“You’re being flooded with too much information and you can’t selectively filter out quickly which is important and which is not important,” says Goodman. “It only takes a fraction of a second for you to take your eyes off the road and miss the guy making a right-hand turn into your lane.”
CNN ran a story recently on the possibility of danger from trying to multitask. I found the embedded ads for “health.com” to be ridiculous and a bad experiment. But the article should be of some interest to those of us who carry smart phones, have 10 windows open on our laptops, and sometimes sit staring at our desks wondering what’s next.
Aston-Jones says that it’s unclear if some people are drawn to multitasking because that’s the way their brain works, or if multitasking itself causes changes in the brain. And it’s not clear if the brain changes caused by switching attention from YouTube to Google to Twitter and then back to your iPhone — if that is what is occurring — are easily reversed.