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He said our brains are not actually physically capable of handling multiple active tasks at the same time. Active tasks require attention. He said there are two types of multitasking: switch-tasking and background-tasking.

“Background tasking is where something mindless or mundane is happening in the background, that would be like running on the treadmill while you’re watching TV,” Crenshaw said. “That’s not really multitasking.”

He said in contrast, switch-tasking involves more active tasks like driving while talking on the cell phone or surfing the Internet while listening to a lecture. When we do two active tasks simultaneously, Crenshaw said, our brain under-performs because it is actually switching rapidly between tasks. Crenshaw said every switch incurs a switching cost, which equals lost time and effort

Nass is skeptical. In a recent unpublished study, he and his colleagues found that chronic media multitaskers—people who spent several hours a day juggling multiple screen tasks—performed worse than otherwise similar peers on analytic questions drawn from the LSAT. He isn't sure which way the causation runs here: It might be that media multitaskers are hyperdistractible people who always would have done poorly on LSAT questions, even in the pre-Internet era. But he worries that media multitasking might actually be destroying students' capacity for reasoning.

is whether media multitasking is driven by a desire for new information or by an avoidance of existing information. Are people in these settings multitasking because the other media are alluring—that is, they're really dying to play Freecell or read Facebook or shop on eBay—or is it just an aversion to the task at hand?"

But those scholars also became intrigued by the range of individual variation they found. Some people seemed to be consistently better than others at concentrating amid distraction. At the same time, there were no superstars: Beyond a fairly low level of multitasking, everyone's performance breaks down. People can walk and chew gum at the same time, but not walk, chew gum, play Frisbee, and solve calculus problems.

We find that students engage in substantial multitasking behavior with their laptops and have non course-related software applications open and active about 42% of the time.

Although many students may believe they can switch back and forth between different tasks with no serious consequences to their academic performance, multitasking has been shown to dramaticaUy increase the number of memory errors and the processing time required to "learn" topics that involve a significant cognitive load

Although many students may believe they can switch back and forth between different tasks with no serious consequences to their academic performance,

When we talk about multitasking, we are really talking about attention: the art of paying attention, the ability to shift our attention, and, more broadly, to exercise judgment about what objects are worthy of our attention.

When people do their work only in the “interstices of their mind-wandering,”

their culture may gain in information, but it will surely weaken in wisdom.