Biology professor warns of dangers of multitasking

If you’re doing something else while reading this, Professor Barbara Christie-Pope would like you to stop. Christie-Pope, a biology professor at Cornell College who specializes in neuroscience, is in total agreement with the authors of a recent Stanford University study who suggest not only is multitasking ineffective, it might be bad for your brain.

The study looked at the memory and cognitive functions of people who multitask often versus those who don’t. The low multitaskers outscored the high multitaskers on every test. That outcome doesn’t surprise Christie-Pope at all. On the first day of the Fundamentals of Neuroscience course she taught during Block 2, she warned her students about the myth of multitasking, as she calls it, and the associated problems.

“The brain isn’t set up to do parallel tasks,” she said. Instead, it works most effectively when people start a task, finish it, and switch to a new task. That switch takes time, and people who multitask switch back and forth constantly, with the end result that tasks take longer to complete and aren’t necessarily done as well, either.

In some ways, Christie-Pope’s students are already ahead of the game, because of Cornell College’s One Course At A Time curriculum. Students take one course for three and a half weeks, as opposed to semester systems where they often take four or more courses at a time. The One Course calendar helps students learn the subject they’re studying more effectively, she said.

“Taking one course allows us to focus our attention on one thing,” she said. “We not only learn that topic better, we retain it better.”

Even still, the message that multitasking is bad can be a hard one for students to take, she said. They say they can’t study without listening to music, and that they multitask all the time. But the question, Christie-Pope said, is how well do you do when you’re multitasking?

“I don’t know if I’ve changed their minds, but at least I’ve put out the information about multitasking and task switching,” she said.

Students aren’t the only ones who have a hard time seeing the possible damage multitasking can cause, Christie-Pope said. Society seems to expect people to do so, and plenty of job listings even ask for someone who can multitask.

“My answer to that is: You want someone who’s not going to do good work?’” she said.