Academics

Surprising Reasons Why Multitasking is Bad for Your Brain, Says Neuroscientist

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Multitasking is not something that will make anyone productive and efficient as many have observed for years and recent research suggest that multitasking can even be more harmful to the brain and affect its prime performance.

According to Earl Miller, an MIT neuroscientist, Earl Miller, multitasking does not really help save time and make people productive. In fact, it works the other way around regardless of your gender.

A Stanford University study suggest that multitasking can make a person less productive because people can only pay attention to one thing at a time. And when there's plenty of information to absorb at once, it becomes very difficult for people to pay attention and retain information.

Earl Miller supports this study and explained that the human brain works the same way like a camera with wide-angle lens. "When we toggle between tasks, the process often feels seamless - but in reality, it requires a series of small shifts."

He also added that these small shifts or interruptions only cause you to waste time and increase your chances of committing mistakes with the things you are trying to juggle at a certain moment. In reality, you are not doing multiple things at once, your brain quickly pauses or stops from doing a task then switches to another before it goes back to the first one.

It takes a little while before your brain can get back on track because it requires more energy to be able to redeem its focus, so the moment you get distracted, you are also losing minutes of your precious time.

And for the people who feel like they are actually good at multitasking, they actually just don't have the ability to filter out distractions which has a negative effect on their productivity, according to the Stanford University research.

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