Not only do smartphones provide unprecedented access to information, they provide unprecedented opportunities to multitask. Any activity can be accompanied by music, selfies or social media updates. Of course, some people pick poor times to tweet or text, and lawmakers have stepped in. Forty-eight stateshave banned texting while driving. In Honolulu, it’s More
Earlier this summer, our team had the opportunity to join the Association for Psychological Science’s annual conference in San Francisco. And while we were there, we got to talk to a few psychologists about the application of their research. In our final episode of the series is a discussion on More
As I type this, my iPhone is tucked away inside my desk drawer under lock and key. It’s been there all day, completely out of sight. I’m slightly anxious about the notifications I might be missing, but only slightly; it’s a manageable level that’s not distracting. Yes, it’s a little More
You’ve probably heard by now that trying to multitask is a terrible idea. One main reason is that our neural wiring does not allow us to split our attention: when we try to attend to two things at once, all we actually do is switch our focus back and forth More
A series of experiments suggests that merely believing that we’re multitasking may boost our performance by making us more engaged in the tasks at hand. More
Why is an organ as powerful as the human brain so bad at multitasking? APS William James Fellow Jonathan D. Cohen is generating new answers to that question. More
