Word: multitasking
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...While reading it I was listening to music on my computer, checking my e-mail, befriending people on Facebook and trying to decide how long it would take me to get to my next class--all with complete comprehension of what I was reading. Our generation's ability to multitask should be looked upon as a gift, not a weakness that inhibits achievement...
...Messiah Berlusconi promised to abstain from carnal relationships till the April elections. For the record, that is over two months of Catholic abstinence. That pledge might surprise his wife Veronica, but at least she has love songs to make up for it. Former American President Clinton clearly could not multitask, as he produced a jazz compilation only after retiring from the Oval Office. But Berlusconi, to Veronica’s (and our) sheer pleasure, has found time to record not one but two full albums of his touching love songs while in office. Ultimately, Berlusconi’s miraculous powers...
Bronte has the same strategy. "You just multitask," she explains. "My parents always tell me I can't do homework while listening to music, but they don't understand that it helps me concentrate." The twins also multitask when hanging with friends, which has its own etiquette. "When I talk to my best friend Eloy," says Piers, "he'll have one earpiece [of his iPod] in and one out." Says Bronte: "If a friend thinks she's not getting my full attention, I just make it very clear that she is, even though I'm also listening to music...
...part of the frontal lobes, which "are important for maintaining long-term goals and achieving them," Grafman explains. "The most anterior part allows you to leave something when it's incomplete and return to the same place and continue from there." This gives us a "form of multitasking," he says, though it's actually sequential processing. Because the prefrontal cortex is one of the last regions of the brain to mature and one of the first to decline with aging, young children do not multitask well, and neither do most adults over 60. New fMRI studies at Toronto's Rotman...
...UNIVERSITIES around the U.S. have noticed that Gen M kids arrive on campus with a different set of cognitive skills and habits than past generations. In lecture halls with wireless Internet access--now more than 40% of college classrooms, according to the Campus Computing Project--the compulsion to multitask can get out of hand. "People are going to lectures by some of the greatest minds, and they are doing their mail," says Sherry Turkle, professor of the social studies of science and technology at M.I.T. In her class, says Turkle, "I tell them this is not a place...