Unafam - Accueil. Haptonomie, préparation à l'accouchement mais pas seulement... Is multi-tasking bad for your brain? Experts reveal the hidden perils of juggling too many jobs. By John Naish Updated: 09:11 GMT, 11 August 2009 Multi-tasking has rapidly taken over our lives, to the point where we look woefully lax if we’re doing just one thing at a time. We think nothing of texting while also watching television, surfing the internet and talking to our family. Indeed, drug companies are busy developing products to enhance our mental efficiency so that we can do even more.
Overload: Ironically, doing many things at once can make us less efficient But scientists are discovering that today’s mania for cramming everything in at once is creating a perilous cocktail of brain problems, from severe stress and rage in adults to learning problems and autism-like behaviour in children. It also, ironically, often makes us less efficient. Advances in medical-scanning technology mean we can now watch what happens in the brain when people try to perform more than one complex task at a time. In other words, our brains have to skitter to and fro inefficiently between tasks. Multitasking drains brain. By Sandra Blakeslee NEW YORK TIMES NEWS SERVICE July 31, 2001 Scientists have bad news for people who think they can deftly drive a car while gabbing on a cell phone.
The first study using magnetic resonance images of brain activity to compare what happens in people's heads when they do one complex task, as opposed to two tasks at a time, reveals a disquieting fact: The brain appears to have a finite amount of space for tasks requiring attention. When people try to drive in heavy traffic and talk, researchers say, brain activity does not double. It decreases. People performing two demanding tasks simultaneously do neither one as well as they do each one alone. The study, published in tomorrow's issue of the journal NeuroImage, was led by Marcel Just, a psychology professor and co-director of the Center for Cognitive Brain Imaging at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.
The active regions are measured in voxels, volumes of brain tissue about the size of a grain of rice.