Cell phones, steering wheels and rapidly rotating tires don't go together. At least that's the first thought that comes when someone follows me too closely with drivers seemingly vacantly chatting away on their cell phone. The idea of multi-tasking, doing more than one thing at a time, seems pretty wide spread in these ever-quickening times.
But you know what? There isn't really any such thing as mutitasking. And now we have the pictures to prove it! That is, a recently published research study at Vanderbilt University turns up images of brain activity during multi-tasking that visibly shows a frontal lobe bottleneck. So my frequent shouts of "put down the damn phone and drive" aren't so far off at all.
Researchers René Marois and Paul Dux asked people to do two simple things at the same time, pressing a key on a computer keyboard in response to a verbal cue, and saying their response as they did it. Marois and Dux watched brain activity from an fMRI machine as this was happening, using a technique that let them sample activity over a period of time.
They found a bottleneck in processing. It turns out the mutitasking is really rapid sequential processing instead.
"Neural activity seemed to be delayed for the second task when the two tasks were presented nearly simultaneously – within 300 milliseconds of each other," Marois said. "If individuals have a second or more between tasks, we did not see this delay.
I suppose this is not a big deal when taking part in a university research study. But what about activities when a second is more time than you might have to respond? For example, when driving 65 or so miles per hour?
"While we are driving, we are bombarded with visual information. We might also be talking to passengers or talking on the phone," Marois said. "Our new research offers neurological evidence that the brain cannot effectively do two things at once. People think if they are using a headset with their cell phone while driving they are safe, but they're not because they are still doing two cognitively demanding tasks at once."
Embodiment provides us with the ability to act in real time to the environment around us. But we have to be realistic about what real time means, at least in terms of having a chance to safely perform the activities we need to do. Phoning and driving probably ain't such a good idea. We have the pictures that suggest it. (Hopefully, there isn't a research project where people drive and talk on a cell phone while inside an MRI machine.)
Tags: brain attention psychology