Many of us claim to be able to multitask. But our guest this week on Futureproof has news for you; you can’t. Or at least it’s highly unlikely as only about one in a hundred people can genuinely multitask.

David Strayer is the Professor of Cognition and Neural Science at the University of Utah and has spent his life studying ‘attention’ and how hard we find it to pay attention.

In Laboratory tests David has shown that the majority of people can’t do more than one thing at a time; when they try one of the two things suffer.

To this end David has also shown categorically just how dangerous it is to use your mobile phone when you drive. Over the course of a decade, he has shown that drivers using phones were just as likely to be in a crash as people who drink and drive. Your reaction time slows to the point where you miss more than half the things you would normally see; such as a child on the road or a sign.

David has developed a fascinating test that you can take to see how bad at multitasking you really are. It involves you playing the role of a bouncer in a club. We’d love you to take it and then let us know your results.

Here’s a link to the test 

http://psych.newcastle.edu.au/~ae273/GateKeeper/ 

 

Let us know your results and drop us a mail to science@newstalk.ie