Brain Drain

Memo to: Frustrated parents.

Subject: Your kids’ study habits.

There’s some impressive new scientific research on your side when you tell your kids they can’t possibly do their homework with the TV blaring, instant messenger crawling or MP3 player pumping. Unfortunately, explaining it will require you to get them unplugged from their iPods.

Tell them this: A recent study shows that the ruckus of such multitasking may make them learn less and to use the wrong parts of their brains to store information. Tell ‘em they can look it up in the Aug. 1 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academies of Science (PNAS). Tell them it was done by researchers at UCLA (that’s the University of California, Los Angeles, if they don’t know).

Tell them you know nearly everybody has this bad habit, that a 2005 report by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that nearly 60 percent of seventh- to 12th-graders interviewed reported multitasking – watching TV, listening to music, surfing the Web and chatting online — some or most of the time while doing homework.

You could even concede you know about people like Lauren Kyla Pitts, a 19-year-old junior at the University of Maryland, College Park, who insists that listening to music (pop, R&B, “all kinds,” she says) and IM’ing with her friends are important parts of her college study routine. “For the most part I think it helps me concentrate and avoid daydreaming, which can be really distracting to me,” she says.–just as you may have — that we pay for trying to perform more than one job at a time.

“Most would agree that there’s always a cost associated with multitasking,” said Russell Poldrack, associate professor of psychology at UCLA and co-author of the PNAS study. “We found that it can have a negative impact on learning.”

To test the relationship between multitasking and learning, he and colleagues assigned 14 twentysomethings to an exercise that involved learning how to sort various shapes into different piles based on trial and error. Each participant performed the task under two conditions: first, without any distractions; then, while listening to high and low beeps and counting only the high ones. Participants were tested on what they learned under each condition.

(At this point your kids will point out they are not counting beeps while they listen to Death Cab for Cutie. Tell them to just be quiet, that you’re getting to that.)

The researchers used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) – a technique that tracks increases in blood-oxygen content as an indicator of activity in different parts of the brain – to evaluate participants’ brain activity and function during both conditions.

“Our results told us that people can learn under either condition, but the way they learned (material) and the brain systems involved were different,” said Poldrack. “For the task performed while multi-tasking, the subjects’ knowledge was less flexible, meaning they could not extrapolate their knowledge to different contexts.”

Investigators also discovered a difference in the brain systems and types of memory activated under multi-tasking and non-multi-tasking conditions.

The hippocampus, a region of the brain involved in sorting, processing and recalling information, is critical for declarative memory (things you can learn from text). While performing the sorting task without multi-tasking, the hippocampus was active. The distractive beeps, however, shifted activity away from the hippocampus to the striatum, which is necessary for procedural memory (that is, habitual tasks, like riding a bike).

Memories in the hippocampus are easier to recall in different situations, said Poldrack, whereas those stored in the striatum are tied closely to the specific situation in which they were learned. “This means that learning with the striatum leads to knowledge that cannot be generalized as well in new situations.”

“The bottom line is that active distractions involved in multi-tasking are going to reduce one’s ability to learn,” he said – even if standard performance measures, like grades, show otherwise.

For many experts, these results are just confirmation of what they already suspected.

“With multi-tasking, you’re getting – at best – a superficial understanding of the studied material,” said David E. Meyer, a professor of psychology at the University of Michigan. Meyer offers the example of reading: “You read at various depths of understanding. You can get the bare minimum or, if you read carefully, you can also make inferences about the work.”

“When learning with distractions, students’ brains are trying to wing it by using a region that is not the best suited for long-term memory and understanding,” said Meyer, whose own research suggests that multi-tasking takes more time and involves more error.

At this point your teens may insist that their distractions enhance their studying.

According to Meyer, multi-tasking has less to do with study help and more to do with pleasure. “It’s sort of like eating dessert while skimping on a proper meal – you forgo nutrition for enjoyment,” he said.