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Even though the study did not revolve around interruptions from cellphones or other gadgets, one researcher said the results provide a “clear extrapolation” to the impact of a stream of incoming rings and buzzes. “Technology provides so much more of an interference than what we did here,” said the researcher, Dr. Adam Gazzaley, a neurologist at the University of California at San Francisco. Indeed, the paper argues that studies like this are becoming increasingly important as aging adults spend more time in a work force with heavy multitasking demands.

the research shows instead is a “diminished ability” to reactivate the networks involved in the initial task.

A growing body of research shows that juggling many tasks, as so many people do in this technological era, can divide attention and hurt learning and performance. Does it also hinder short-term memory?

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

keeping up several e-mail and instant message conversations at once, text messaging while watching television and jumping from one website to another while plowing through homework assignments.

the researchers realized those heavy media multitaskers are paying a big mental price

Everything distracts them

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 In a recent unpublished study, he and his colleagues found that chronic media multitaskers—people who spent several hours a day juggling multiple screen tasks—performed worse than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.

The process of switching back immediately to a task you've just performed, as many multitaskers try to do, takes longer than switching after a bit more time has passed, say findings published last fall by researchers from the National Institute of Mental Health. The reason is that the brain has to overcome "inhibitions" it imposed on itself to stop doing the first task in the first place; it takes time, in effect, to take off the brakes. If you wait several seconds longer before switching tasks, the obstacles imposed by that shutting-off process are reduced.Managing two mental tasks at once reduces the brainpower available for either task, according to a study published in the journal NeuroImage. Marcel Just of Carnegie Mellon University asked subjects to listen to sentences while comparing two rotating objects. Even though these activities engage two different parts of the brain, the resources available for processing visual input dropped 29% if the subject was trying to listen at the same time. The brain activation for listening dropped 53% if the person was trying to process visual input at the same time."It doesn't mean you can't do several things at the same time," says Dr. Just, co-director of the university's Center for Cognitive Brain Imaging. "But we're kidding ourselves if we think we can do so without cost."

And when people started a third task, one of the original goals disappeared from their brains,