07 Jun 2004
Study: Humans weren't made to multitask

My wife, merely from observing me, could've saved these researchers a whole lotta trouble in reaching this conclusion.

It's readily apparent that handling two things at once is much harder than handling one thing at a time. Spend too much time trying to juggle more than one objective and you'll end up wanting to get rid of all your goals besides sleeping. The question is, though, what makes it so hard to process two things at once? Two theories try to explain this phenomenon: ''passive queuing'' and ''active monitoring.'' The former says that information has to line up for a chance at being processed at some focal point of the brain, while the latter suggests that the brain can process two things at once -- it just needs to use a complicated mechanism to keep the two processes separate. Recent research from MIT points to the former as an explanation.

(link) [Science Blog - Science News Stories]

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