Mobile electronic devices have become an inseparable part of our bodies and minds. Multitasking is a rapidly growing phenomenon affecting all population segments. It often benefits users in terms of rapid access to information. It is an everyday scene, be it waiting for the elevator, bus, or train or even while crossing the road. Many people have convinced themselves that they must always be professionally and socially connected. Our electronic gadgets fill up the time formerly used for thinking, reflection, and planning. Addiction to our potentially useful electronic devices can make multitasking a way of life. We walk and text, drive and phone, watch TV and use a computer and a mobile, all at the same time. Such combinations divert attention away from the primary task and result in losing focus and creativity. However, there is a dark side to the increasing addiction to these devices that challenges the health and well-being of the entire population, targeting, in particular, the aged.  Using mobile phones or texting while driving a car has long been recognised to contribute to automobile accidents and is now considered a traffic violation in many cities.

Research repeatedly tells us that excessive use of mobile phones is detrimental to our brains. Human brains weren’t built to multitask. Several studies have concluded that our brains are“dumbed down” while multitasking. The excessive use of mobile electronic devices contributes significantly to cognitive overload, impairs multitasking and lowers performance at all ages, particularly in the elderly. This phenomenon appears to be rapidly increasing and threatens to become a tsunami as spreading electronic waves cause an ‘epidemic of distraction’. Our ‘CQ’ (creative quotient) is deteriorating because of cognitive overload imposed by multitasking, even if the IQ does not change.

The economist and Nobel laureate Herbert A. Simon addressed in 1971 a developing problem well in advance of the current slew of electronic connectivity when he said, ‘… in an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence, a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate it efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it. He thus addressed the downside of multitasking, the consequence of excessive distraction – i.e. information overload – as a problem of attention. 

Neurophysiologic studies correlate with distracting second tasks during simulated driving have shown by MRI that a driver listening to someone speak suffers a 37% loss in parietal lobe activation associated with significant deterioration in driving accuracy, even when a phone is not being used.