It seems like today, the more things you can do at once, the better.
I’m watching Netflix, while eating sushi and writing emails.
Multitasking!
But research keeps telling us that most people can’t perform two or more attention-demanding
tasks at the same time, without doing one of those tasks badly.
And instead of truly multitasking, we often just switch between two or more tasks rapidly,
which is known as task-switching.
Research suggests there’s a switch-cost – people tend to slow down when moving from
one task to another, due to the time it takes the brain to realign to the “new” task.
Scientists and the media also point to anecdotal evidence: if we are walking, we slow down
when we look at our phones; if we are driving, we turn down the radio when looking for our
turn; and if we are typing an email, we often lose track of what we are saying on the phone.
It’s often claimed that we can’t multitask, unless the actions or processes are so automatic
to us that they don’t require any thought: like tying a shoe while talking about the
weather.
Unless, that is, you’re a supertasker.
They’re people who can actually multitask, they can perform tasks at the same time and
do them well.
Take Lauren Moore, who holds the record for “The fastest time to say the first 100 digits
of Pi while twisting a rubik’s cube and balancing 15 books on her head” on YouTube
she just goes by booksonmyhead, or David Babcock’s record for knitting the longest scarf while
running.
They’re pros at doing somewhat odd things simultaneously.
Supertaskers seem to have the perfect mix of attention, memory and concentration.
And in a 2010 study, researchers found that 2.5% of their participants were supertaskers.
On a larger scale, that could be quite a lot of people!
Or, quite a lot of you!
The dual-task n-back is a task some studies have used to measure supertasking ability.
And I want you to try it.
In the task, you have to keep track of the changing positions of a blue square and at
the same time listen to a stream of letters played over headphones.
Then you have to indicate when the square’s position matches the position it was in three
goes earlier, or when the letter matches the letter that was spoken three times earlier.
So in this case, try clicking or tapping on this video when you see the blue square appear
in the same spot as it was three turns earlier, or when you hear the same letter said as it
was three turns earlier.
You should have paused the video twice, and that's a tiny taste of what the n-back is
like.
It was immediately obvious to me that I’m not a supertasker because my brain can’t
even.
And supertasking aside, lots of studies have found evidence that groups of people can multitask.
In one, elderly adults were asked to cycle on a stationary bike while completing increasingly
difficult tasks, like repeating a list of numbers in reverse order.
Completing those cognitive tasks actually resulted in the participants cycling faster
than they were when they weren’t multitasking.
Another study found when participants were given two letter matching tasks at the same
time, each hemisphere of the medial frontal cortex processed one of those tasks independently
of the other.
But when a third task was added, participants behaved almost as if they forgot one of the
3 tasks, and they performed much worse overall.
The thing is, we can’t definitively say that people can or can’t multitask.
Multitasking is an ability – there’s a spectrum from people who are better at single
tasks, to task-switchers, to great supertaskers.
If you try and do multiple challenging things all at once, yes, you’ll probably do worse
in all of them!
But if you focus on learning a process inside and out, you could probably do it while you
do something else.
Remember David Babcock?
He took up running and knitting at about the same time, so he had lots of practice doing
them together.
So, how many things can you do at once?
And one more thing guys!
I have an announcement, which is in the form of a person.
This is Shini!
Who's hosting Crash Course Physics.
What can we look forward to in Crash Course Physics?
So all the things that are particularly scary about physics, like vectors, calculus, integrals,
remember those days?
Not really!
It was scary, but we make it really fun and we explain the concepts and it's fun!
Check it out.
Awesome.
I think I need to check it out and brush up on my physics!
I'll put a link down here so go and check out Crash Course Physics and you can learn
lots of awesome things with Shini.
Thanks for watching!