For a generation of children immersed in technology, emerging research suggests that while the temptation to multitask may be pervasive, the ability to control it could be the real bellwether of academic success. The pervasiveness of technology and social media, coupled with a fear of missing out on something important, has led students to pay "continuous partial attention" to everything. Simply put, the brain can't be in two places at once. Not only can people not process two tasks simultaneously, but it also takes longer to multitask than it would to do the individual tasks one after the other, according to Steven G. Yantis, the chairman of the psychological and brain sciences department at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. It's fine to walk and chew gum at the same time, but when a person tries to do two things at the same time that each require a choice, there's a brief "bottleneck" in the prefrontal cortex--the decisionmaking part of the brain--that delays the second task, he said. In education, that delay can cause students to miss information or simply fail to fully take it in. Research shows teachers shouldn't necessarily take students' word for it that having multiple media helps, rather than hurts, their concentration.