Think you're awesome at handling 15 AIM conversations, listening to The RZA while watching Robocop, emailing pictures to your mom and working on a project at the office? Wrong. You suck so bad that you're costing the economy $650 billion a year according to analyst Jonathan B. Spira.

Here at Giz, we know not to rely just on analysts, but a cognitive scientist and director of the Brain, Cognition and Action Laboratory at the University of Michigan agrees. He says, "Multitasking is going to slow you down, increasing the chances of mistakes." Great job, screw-up. Apparently, "a core limitation [of your feeble brain] is an inability to concentrate on two things at once," according to the director of the Human Information Processing Laboratory at Vanderbilt University.

But fear not, a solution is on the way: "Brain scans, social networking algorithms and other new tools should help provide a deeper understanding of the limits and the potential of the human brain," so your corporate taskmasters will soon know how to wring every last drop of work out of it before five o' clock rolls around. Awesome. – Matt Buchanan

Slow Down, Brave Multitasker, and Don't Read This in Traffic [NYT]

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