Multitasking was the focus at Stanford’s 2011 IT Open House yesterday, where communication professor Cliff Nass delivered the featured talk. Nass discussed the studies he used to examine multitasking’s effects on efficiency and emotional development – studies that invariably apply to Stanford students simultaneously juggling emails, Facebook chat, iPod music and problem sets.

“The use of unrelated media content is new, unprecedented and has a wide range of effects that we’re only beginning to understand,” Nass said. “There are multiple causes, but it turns out that this is a trend that has been happening since the Industrial Revolution.”

But multitasking adds a new factor to the mix.

“This trend of media multitasking, even though it has only emerged recently, the seeds of it were set over a hundred years ago when we became obsessed with media,” Nass said.

As people attempt to keep up with the influx of new media tools, they are forced to double-, triple- and quadruple-book the time they spend using them.

“Every time a new media product or service appears, the first thing it does is it steals time from other media activities,” Nass said. “But the lust for brand new media, with a reluctance to give up existing and old media, means that we end up using media in parallel.

“We try to over-schedule our media use, making believe that we’re getting everything done, but we all know that when you double-book, you can’t really get both things done at the same time, so you spend time bouncing back and forth,” he added.

Nass added that this trend is prevalent in nearly every age group; academic, social and business situations all call upon people to multitask.

As a result of these studies, Nass found that high multitaskers, who perform a lot of tasks simultaneously, and low multitaskers, who split their time less, do not differ in general memory capacity. However, distractors negatively affected high multitaskers. Nass’ study found a direct, negative correlation between the number of distractors and the number of relevant details that they were able to identify.

Furthermore, high multitaskers proved to have difficulty storing and organizing pieces of information, which Nass described as having “sloppy filing cabinets in their brains.”

“You’d think that if there’s one thing that you’d expect multitaskers to be at, it’s multitasking,” Nass said. “But high multitaskers are much slower in switching — they can’t help thinking about what they’re not doing. Their brains are really just a mush of stuff and it’s hard for them to focus on what they’re supposed to do.”

Nass’ research also analyzed freshman writing, finding that high multitaskers’ writing featured a decreased continuity of ideas and shorter sentences, as well as a stronger focus on the future tense with a decreased concern about the past.

“They don’t sustain a thought through a lengthy [piece of writing],” Nass said. “We see less complex ideas; they’re living and writing in a staccato world. They’re always worried about what’s going to happen and not what already happened.”

Drawing from his experiences as a resident fellow in Otero, Nass explained the decline of face-to-face communication and a lack of focus on the conversation at hand among younger media users.

“Emotional understanding has to be learned,” Nass added. “We’re all born with an orientation towards emotional understanding. We’re obsessed with emotion; everyone in this room can detect emotion through voices, faces and body posture. They learn by practice, by paying attention, thinking and working hard and listening to become socially adept and aware.”

However, for chronic media multitaskers, the focus and concentration required in face-to-face communication is very difficult to attain. For young girls, this can result in negative social consequences that include fewer “feelings of normalcy,” more susceptibility to peer pressure and less sleep.

To correct for the negative effects of multitasking, Nass stressed the importance of engaging in face-to-face conversation and “making it sacred,” especially in family settings.

Economics Professor Marcelo Clerici-Arias, who attended the talk, said he found Nass’ research to be very enlightening. As a parent of two teenagers, Clerici-Arias agreed that multitasking could be detrimental to both the multitaskers and the people around them.

“From a parent’s perspective, I agree with Cliff that I think it’s affecting children negatively,” Clerici-Arias said. “[My kids] are aware of the consequences, but I think they would work more efficiently if they didn’t have all of those distractions.”