Sign up for our newsletters! Multitasking woman Photo:
Thinkstock "Where's the restaurant we're meeting at?" Your
husband's on the phone as you scramble to finish a last-minute
client proposal and root around for your lipstick. You give him
directions while reading the five e-mails your boss just sent
and trying to decipher the "something came up" text message from
the babysitter. Multitasking has practically become an Olympic
sport. But new science suggests it's not always a winning game.
A study in the British Medical Journal, for example, found that
people talking on cell phones while driving were four times more
likely to have car accidents resulting in hospitalization than
other motorists. Road safety may be an extreme example, but it
underscores a larger point. Research shows that we consistently
perform better and faster when tasks are done successively,
rather than all at once. A new study is shedding light on why.
"We've identified a kind of bottleneck in the prefrontal cortex
of the brain that forc