Don't hold that thought.

Multitasking severly limits your learning according to a new study published in PNAS. Looking at the effects on learning while doing two tasks, the researchers found that:

even if distraction does not decrease the overall level of learning, it can result in the acquisition of knowledge that can be applied less flexibly in new situations.

Participants in the study, who were in their 20s, learned a simple classification task by trial-and-error. They were asked to make predictions after receiving a set of cues concerning cards that displayed various shapes, and divided the cards into two categories. With one set of cards, they learned without any distractions. With a second set of cards, they performed a simultaneous task: listening to high and low beeps through headphones and keeping a mental count of the high-pitch beeps. While the distraction of the beeps did not reduce the accuracy of the predictions — people could learn the task either way — it did reduce the participants' subsequent knowledge about the task during a follow-up session.

When the subjects were asked questions about the cards afterward, they did much better on the task they learned without the distraction. On the task they learned with the distraction, they could not extrapolate.

The researchers are quick to note that multitasking can be beneficial sometimes, like listening to music during exercise. The point their research makes is that if you're trying to learn something, concentrate!

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