Posted on 07/13/2004 3:03:58 PM PDT by neverdem
Am I the only person who still prefers doing things one at a time?
My fellow New Yorkers have raised multitasking to an art form. People talk on their cellphones while jogging, do their homework on the subway, listen to books on tape while walking, put on makeup in the back seat of the taxicab and - always, everywhere, constantly - talk on their cellphones while they're busy doing something else.
This isn't how things were meant to be. Our brains are not built to work this way, no matter how many times teenagers insist that they're paying full attention to their homework, despite the fact that they're also watching television, listening to music and sending electronic instant messages to friends who are doing their own homework amid comparable chaos.
The brain works best "on a single task and for sustained rather than intermittent or alternating periods of time," the neurologist Richard Restak writes in "The New Brain: How the Modern Age Is Rewiring Your Mind."
"This doesn't mean that we can't perform a certain amount of multitasking,'' Dr. Restak writes.. "But we do so at decreased efficiency and accuracy."
And danger. Studies have shown that if you do anything distracting while driving - drinking coffee, fixing your hair, changing CD's and, of course, talking on a cellphone - you're significantly more likely to end up in a crash.
In the last few years, 30 states have considered legislation to outlaw the use of hand-held cellphones while driving. Most have failed. But three states now have such laws. The most far-reaching, New Jersey's, which went into effect this month, prohibits drivers from doing anything else - not just talking while holding a cellphone but restraining a pet, reading a map or eating a Krispy Kreme doughnut on the way to work. The ultimate antimultitasking law.
What could make more sense than to make people who are operating two- or three-ton projectiles at speeds exceeding a mile a minute actually focus on their journey? Yet most states managed to kill such legislation, defending multitasking as an almost inalienable right.
We are all so steeped in the ethos of doing more than one thing at a time that we are hardly aware of it. I serve brunch to my daughter's friend and only later realize that she has, while eating bagels and seeming to enjoy our conversation, been text messaging on her cellphone to two or three other friends, managing it all so skillfully - under the table, during a bathroom break - that none of us has even noticed.
I talk to my brother on the telephone and hear him clicking at his computer in the background, or to my mother and hear her loading the dishwasher. Is it any wonder that occasionally one of them will interrupt the conversation with "What did you just say?"
I do it, too. Just not as flashily as the text messagers or the people at the gym with books propped on the treadmill handlebars. When I'm out for my morning walk, disdaining the people who are walking their dogs while reading the newspaper, talking on the cellphone and drinking a latte, what am I doing? Listening to an audio book on my iPod. Wouldn't want to waste time by just exercising, would I?
Still, in the long run, multitasking is what wastes time. Last year, psychologists at the University of Michigan reported that when they asked subjects to perform two or more experimental tasks - solving arithmetic problems, say, at the same time they identified a series of shapes - the frontal cortex, the executive function center of the brain, had to switch constantly, toggling back and forth in a stutter that added as much as 50 percent to the time it would have taken to perform the tasks sequentially instead of simultaneously.
In another study, scientists at Carnegie Mellon put subjects in an M.R.I. machine and asked them to listen to complicated sentences at the same time that they mentally rotated geometric shapes. The two tasks activated different parts of the brain, but each region was operating at a suboptimal level. Here, then, was high-tech confirmation of the common-sense wisdom of Publilius Syrus, a Roman philosopher from the first century B.C., who warned, "To do things at once is to do neither." (Publilius also came up with "Better late than never" and "A rolling stone gathers no moss.")
But things have changed in the last 2,000 years.
"We are awash in things," James Gleick writes in "Faster," "in information, in news, in the old rubble and shiny new toys of our complex civilization, and - strange, perhaps - stuff means speed. The wave patterns of all these facts and choices flow and crash about us at a heightened frequency. We live in the buzz."
And probably, the buzz is something we will adjust to, because we are at our core a species that, whether we do it one step at a time or all at once, usually manages to adjust.
PING
Nearly daily, someone tries to sideswipe me while they are talking on their cellphone.
I hate call-waiting, too. Are you waiting for a BETTER phonecall?
I just get mad when people are bad at it.
BTW, I have answered many emails while driving.
Oh, don't be silly. I'm talking on the phone as I type this and it's perfectly tzfotnb' yjomnm prlk y;lmb';l/
If I'm not multitasking I'm bored. That's why I constantly have music playing (usually out in reality, in a pinch I've got tunes playing in my head, memorization is a wonderful thing). It's also what keeps me hooked on FR. Work on two computers, FR on a third, music to give my brain a rhythm, it's the minimum to keep me awake.
Of course I hate phones and refuse to have an electro-leash buzzing where-ever I go.
I can multi-task with the best of them. I can cook, watch the news, answer my kids questions and seldom step on a slumbering dog while doing all of the above.
I agree about people who are no good at it. ; )
If you take a performance driving class or just talk to people who know about such things they teach you a couple of things at the outset. Always have two hands on the wheel and always look where you want the car to go - the hands follow the eyes.
I think this last point is the most important and probably the most underappreciated as it happens subconciously - if you look down at the radio or your phone or your dog or whatever - your hands WILL follow - often with bad results.
Bottom line - hands on the wheel (both of them), eyes ahead (and not just locked on the car ahead or the white lines, but scanning all possible threats, obstacles) and pay attention to what you're doing.
What is the big gripe about cellphones? I have a headset, I push one button (which I do by touch) and speak the name of the party I wish to call. It is no worse than talking to the person in the seat next to you or listening to the radio.
Amen. Our 14 year old learned this the hard way while driving the lawn tractor. (Hint: trees are stationary.)
The big gripe is the people whose brains are on the conversation not the road. At least when you're taking to someone in the next seat the person can yell at you to watch where you're driving. I've seen some pretty psychotic behavior by people yaking on the phone, and I think the headsets make it worse. I've seen at least 4 people alone in their car gesticulating wildly while running right through a red light. If you know how to talk and drive at the same time it's OK, unfortunately apparently many people do not.
I will be face-to-face with a customer in discussion of the symptoms of their vehicle and realize that they are not talking to me any more, but on a phone. I walk away, pour a glass of Ice Tea and log back onto FR.
Better your 14 year old learn the lesson driving the lawn tractor than out on the public roadways - I imagine that he learned the lesson at a comparably cheap price.
Yup. Other than the lambasting he took about being more careful, no one was hurt.
The tree is resting quietly, btw.
The people who feel that stops signs are optional are a double danger when on their cellphones.
Stop signs are optional, as long as there's nobody coming... I have great skills at the California roll through. But there's gotta be nobody coming, no racing.
Gramps? Is that you? He was the King of the Boulevard stop.
Scared the bejesus out of me a few times on our way to the donut shop.
Sounds like me...music, 2 Everquest accounts running, FR, and as often as not a retail workers' board and an EQ tradeskill list or forum also. And still managing to read all the interesting articles with enough time to be bored before new ones are up.
I've gotten worse since I moved. Now to get home from pretty much anywhere I have to go through a 4-way stop where 90% of the traffic is coming from one direction, it's just begging for a roll through... at least if I'm coming from the direction everybody else is.
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