Multitasking impairs attention and causes memory lapses

Kevin Paul Madore, a postdoctoral fellow at the Stanford University School of Psychology in the United States, has spent ten years trying to understand what happens in the brain of human beings moments before a memory occurs.

Solving that question was the origin of a study published this Wednesday in the journal

that reveals how and why doing two or more digital media activities at the same time worsens the attention of individuals and generates memory failures.

The findings of the study, led by Madore, Anthony Wagner and Anna M. Khazenzon, suggest, for example, that young adults who watch television for a long time while sending text messages, checking social networks or looking for information on the Internet show an increase in the attention spans that make it impossible to clearly remember the content broadcast in these activities.

Madore says the new research helps unravel the reasons behind human forgetfulness and is key to understanding why some people remember better than others.

The work shows that media multitasking generates attention lapses that occur just before memory and negatively impacts behavioral and neural memory signals.

The researchers also found that changes in sustained attention span can explain differences in memory capacity between different individuals.

If two people watch a movie together, but one of them concentrates more, they will better remember the dialogues, characters and plot compared to another who watched Instagram or sent an email during the screening.

The Stanford researchers revealed through human experiments what happens in the brain when two digital media activities are performed at the same time.

Madore and her team briefly presented images of objects on a computer screen to a group of 80 young adults, ages 18 to 26.

After ten minutes, they were presented with a second round of images and participants had to identify whether they were bigger or smaller, more pleasant or unpleasant, or if they had seen the image before or not compared to the previous series.

With this test, they evaluated memory capacity by measuring changes in brain wave activity and the increase or decrease in the diameter of the pupil.

To know the level of sustained attention and the ability to concentrate, the young people answered questionnaires that measured how much time a week they spent multitasking in the media, whether or not they had symptoms of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), what was it? their degree of impulsiveness and their tendencies for mental distraction.

Madore states that "the results of the biological metrics of memory behavior (brain waves and dilated pupil) coincided with the behavioral metrics of the sustained attention surveys."

“Although it seems to us that we can pay attention to several things at the same time, it is not true.

We are only able to attend one "

Ignacio Morgado, professor of psychobiology at the Institute of Neuroscience of the Autonomous University of Barcelona, ​​explains that attention is a process that works linearly in the brain, not in parallel.

“Although it seems to us that we can pay attention to several things at the same time, it is not true.

We are only able to serve one.

Our consciousness works in series, it is linear.

Scientifically, it is impossible to consciously attend to two things at the same time ”.

Morgado affirms that this attention process is very important to form memory.

The Spanish researcher insists that the content of the article is very interesting, but for him the underlying findings are not entirely new.

"For a long time we have known that if we receive one piece of information and a short time later we receive another or others, we are undermining the process of registration in the brain of the first information we have received."

According to Morgado, the key to the new article is that it specifies a known psychological process in a situation like the one we are currently experiencing.

"This helps us understand how and when to use digital media during the pandemic and to measure the possible consequences of multitasking in the future."

Besides attention, another key aspect for proper memory formation is emotion.

Morgado explains that information that moves us for better or for worse is better retained in memory.

"Emotions are like the energy that heats up the oven where memories are baked, the more energy the oven has, the faster and better the bread cooks," says Morgado.

"If a piece of information is not exciting to us to any degree, we will most likely forget it soon."

Madore and Morgado agree that memory is not formed instantly when information is acquired.

"When it reaches the brain, it needs time to consolidate, this is a complex time in which many internal physicochemical processes occur that, if interrupted with lapses or interferences in attention, can deteriorate memory," explains Morgado.

And he adds: “In these days of confinement, we are all absorbed by information from different technologies that reach us at the same time.

The memories that we are forming are trampling on each other, and that means that we cannot remember them well ”.

Being simultaneously in several online conferences, receiving or sending emails, studying, watching the news, listening to music or watching social networks affects the memory of human beings.

Madore states that awareness of the importance of attention and limitation of distractions can contribute to memory care in young adults.

"Resisting or limiting multitasking during college lectures or work zooms could be a valuable lesson for this time," Madore concludes.

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