The Republic of Awesome

An interesting study conducted by the Institute of Psychiatry at King’s College London demonstrated that multitasking actually lowers your IQ.

Yes I know. You’re going, “oh shit! I’ve been simultaneously checking my IM, email, Facebook, blog all this while! I’m going to be a dumbfuck!”

Bush did too much multitasking

Well yes, and no. If you’re already a dumbfuck anyway no amount of multitasking could have hurt. Yes, go cry in the corner.

However, more importantly, this article in Discover Magazine revealed the details of this interesting experiment.

There were two groups involved in the King’s College experiment and both were assigned a simple IQ test. The control group is allowed to concentrate on the task at hand. The experiment group on the other hand had to respond to emails and IM’s whilst completing the test.

Naturally, the experiment group performed worse, with 10 points lower than the control group. Contrast this to doing the IQ test while drunk  or high which leads to a 8 point reduction.

Thus, the conclusion that multitasking lowers your IQ more than smoking pot. LOL.

Nonetheless I’m sure you can see the flaw in drawing such a conclusion from the experiment. (If you can’t then… stop multitasking lol)

One’s IQ isn’t actually decreased by multitasking. Rather, multitasking has an adverse effect on one’s ability to concentrate and perform tasks. Well, duh.

The moral of the story is you shouldn’t believe the conclusions of so-called “scientific studies” until you’ve examined facts properly. This is called critical thinking.

The other moral is that we shouldn’t multitask when we have something important to do!!

So shut down your MSN, Facebook, email browsers, etc.