(Ryan Ritchie/Flickr)
I’m not listening to music as I write this. I don’t listen to music when I do other homework, either. I’m in what seems to be one of the shrinking groups of students in the United States today: students who don’t multitask to be productive with work.
If I’m checking my email, folding my laundry or doing anything that doesn’t take substantial concentration, then I will absolutely have my favorite Pandora station on. But if I’m doing something that requires my full attention, I easily become distracted by the lyrics.
The same goes for using my iPhone or Internet browser while trying to get work done. This may be because I grew up before the boom of the smartphone era, and in middle school, my only distraction was Instant Messenger, and that was if I was connected to the dial-up Internet, blocking out my family’s telephone line.
However, the Wall Street Journal reported in an article, titled, “Study Finds Some Teens Can Excel at Multitasking,” that some teens who do homework while listening to music, tweeting and texting may actually work better that way, according to a study performed by two high school seniors.
The study explored whether multitasking affects behaviors controlled by the prefrontal cortex (PFC), and was conducted by two students from Portland, Oregon. The PFC is the part of the brain that orchestrates thoughts and actions having to do with thinking, thought analysis, decision making and social behavior. They found that out of 400 adolescents doing homework, about 15 percent “performed better when working with the distractions of email and music than when focusing on a single activity.”
Both the experts and myself were surprised by the results, because students often do worse while distracted, or at least take longer to complete their work. I have noticed this in my personal experiences, through talking with friends or even through posts on the app Yik Yak by guilty students who are up too late doing homework, getting distracted and then complaining about it on social media. How ironic.
Sometimes I have the right mindset to listen to classical music while doing homework, but anything with lyrics is too distracting because I focus on the words rather than what I should be concentrating on. The same goes for doing work in a crowded place. If I can hear a conversation going on, I don’t concentrate on the work at hand, I listen to the words. But if I’m in a noisy area in which I can’t pinpoint a conversation and the only noise I notice is mumbling, I am perfectly content with that background noise.
The research on this particular sample of high school students concluded that on average, most people perform better when focusing on one task, except for a group of “high media multitaskers” who do their best while multitasking.
Multitasking undoubtedly makes whatever your main goal is take longer. If I sit here at my desk typing non-stop, referencing the Wall Street Journal article, referring to my personal experiences and not letting myself do anything else, I am naturally going to finish quicker than if I pause to read an email or answer a text. Even if I reply quickly, that’s a few seconds wasted and I am likely to lose my train of thought when I return to writing.
Other studies conducted by professionals that the two students from Portland received guidance from during their study found that heavy media multitaskers were less able to focus on the relevant information. For one researcher, the big question was, “…whether the act of heavy media multitasking affects attention and impairs a person’s ability to filter out distractions, or whether the people themselves are naturally that way.” It’s difficult to answer, because even if a task takes longer to complete while doing something else, the individual might not lose his or her focus, just time.
If I’m scrolling through my Twitter feed or texting a friend in class, that’s where my attention is. When I’m ready to listen again and look up at the teacher, I’m lost. I envy those individuals who can concentrate on many areas at once, but am still afraid of a driver texting in the car next to me.
The Wall Street Journal article references a 2010 study by the University of Utah regarding multitasking while driving. Researchers labeled a group of “supertaskers” who perform well while doing multiple things at once, but most showed a significant decline in driving performance. This is why texting while driving laws are in place. If I am driving, I need to give my full attention to the road the same way I need to give my attention to a professor in class.
Karen Podorefsky is a Collegian Columnist and can be reached at [email protected].
