Health & Science

The truth about multitasking

Modern humans have embraced multitasking with all four limbs. We text while walking, chat on the phone while driving, check e-mail while writing the annual report. Psychology textbooks suggest that our brains can’t successfully process so much at once. “But if you walk around on the street, you see lots of people multitasking,” Stanford researcher Eyal Ophir tells BBCnews.com. “So we asked ourselves, ‘What is it that these multitaskers are good at that enable them to do this?’” The surprising answer is nothing. Ophir and colleagues categorized subjects into two groups, high and low multitaskers, according to the amount of electronic information they typically consumed. Then they ran them through several experiments designed to test the skills that multi­taskers ostensibly possess. To test their ability to ignore irrelevant information, for example, subjects were shown a screen with both red rectangles and blue rectangles; when subjects saw the screen a second time, they were asked whether any of the red rectangles had been rotated. High multitaskers consistently scored much worse; they were less able to ignore distractions, had more fallible memories, and couldn’t switch to new tasks as readily. “The shocking discovery of this research” is that high multitaskers “are lousy at everything that’s necessary for multi­tasking,” says co-author Clifford Nass. “They’re suckers for irrelevancy. Everything distracts them.” Left unclear is why chronic multitaskers fail. Are they naturally bad at focusing, so they multitask to compensate? Or does multitasking actively degrade their ability to concentrate? Either way, the lesson is the same: If you want to get more done, try doing less.

Did strep kill Mozart?

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In 1791, the composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart suddenly fell ill and, at the young age of 35, died. The official cause was “fever and rash,” but unofficial explanations have ranged widely and wildly, to include poisoning, syphilis, rheumatic fever, even trichinosis from eating bad pork. Now, says The New York Times, Dutch scientists offer a more mundane postmortem: complications from a strep infection. Mozart is known to have suffered from edema, a gross swelling of tissue under the skin, which was a common cause of death at the time. (Mozart was so swollen on his deathbed that he could not turn over.) The researchers analyzed Vienna’s death registry from that period and noticed a spike in edema cases, suggesting a mild epidemic of some infectious disease, such as group A streptococcus—which can cause strep throat. Strep infections can lead to conditions from which Mozart evidently suffered, including fever, limb pain, skin rash, and perhaps kidney damage, which can cause fluid to build up throughout the body.

Going in circles

It’s not just a cliché: When people get lost, they really do tend to walk in circles. German researchers gave volunteers a tracking device and had them walk for several hours, either in a forest or in the featureless Sahara desert; later they mapped the paths the walkers had traced. “I was trying to simulate what happens when you get lost and try to find your way out,” psychologist Jan Souman tells Australia’s ABC Science. Only when the sun or moon was visible as a reference could the subjects walk in a straight line. Otherwise, they often traced circles, some as small as 20 yards in diameter, without ever realizing it. “They didn’t really believe when we showed them afterward,” Souman says. Without external signposts, he says, people rely on internal signals provided by their sense of balance and the movement sensors in their legs. These signals often contain small random errors; without landmarks to help us correct course, those errors often accumulate in a circular direction. “Don’t trust your senses,” Souman advises would-be explorers. “You might think you are walking in a straight line when you’re not.”

Lightning that goes upward

Lightning doesn’t always shoot straight down to the ground. Sometimes, it goes the other way. Through a fortunate fluke of timing, scientists for the first time have managed to photograph a “gigantic jet,” a 40-mile-long bolt of lightning that shoots upward from the top of thunderheads to the very ceiling of Earth’s atmosphere. Gigantic jets were first discovered in 2001; only 10 or so have been witnessed. Duke University electrical engineer Steven Cummer captured the image last summer by chance, while studying other atmospheric phenomena, and found that the jet’s electrical charge was far more powerful than expected. “These are not just sparks that come out of the thunderstorm and travel upward and tickle the upper atmosphere,” he tells BBCnews.com. In fact, gigantic jets send as much electrical energy upward from clouds as traditional lightning bolts carry to the ground. The finding could help scientists better understand how massive amounts of electrical energy are constantly shuffled between the ground and Earth’s many layers of atmosphere, a phenomenon known as the global electrical circuit. “For sure we got lucky,” Cummer says. “We were pretty thrilled.”