Multitasking doesn't work

Attention, multitaskers (if you can pay attention, that is): Your brain may be in trouble.

People who are regularly bombarded with several streams of electronic information do not pay attention, control their memory or switch from one job to another as well as those who prefer to complete one task at a time, a group of Stanford researchers has found. (source)

Interesting, the study, which was published last August in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, found that habitual media multitaskers "are more susceptible to interference from irrelevant environmental stimuli and from irrelevant representations in memory." It's not clear whether habitual multitasking causes people to be more susceptible to irrelevant information or whether those who are more susceptible to irrelevant information are more prone to be media multitaskers, but it is clear that the minds of multitaskers work differently from the minds of those who aren't.

Perhaps the most intriguing finding of all is that multitaskers are worse at switching tasks than non-multitaskers.