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Multitasking reduces brain productivity

18.05.2017

Multitasking is considered a big plus - of course, because a person who is able to simultaneously talk on the phone, write e-mail and compose, say, some kind of report, seems to us a more productive worker than one who will do everything separately.

Researchers at Aalto University have found that tackling too many tasks at once makes our brains less efficient.

The participants in the experiment were required to watch several fragments from "Star Wars", "Indiana Jones" and "James Bond". In one case, all the fragments were six and a half minutes long and they went one after another, that is, a person first watched six and a half minutes about Bond, then immediately about Indiana Jones, and then a piece from Star Wars.

In another case, the same movie clips were cut into pieces of fifty seconds, and they had to be watched interspersed, that is, for example, fifty seconds from Star Wars followed by fifty seconds of Indiana Jones, then Star Wars returned, then Bond appeared. - and so on until all six and a half minutes of each film are watched in full.

When we watch a movie, read, write, and generally engage in more or less complex mental activity, then information chains are constantly being formed in our heads: if we watch a movie, then our brain adds another to one event, if we write a message to someone , then the words and thoughts that we wrote earlier are combined into a single sequence.

Obviously, understanding the material, understanding what you are doing, depends on how the mind processes the sequence of events. The authors of the work were interested in what would happen in the brain when presented with such a salad of different, unrelated stories.

The brain function of those who watched the movie was assessed using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). As a result, we managed to find out that during the leapfrog of fifty-second segments, the activity of those brain zones that are responsible for the fusion of information pieces into a single whole fell.

On the contrary, if all three excerpts from different films were watched at once in their entirety, without being distracted, then the same brain areas worked more actively. It can be assumed that the low activity of the areas responsible for the formation of a holistic information picture affected cognitive functions.

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