A task too many?
Because apparently the people at in the Health section of Washington Post don't think you read their section/paper (note to Washington Post: shame on you for thumbing your nose at so large a literate population), they have written a rather obnoxiously condescending article on some recent research concerning multi-tasking while studying.
Researchers at UCLA have concluded that "multi-tasking "while studying can have a negative impact on your ability to retain the information. The researchers used fMRI to monitor participants' brain function (all the participants were in their twenties) while they performed the tasks in the study. Interestingly, the fMRIs revealed that when a participant was performing a task under non-multi-tasking situations his hippocampus hippocamus was involved. But when the same task was performed under multi-tasking conditions (participants had to count a series of beeps while they performed the original task of sorting a pile of objects based on a process of trial and error) their brain activity shifted away from the hippocampus to the striatum-- a sign, researchers say, that the information learned during the process is less likely to be available in future situations (in other words, you would not remember the information when you took your test).
I would love to know if different age groups would perform differently on this test. Everyone always talks about how much multi-tasking young people do and how their minds are always in so many different places. Does that mean that as distracted as young people became while multi-tasking that adults would perform even worse? What does that say about corporate America where people are constantly being required to multi-task? Also, I would love to know whether the study's participants personally prefer to study in quiet or while multi-tasking as I could see that those who are used to studying while multi-tasking might get better at performing two tasks at once.
One favorite study habit that was not investigated by this study was whether listening to music (or other passive tasks) impacts a person's brain activity while studying. So if you do decide to sign offline, at least you can keep listening to your iPod.