, and agitation are a regular way of life for many people — unfortunately so much so that we have embraced a word that describes our efforts to respond to the many pressing demands on our time: multitasking. Used for decades to describe the parallel processing abilities of computers, multitasking is now shorthand for the human attempt to do simultaneously as many things as possible, as quickly as possible, preferably marshalling the power of as many technologies as possible.
To better understand the multitasking phenomenon, neurologists and psychologists have studied the workings of the brain. In 1999, Jordan Grafman used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scans to determine that when people engage in ‘task-switching’ — that is, multitasking behaviour — the flow of blood increases to a region of the frontal cortex called Brodmann area 10. (The flow of blood to particular regions of the brain is taken as an indication of activity in those regions.) ‘This is presumably the last part of the brain to evolve, the most mysterious and exciting part,’ Grafman said.
This fact is also what makes multitasking a poor long-term strategy for learning. Other studies, such as those performed by psychologist René Marois, have used fMRI to demonstrate the brain’s response to handling multiple tasks. Marois found evidence of a ‘response selection bottleneck’ that occurs when the brain is forced to respond to several stimuli at once. As a result, task-switching leads to time lost as the brain determines which task to perform.
Psychologist David Meyer believes that rather than a bottleneck in the brain, a process of ‘adaptive executive control’ takes place, which ‘schedules task processes appropriately to obey instructions about their relative priorities and serial order’, as he described to the New Scientist. Unlike many other researchers who study multitasking, Meyer is optimistic that, with training, the brain can learn to task-switch more effectively, and there is some evidence that certain simple tasks are amenable to such practice.
(Adapted from Formula)
