What Multitasking Does To Our Brains

Supplementary question: why is multitasking more prevalent in women than in men?

There is no such thing as multi tasking. Women claim to be able to multi-task as do computers.

The word isn't multi tasking as rather multiple ignoring. We work by time slicing. A woman looks at a pan cooking on the stove and knows from experience she can leave it for 5 minutes. She goes back to her ironing and forgets about the pan. 5 mins later she thinks I need to recheck the pan. From experience this lady can time slice to both cook and iron all without the aid of the fire brigade.

Computers don't multi task - they just time slice and jump quickly from one program to another. The Processor in a Windows PC only does one instruction at a time all be quite quickly.

Muliple processors are like multiple women in a kitchen so again not really multi tasking.

Apologies to any women reading this blog - I make no claim to be PC!

A woman looks at a pan cooking on the stove and knows from experience she can leave it for 5 minutes. She goes back to her ironing and forgets about the pan.

Multi-tasking, What a fallacy.

Girl I used to date, I did the cooking, She had a pretty complete Magic Chef items, for years (before I met her) in like new condition. That was only because she never used them. (Very expensive items but I loved using them)

I did the cooking, of course she would help........like shutting off the stove for me, (two minutes after I had already shut it off) an hour later, I'd have all the doors and windows open to vent all the smoke out of the house. Because when she shut the stove off, she actually turned the stove back on.

Of course, as she put it, that was my fault, I should have cleaned the pans and would have noticed the burner was. , Why do I think that's funny, probally for my sanity

doing Multi-Tasking, something has to give, no one is a over-unity.

I can do 5 things at once. some times redoing most of them 2 to 3 times

Caption This:

Woman gets ring to slip over knuckle using the force of gravity alone, while smiling at her man. Wow, what multitasking! I bet she could walk and chew gum at the same time too.

I agree, there is no such a thing as multitasking, but when I think about very basic tasks, the ones that only require your senses, like for example:

Checking the finish of a surface, only by the touch and sight, won't stop you from using your ear to closely check for a coarse hissing sound as well, all this while you chew gum, smoke or describe to someone else how's the finish.

Ok I admit it it's still one task, but I doubt we do a super quick scan of our senses one at the time, they update in REAL real time.

This brings out another question that bothers me some times:

The nervous terminations send electrical impulses to the brain, ok, how do the wave forms of such impulses look like?, can they be reproduced?.

It is funny. The "multitasker", more often than not a woman, tosses out a question. I take it for real, and think it over. Before 20 - 30% of the answer is delivered, usually I get cut off because s(he) already formed an opininon. Never mind, that it is personally irritating from a so-called sensitive person of habitually stepping on your conversation. Never mind, that your delivered fraction of an answer taken as a verification of existing preiudice. And later, you are accused of giving that (whatever fraction that that is?) as an answer.

There is plenty to learn from an extended conversation. It even can sink in, and be part of a long term memory.

The "multitasking" is a fashionable cliche for bad habits, and an excuse for not learning anything new, IMHO. While pretending being excessively busy. Actual experiments in simulators for car driving bear this out. For the great resistance and irritatedness for habitual phone talker. That they CANNOT do them well at all at the same time.

QED, but do not let yourself be bothered by facts.

Right after I got out of college, I was doing space planing for a company that had huge government contracts, I asks to be put on second shift for the CADD work.

I had a number computer terminals open, and I would save all my prints to be plotted and one time.

Mind you this was in the eighties.

I was printing/plotting off of (3) ribbon printers and (2) pen plotters. The ribbon printers zipped through the drawings. And it made that kind of sound, at the time I thought it sounded like progress, but now it irritates me to this day. I only thought I was efficient, but the time I spent sorting and the re-plots, eat all and then some of the supposed efficiencies.

To this day, I can not stand and kind of electronic noise.

But this may only have been me.

...an example of true "multi-tasking" is someone who's able to write with both hands, at the sametime, two different things upon the chalkboard. For, example, writing the beginning of a sentence with one hand, and the closeing of the same sentence with the other hand. My grandfather could do this, much to the consternation of his Columbia, SC, classroom college students!

Writing with both hands - is that a bit like playing a piano where you use both hands. What about a church or theatre organist who can play with both hands and both feet. I'm not convinced this is multi tasking though. Its still time slicing.

There is a standard psychological exercise proving, that you cannot maintain conflicting emotions. It is based on the structure of your brain, in which many things are essentially hardwired.

It goes like this. You are seething with anger. Then somebody convinces you to put a (totally fake) wide grin on your face. Without fail, you cannot maintain both. Either / or. Your single emotional control center is connected to your facial expression not under your conscious control. And it has to make a decision. A similar case can be set up for other processing centers in your brain. Attempt at multitasking invariably gets to the point of conflicting demands on a processing center, where it will fail.

Now, the brain is amazingly plastic and adaptable. And for statistical averages there are some exceptions. Amazing, but those do not write the rules.

I don't know what it does to your brain, but years ago, I drove a stick shift car with three different amateur radios. One evening in stop and go traffic, I had conversations going on all three radios and still managed to drive and shift the car! While it was truly time slicing, I haven't heard of anyone locally doing similar. BTW the conversations were with different groups of people not associated with each other. I don't claim to have been coherent in all conversations.