How can a person (especially a teenager) study and multitask at the same time? That's the question posed by Dr. Perri Klass in a recent New York Times article. To answer the question he checks in with his grown children (a high-school student, a college student, and a medical student) and some experts in the field of media and human performance.

"The literature looking at media and its impact on attentional skills is just in its infancy," said Renee Hobbs, a professor of mass media and communications at Temple University. "We don't really know what they pay attention to, what they don't. We don't know how it impacts their school performance, whether it impacts their school performance." In many ways, the experts acknowledge, the pace of science has not kept up with technology.

A recent and much-discussed study showed decreased productivity in adults who were multitasking — or as Dr. Christakis, a professor of pediatrics at the University of Washington puts it, "The truth is you don't really multitask, you just think you do; the brain can't process two high-level cognitive things." What you are actually doing, he continues, is "oscillating between the two." Teenagers may be better at oscillating than their parents, because they are digital natives who grew up in the age of technology.

Dr. Klass's children acknowledged that they have different ways of studying different material. When they are doing the final preparation for a big test they find they like to be in a quiet place doing only one thing: the studying. Dr. Klass ends his thoughts with this statement about students' study habits: "If they're doing well, permitting them to have some choice permits them to find their own style."

Source: New York Times, Texting, Surfing, Studying by Perri Klass, M.D.