Image: iStockPhoto (note); Photoillustration by Aaron Goodman
In Brief
- Attempting to complete two or more tasks at once causes us to divide our attention, so that we focus less on each of those activities.
- A person who drives while talking on a cell phone, for example, is a worse driver than an individual at the legal limit of alcohol intoxication.
- A small percentage of the population defies this trend and multitasks with ease. These so-called supertaskers are helping to elucidate the underlying brain mechanisms supporting multitasking and attention.
More In This Article
Listen to this Podcast “Any man who can drive safely while kissing a pretty girl is simply not giving the kiss the attention it deserves,” Albert Einstein is purported to have said. The quote acknowledges a fundamental characteristic of human attention. Sometimes there simply is not enough of it to go around.
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14 Comments
Add Commentyes the kiss is part of a fundametal that deserves the utmost attention. there is a release of seratonin in the brain that creates a connection between the two. just like eating chocolate. just like using the word because in sentences. these are all factors in the underlying principle of wholeness. the two become one,not only in spirit and body yet also in mind...
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThere seems to be no article to read here. Perhaps the author was multi-tasking at the time. If you study Dennis Ritchie multi-tasking is not that hard it is a storage issue.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIn sex-related sins, there's no "materia leve", Einstein wasn't an acknowledged morale expert, and the kind of behavior described in the note above can put you in trouble with the traffic authorities and the police, if not just increasing your chances of being involved in an automobile crash. Watch your step !
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIt would be good kissing your girl, but not kissing a girl, meaning any girl, and just for fun, as if it were a sport.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI wrote about multitasking and ADHD: "Multitasking Myth" about a year ago:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thishttp://www.interfaces.com/blog/2011/02/multitasking-myth/
Still seems relavant now.
PS: Just linked to the two SciAm articles...
juggling the processes of the brAIN IS VERY SIMPLISTIC INDEED. all one has to do is come to there scenes about the body its fundamental aspects of nutrition through the everyday living situation. one should ask themselves do i want to be healthy or not. well if you do then work t words the wholeness of oneself repetitiously. listen to your body. not someone else's. then work on what techniques help you in every =day living..☺
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThis is a teaser with the intent of getting readers to purchase a subscription. And multi-tasking is more than a storage issue. People have a cognitive capacity which may be supplemented by various techniques but in the end remains within a finite limit. Depending upon the complexity of the task, and a non-present verbal conversation without the benefit of visual cues, exacts a very high cognitive toll, multi-tasking or task-swapping can be more or less efficient. Essentially the brain is jumping between paying attention to one task and then the other. But while focusing on the second task, the first goes unattended. If events within the first task happen to be occurring at a rapid pace, as with driving, the possibility that critical data may be missed or overlooked is significantly increased.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI am a computer scientist and one of the biggest issues was multi-tasking. Until Dennis Ritchie came up with UNIX it was pretty unheard of. IBM did some time slicing with VM on the really big beast but all you had was a bunch of single tasking virtual terminals. Ritchie took time slicing and added piping and memory management allowing the computer to do many things at once some independently and others interdependently. What was the best part was that UNIX was portable because of its ability to manage memory and jobs in real time. So when I refer to storage it is that while you are multi tasking you have to put aside one thing to do the other which is memory no matter how you look at it.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI realized it was a teaser and I am a subscriber to the magazine since 1972 so I am a groupie. I get a little irritated when the teaser has no meat at all such as this one. It would behoove you to study Ritchie's genius a little because he was eons ahead of his time. The MAC did not become much until OSX which was because BSD UNIX was underneath it. Even then I have been less than impressed and Windows had to take simple concepts and overload them some what like the language ADA did in the mid 80's.
I enjoyed the time I had at Bell Labs and learned a lot, in fact one project I did for Lockheed had IBM mainframes, talking to DEC clusters, connected to NETWARE interface that talked to 100's of work stations at once. And the best part is I got my hands dirty on each part. We used it for graphic downloads and real time shop floor control.
But I plead guilty to being one of the primo multi taskers which use to drive some people crazy, I hope that answers the point. Again I was not too happy with the teaser, it is kind of like porn.
Something else to consider, is that the brain is more and more being proven to be like a neural network and storage is more multi-leveled with the same neurons participating in different memories. Olfactory senses can initiate memories that have nothing to do with the conscious actions of the person by simply stimulating a network response.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWe store if I remember right somewhere around 5 billion neurons in the brain alone and there have been studies showing other going ons near the stomach that affect memories and the nervous system. AI has done a lot to bring forward machines that act intelligently even though that is a misnomer because a machine has no immediate needs such as hunger, fear or other worldly desires (at least so far) but as we move into quantum computing a lot of these issues may need to be re-addressed.
The point of what I was saying is that while you move your focus from one task to the other, you have to put the current task into a place holder otherwise you could not pick up where you were. An interesting thing with computers and it may apply to people is that a computer does not need to use the extra storage until the memory attached directly to the CPU (RAM) is filled and then it uses swap space. With that idea in mind some people with higher IQ's may be able to multi-task better than others because they truly can use more of the RAM memory available. Einstein, Dyson, Smolin, Hawkings (even), Greene and Suskind may well fit these shoes.
I keep hoping that Sciam will find better ways to stay alive instead of cheap teasers. They have changed dramatically since the 60's and 70's becoming more and more like USA today and I salute the web presence and am glad that we have these conversations but to cheapen itself to said teasers is a sign of desperation. Next they will have the 150,100,50 in the past with 50 years into the future column to keep an audience.
The best thing we can all do is renew your subscription to the magazine that still attempts to keep us up to date with current science. I will leave that as my tease because I fear for the day print is no longer on paper. I am sure all Beta Max owners can appreciate that.
Sweet nicely said. Texters and Sexers beware.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisHello David Russell, That was an extensive response to my post with some very well presented points. In addition to currently being an educational psychologist, specializing in learning, I am/was a Novell CNE and a Microsoft MSCE with a degree in sysems analysis from NYU so it brought back fond memories when you referenced to your work with Netware acting as an mainframe/mini PC workstation interface. I likewise got my hands "dirty" working from the pc side up. One point I would like to make however is the common misconception of the brain as a computer or tape recorder. Unlike these machines, the brain does not record a perfect image of what occurs around it and have it available for playback on demand. That which is perceived by the individual and stored in the brain is filtered through the perspective of that individual both at the point of storage and the point of retrieval. As such, the same event will be recalled differently by different individuals depending upon their individual perspective. Obviously this is more true as recalled events are more complex. A simple event such as a string of numbers will be recalled identically by each observer up to the point of that observers ability to remember discrete bit of data. Which brings me to your point on task switching. The crude similarity to a computer would be in caching when data is swapped onto the local hard drive as ram memory becomes full. The net sum of these becomes the working memory for the system. Some people apparently have more working memory than others. Perhaps the gifted individuals that you mentioned had greater amounts of working memory or better still, were able to more efficiently utilize the memory that they had available to them through a variety of common memory techniques such as chunking or sensory association.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisInteresting theory on people with higher IQs having a larger capacity to multi-task, but I think what you are really referring to is working memory. No one can do effective complex multi-tasking. A complex task requires the processing of "linkable" pieces. Introducing a whole other set of pieces from a separate complex task results in errors as the links get mixed up and misplaced. What people with higher IQS are good at is working with a high number of "linked or linkable pieces" from one particular task and then having the ability to know when it is appropriate to task switch to process a whole other set of pieces. This is self-regulation of attention.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisHere are a few great essays to read on the subject:
Iqbal, S. T. and Horvitz, E. “Disruption and Recovery of Computing Tasks: Field Study, Analysis, and Directions”. ACM. 2007. Web. 22 Feb. 2010.
Oulasvirta, Antti, and Pertti Saarilouma. "Long-Term Working Memory and Interrupting Messages in Human - Computer Interaction." Behaviour & Information Technology 23.1. (2004): 53-64. Print.
Oulasvirta, Antti, and Pertti Saarilouma."Surviving task interruptions: Investigating the implications of long-term working memory theory." International Journal of Human -- Computer Studies 64.10 (2006): 941-961. Print.
I also conducted interviews with former senior executive for Microsoft and Apple Linda Stone. Linda coined the term "continuous partial attention", which is essentially splitting attention in "monitor mode". It's knowing when to pay single focus attention that is important. Here are some clips from the interview:
http://janemitchinson.ca/?p=68
Nice response and well framed. I think some of the research results I have seen on neural networks is similar to the ideal that memory is not perfect in that the network learns by trial and error and does not necessarily know why it works just that it got the desired response. I look forward to the break throughs in quantum physics where we really won't know what is happening. I had to do some fuzzy logic on the shop floor control system which was very fun.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIt is true that two people do not see or remember events the same and that as time fades we do seem to see reality in different flavors so that is something I hope computers don't do (but I am sure you have met some of the same type of engineers where that may happen by bad programming (leaky memory:))). Also group thought is something that is very dangerous and very effective causing mass risings of people without real issues to cause them. After 8 years of Bush we should be well aware of what chanting the same thing over and over is capable of.
On the science side one of the best books on that was one by Lee Smolin called 'The Trouble with Physics', if you get a chance take a read. For the shorter version 'The Grand Inquisitor' will do. Thanks for the memories and your right because if was a Novelle network not a Netware one I used at Lockheed. Your point is proven. I have old RAM.
Thanks again a good response. What was interesting was that Ritchie understood interdependency and used several approaches to deal with it from pipe, semaphores, intercommunication (passing pointers to functions from functions( Used this a lot to separate system from application processing)) and interrupts both mask-able and non-mask-able. Also assigning priority to applications meaning more CPU time based on the priority of the job.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI think as computers evolve psychology and physiology of learning will become imperative in teaching a computer how to think in quantum ways and at that point memory may become cloudier and maybe more like us. Not too much I hope, I don't want a machine that can out think its creator and then decide we are illogical at times. Too many horror stories are based on that ideal. But I would like to see the continuation of the neural networks where the task is defined and the computers have to come up with the best working answer.