307,369 Crashes Means Very Few Of Us Are Supertaskers. Yet.

I am not advocating texting while driving, which has reportedly led to 307,369 crashes so far this year, according to estimates from the National Safety Council. But I do feel its a good policy to keep to scientific facts about attention, even when announcing beneficial policies:

Keeping Eyes on Distracted Driving’s Toll

At the news briefing, Dr. Andrew Pollak, president of the trauma association, said: “It isn’t just cellphones. It’s anything that takes our attention from the task of driving.”

David L. Strickland, administrator of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, added: “No one does multitasking well.”

It turns out that in fact there are some people who do multitasking well. These are known as ‘supertaskers’ by the researchers that discovered their paradoxical existence, Jason Watson and David Strayer at the University of Utah (Supertaskers: Profiles In Extraordinary Multitasking Ability).

As I reported last year,

Watson and Strayer tested 200 subjects in a controlled fashion, and determined that 2.5% of the group could in fact drive in a difficult car simulation while conversing on the phone without significant loss of ability of the individual tasks. The ‘conversing on the phone’ wasn’t just talking about TV: it was a complex set of behaviors called OSPAN tasks, like remembered lists of items while performing mathematical calculations.

The authors state, unequivocally:

Supertaskers are not a statistical fluke. The single-task performance of supertaskers was in the top quartile, so the superior performance in dual-task conditions cannot be attributed to regression to the mean. However, it is important to note that being a supertasker is more than just being good at the individual tasks. While supertaskers performed well in single-task conditions, they excelled at multi-tasking.

This means that there are some of us who can drive and talk on the phone safely. And it seems like their superpower is multitasking itself, not just the ability to do these two specific things together.

So, I will make the conjecture that multitasking is a cognitive skill which — like mathematical reasoning and musical ability — occurs in a bell curve distribution across the population. Watson and Strayer discovered some folks that are three standard deviations above the norm, who had functionally zero decrease in their performance in the individual tasks when asked to do more than one at a time. But all of us fall somewhere on that curve. And as with most cognitive skills, we can improve.

Note that it takes a great long time, on the order of 10,000 hours, to gain mastery of complex skills like piano playing and kung fu. It may take that long to become great at multitasking, for the average among us.

So it is categorically false to say that no one is good at multitasking.

And like you, I hope that wannabe multitaskers should practice somewhere other than the drivers seat of a moving automobile, at least until they have attained their multitasking black belt, anyway.