Students can't resist distraction for two minutes ... and neither can you

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A woman checks her phone while at the computer.

By Bob Sullivan, Columnist, NBC News

Are gadgets making us dumber? Two new studies suggest they might be. One found that people who are interrupted by technology score 20 percent lower on a standard cognition test. A second demonstrated that some students, even when on their best behavior, can't concentrate on homework for more than two minutes without distracting themselves by using social media or writing an email.

Interruptions are the scourge of modern life. Our days and nights are full of gadgets that ping, buzz and beep their way into our attention, taking us away from whatever we are doing.

We've known for a while that distractions hurt productivity at work. Depressing research by Gloria Mark at the University of California, Irvine, says that typical office workers only get 11 continuous minutes to work on a task before interruption. With smartphones reaching near ubiquity, the problem of tech-driven multitasking ? juggling daily tasks with email, text messages, social media etc ? is coming to a head.

Multitasking has been ?the subject of popular debate, but among neuroscientists, there is very little of that. Brain researchers say that what many people call multitasking should really be called ?rapid toggling? between tasks, as the brain focuses quickly on one topic, then switches to another, and another.? As all economics students know, switching is not free. It involves "switching costs" ? in this case, the time it takes to re-immerse your mind in one topic or another.

Researchers say only the simplest of tasks are candidates for multitasking, and all but one of those tasks must involve automaticity. If you are good at folding laundry, you can probably fold laundry and watch TV at the same time, for example.

Overestimated abilities
Despite this concern among brain scientists, many people overestimate their ability to multitask, such as the college student who thinks he can text and listen to a lecture simultaneously. He cannot, says brain expert Annie Murphy Paul, who writes "The Brilliant Blog."

"Multitasking while doing academic work ? which is very, very common among young people ? leads to spottier, shallower, less flexible learning," Paul warned in a recent column.

The two studies mentioned above underscore this point.?

In the first, Alessandro Acquisti and Eyal Peer at Carnegie Mellon University's Human Computer Interaction lab recruited 136 college students to take a standard test of cognitive abilities, and invented a controlled method of distraction. Test-takers were interrupted via instant message, which they were told contained important additional instructions, during the exam.

(The research was conducted in concert with research for The Plateau Effect, a book I recently co-authored with Hugh Thompson.)

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