William F. Garrity

IN The New York Times--

August 30, 2009

The Mediocre Multitasker

By RUTH PENNEBAKER

Read it and gloat. Last week, researchers at Stanford University published a study showing that the most persistent multitaskers perform badly in a variety of tasks. They don’t focus as well as non-multitaskers. They’re more distractible. They’re weaker at shifting from one task to another and at organizing information. They are, as a matter of fact, worse at multitasking than people who don’t ordinarily multitask.

You know what this means. This means that the people around you -- the husband who’s tapping the computer keys during an important phone conversation with you, the S.U.V. driver with the grande latte and the cellphone, the dinner companion with the roving eye and twitching thumbs -- are not only irritating, they are (let’s not be fainthearted) incompetent.

But, wait. Should it be breaking news that a single person can’t juggle knives and explain quantum physics while polishing off an artichoke?

Breaking news and a shock to the researchers themselves, as it turns out. Originally, the team of researchers, whose findings are published in the Aug. 24 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, were trying to find out what unusual cognitive gifts multitaskers possessed that made them so successful at multitasking.

They’re still looking.

"Multitaskers were just lousy at everything," said Clifford I. Nass, a professor of communication at Stanford and one of the study’s investigators. "It was a complete and total shock to me."

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