The Like/Hate Thread

[Milk Bubble]

I hate when there's something I kinda want to watch but not enough to give it my full attention, so I decide to do something else while watching (eg, go online, or play on my psp) and then when the show ends I realise I can barely remember anything that happened... so it's like I might as well have not watched it in the first place. I guess I must just be really bad at focusing on two things at once.

It's because you're not a woman.

True or False: Women are better at multitasking, while men are better when concentrating on a single task from beginning to completion.

True. Ruben Gur, PhD, and Raquel Gur, MD, PhD, at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, measured blood flow and activity in men's and women's brains, and they found repeatedly that women use more parts of their brains when given a wide variety of verbal and spatial tasks. They believe that this may contribute to women's ability to focus on a number of different things at one time.

A new study has raised an important question: Women may be better at multitasking, but is multitasking really the most efficient way to work? Newer research shows that switching back and forth from one task to another takes precious seconds of reevaluation, and those seconds add up. As the researchers point out, in the best-case scenario, this makes you only slightly less efficient—but in the case of someone talking on a cell phone and driving, that fraction of a second may make the difference between life and death.

The conclusion I personally have come to is this: Multitasking is certainly helpful when you don't have any options, when your assistant is out sick or when you're trying to put dinner on the table while at the same time making sure your children are entertained and safe. But I find that when I need to concentrate on writing, it's helpful for me to turn off my phone and my e-mail program, with its constant "new mail" alerts, so that I can better and more purely concentrate on the task at hand.

http://www.enotalone.com/article/4893.html