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It may seem your children can simultaneously do homework, write a message and watch YouTube, but in fact they are "task-switching", moving from one task to another, deciding which one to do at any one time. While your children may wrongfully think that by trying to accomplish several tasks at a time they are killing two birds with one stone, the studies show that the shifting between tasks is extremely unproductive. The brain takes time to go form one task to another and the transition is neither fast, nor smooth, losing approximately 40% of time. That means that when children try to perform two or more related tasks either simultaneously or alternating rapidly between them if takes almost double the time to get the job done than if they were done sequentially, not to mention that the number of errors increases as well. David E. Meyer, "director of the Brain, Cognition and Action Laboratory at the University of Michigan," states that "if a teenager is trying to have a conversation on an e-mail chatline while doing algebra, she'll suffer a decrease in efficiency, compared to if she just thought about algebra until she was done." Our brains neurologically can process only one thing at a time. At this stage of development we are not able to "overcome the inherent limitations in the brain for processing information during multitasking." In other words, multitasking is not possible. .
Multitasking has a tremendous impact on your children's schoolwork and performance. The mental habit of dividing one's attention into many small slices has changed the way students learn, reason, socialize, do creative work and understand the world. Even though the modern world and pace of life sets high standards and expectations in productivity and efficiency, and the habit of "multitasking" seems to prepare children for a hectic workplace, many cognitive scientist worry about the tendency.