Multi-Tasking: A Sure-Fire Way to Frustrate Yourself.

Think you can juggle more than one task at a time?

Bet you can't.

For those who think they can juggle several tasks at once with ease, new research from France suggests that humans may not be able to perform more than two complicated jobs at one time.

That doesn't mean you can't walk and chew gum simultaneously, but it probably means you can't talk about astrophysics on the phone while doing your taxes. And you definitely can't add solving calculus equations to the mix, at least if you want to perform any of these tasks with some proficiency.

Researcher posit from this study that the average person can only handle two things at once, but they're cognitively demanding tasks. The reason: The human brain has two lobes that divide the responsibility equally when two tasks are being carried out at the same time.

Attempting more than two tasks overwhelms the capacity of the brain's tasking function. Dual-tasking is doable, however, as normal human cognition is dual in it's native state, which can explain why people are comfortable whent presented with two choices and have difficulties in multiple choices [people can easily switch back and forth between two options before making a decision, but not across three alternatives].

For instance: "Honey what movie should I rent tonight?"  After your brain-dead husband wipes up the drool on his lip, he'll say, "Whatever you think."  The thought of making decision from too many choices is overwhelming--particularly if he's in the middle of staring at the TV. 

None-the-less... forgive my digression.

The results could eventually have some real-world applications.

Frontal lobe function (the area associated with decision making) is the most fragile human brain function, and is altered in aging and impaired in most neuropsychiatric diseases [schizophrenia, autism, dementia, depression.  Therefore, understanding how the frontal lobe function works is fundamental to understanding cognitive aging and the nature of neuropsychiatric mental alterations.

The work could also have important practical applications to areas such as traffic safety [e.g., air traffic control, or driving while using a cell phone], and neurological disorders such as dementia where the ability to multitask is lost, according to researchers.

These authors used functional MRI to study the brains of people while they were performing fairly complicated tasks involving letter sequencing.

In the first scenario, volunteers were asked to alternate between two different tasks. In the second scenario, participants were told to postpone one task while completing the other one.

The most surprising finding was that when volunteers postponed a task, rather than substituting one for another, the two frontal lobes lit up as they focused on the one task.

Introducing a third task increased the error rate.

The inference is that the brain is inherently unable to handle three tasks simultaneously, so the assumption is because we have two hemispheres [of the brain], we are able to do two tasks at the same time.

I don't necessarily buy all of this final conclusion however.  And one shouldn't be limited in their beliefs by this as there are other determinants to performance than just tasking alone.

Prior studies have also suggested that multi-tasking doesn't work.  It's been my own experience that limiting tasks is wise.  However, COMPLETING tasks once started is most important. 

Leaving tasks undone will lead to insanity.  (Almost literally).