Sorry. A team of Stanford University researchers says you can't.
More specifically, the team found that people who are HMM (heavy media multitasker in research parlance) do not pay attention, cannot control their memory or cannot switch easily from one job to another as adeptly as low-tech people who concentrate on one job at a time.
"I found it very surprising," said Eyal Ophir, the study's lead researcher at Stanford's Communication Between Humans and Interactive Media Lab who is admittedly a one-thing-at-a-time kind of guy. "We thought that multitaskers would have some kind of special ability. All we found were deficits."
Susan Mernit, 50, who grew up in Palo Alto, Calif., and is a self-described compulsive multitasker, was not part of the study. But reached at her new home in Oakland where she was talking on the phone, reading the mail and discussing business with her partner, she disagreed with the findings. A founder of a community nonprofit as well as a Web strategist (since she can do at least two things at once), Mernit said, "I believe people can give partial attention to one thing and focus on another. I'm really good at that. And I don't think my brain has gotten any mushier."
