Memories of the 28th Century

The idea of multi-tasking has been around for a few decades now, but humans still cannot do it. Humans can and do switch from one task to another smoothly and quickly, but humans cannot do more than one thing at a time with any degree of competence. The article in Wikipedia puts it as “apparent performance by an individual of handling more than one task at the same time.” It is merely “apparent, because anything done while one is doing something else has to be redone to clean out the errors.

I suppose that someone could fidget and lie at the same time, but those are closely related activities. And it has been shown that people often pay slight attention to one thing while they are doing something else, and sometimes that works out, but people who are on a cell phone have four times as many accidents as those who don’t make that mistake. I think that may be the best example of what multitasking involves, but I have known people who insisted that they were excellent at multitasking. I never heard fine detail of such activity.

It might be that some people are fairly good at automatic physical tasks at the same time as they are doing complex mental tasks. I have often found that I can think about things quite nicely while I am playing computer games, but the games are not important, so I probably do poorly at them. Similarly, I find that thinking while I am walking is quite effective, as long as no one disturbs me, but walking is an automatic action for an adult.

For a good description of what really goes on read the article from NPR (link below). There’s a section about a cook in a diner. If you’ve ever watched a cook in a diner, ten you may have noticed that he does things sequentially, even on those rare occasions when he does the same thing with both hands, but he’ll flip the five orders of eggs one after the other, and they will have been cracked in an order that makes it possible for him to keep track of which was first, etc.

A few weeks ago I was having waiting for breakfast, when another guy there mentioned how beautifully the cook was handling things. And the cook was just keeping everything in order. He was good at it. Between then and now I had roughly the same thing, and I almost complained about i, because the cook simply didn’t do a good job, and my eggs over easy came out over hard, which I do not like.

It appears that mental activity of any kind takes up the mental capacity that is available, and it largely drives out everything else, including the idea of writing a blog on multitasking. I thought of this in the morning, but I couldn’t remember it until about an hour ago, because I had other things on my mind.

If you think that I am mistaken, then let me know. There are people who think they can multitask, and I would like to read a defense of that alleged practice. But take a look at the article from Forbes that asserts that multitasking damages one's brain.




http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_multitasking

Another article debunking multitasking
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/s...oryId=95256794

http://www.forbes.com/sites/travisbr...udies-suggest/