4 Negative Impacts of Multitasking on Brain

Attention multi-taskers! Here’s a bad news for you all. Now if you are busy with your phone, texting your friends and streaming a TV show online and reading this article, then you need to focus on one task right now. Most people think that, multitasking is really a special skill, getting multiple things done at a single time. So, after reading this, you people gonna realize that it’s actually not. Multitasking has many negative impacts on our brain according to the research of Stanford University. The standard recommendation is better to finish one task before moving on to another. Multitasking minimizes your efficiency and performance quality because your brain can only focus on one thing at a single time. And when you try to do two things at a time, your brain runs out of the capacity to perform both tasks successfully. Let’s focus closely on the negative impacts of multitasking on our brain.

1. Brain Damage

Multitasking causes permanent cognitive impairment to the brain. According to the study at the University of Sussex in the UK says that high multitaskers have less brain density in the anterior cingulate cortex, which is a region responsible for understanding as well as psychological and emotional control. However, further researches are also going on to determine if multitasking physically damages the brain or our existing brain damage predisposes people to multitask. But, it’s distinctly clear that multitasking has got negative impacts on brain occurring at the level of brain structure.

2. Minimizes IQ

Research says that multitasking not only slows you down but also lowers your IQ. According to the study at University of London found that participants who were multitasking during their cognitive tasks realized that IQ score lessens. IQ drops to 15 points for multitasking men minimized their scores to the average level of an 8-year-old child. So, guys next time when you write your boss an email during a meeting, do remember that your psychological capacity is being reduced similar to a 8-year-old kid.

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3. Multitasking Learning

Multitasking is not a good habit in which you will want to indulge. It clearly slows you down and decreases the quality of your work productivity. Multitasking not only causes brain damage, also reduces your concentration and attention. Multitasking in official meetings and other social interactions pinpoints low Self and Social Awareness, affecting emotional intelligence (EQ) skills that are crucial to success at work. If multitasking does actual damage the anterior cingulate cortex which is the key brain region for EQ as recent research studies says it lowers your EQ in the process.

4. Memory Loss

Our brain is somewhat similar to a computer with a CPU. When you are reading this article, you might have multiple tabs opened on your browser and your Skype and Facebook messenger would be blinking, hence your computer is on multitasking mode. When your computer does multiple functions, more often it gets hang, similarly multiple tasking can shut down our brain for a specific period of time affecting our memory, specifically the posterior lateral prefrontal cortex region of our brain. Prolonged multitasking could lead to short term memory loss.

Multitasking is sometimes possible up to two works at a time, but it does dilute our focus. So every time you multitask, remember you aren’t just damaging your performance in the moment, but also damaging an area of your brain that’s too essential for your future success at work.

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