I Quit Multi-Tasking A While Back . . . With One Exception . . .
“Every Damn Day” (as it says on my Nike t-shirt), in winter, I tread on my tread-mill.
I turn on a large fan aimed at me before I start. It’s quite a cool breeze that I’ll be looking forward to so I leave my shirt on, but things begin to heat up about mile one.
It must be quite a sight to watch me wrestle the shirt off at 7 mph, trying not to fall. That might not seem fast, but for me it is and gets my heart started running in the right directon every a.m.
Docknic. I have experienced the opposite and think that your post is a bit outdated. Most of the bad drivers I have encountered are young female drivers. They tend to speed through residential and school zones. They also tend to try and cut me off more than young male drivers (is this because I will go to jail if I beat the sh*t out of them?). When I was a teenage male driver in the 1960s we were definitely the more aggressive drivers. Now days I see more female “bad drivers” with a cellphone stuck to their ears and not signaling (as they would have to pry the phone off their ear for 2 seconds to flick the little lever thing) or even worse, texting.
I still drive a couple of tricky roads with blind curves and elevation changes. I am very familiar with them and because of my age have reduced my speed to about 6/10ths of maximum. I hate when I am behind someone who could negotiate a curve at 40mph without squeaking a tire and for some reason have to slow to 15mph. Two examples. 1.) Elderly female in a brand new Mazda Miata. She for some reason negotiated the 40mph curves at 15mph. She did pull over in a safe area and let the 15 vehicles stacked up behind her pass. 2.) Brand new BMW 1 series in front of me. I looked forward to seeing how it handled as it was advertised as hot sh*t. It ended up the same as the Miata with slowing to 15mph on the curves. It ended up being a teenage female driving her high school graduation present. What a waste!
I don’t think mustitasking skills deteriorate with age. I think wisdom grows with age, and you simply realize that when you multitask, you don’t give any one thing enough attention to do it well.
The hubris that makes you think you can do many things well at the same time is what really goes away with age.
Oh, I think it’s pretty much an estsblished fact that mental acuity fades as one ages. There’s things you can do to slow this down, but it’s inevitable if you live long enough.
I’m sure the USAF has looked into this in detail. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn much of it is declassified.
Of course, as one ages, one develops enough wisdom to know how not to put one’s self into situations that require extraordinary skill to extracite one from. On net, that tends to overwhelm losses in wetware processing power.
“Good judgement comes from experience, which comes from bad judgment.”
Multi-tasking may degrade with age…but a lot has to do with being able to multi-task at an early age. People in their 60’s who never multi-tasked before will have a much harder time doing it then someone in their 20’s. However someone in their 60’s who’s been doing it for 40+ years may be better at it then someone in their 20’s.
I wonder if the human mind can work on multiple tasks at the same time, or it works rather like a computer which works on one job until interrupted and then switches to another job. The computer does this switching between jobs so rapidly that it seems at though it is processing multiple jobs at the same time. I would hazard a guess that the mind works on tasks as the computer does.
Not all computers are single threaded these days. Especially when you get into the super computers with hundreds of thousands processors. Your PC on your desk is single threaded…but the high-end ones are usually multi-threaded.
So long as functionally speaking, one manages two tasks simultaneously, I don’t see where it matters how the objective was accomplished: by continuously-divided attention, or by full concentration on one task, microsecond-by-microsecond.
I mean, strictly speaking, movies are a collection of still pictures, and TV only lights one pixel at a time. The end result, though, is mostly indistinguishable from actual motion.
@sgtrock21 Yes, I would have to agree that with the advent of cheap cell phones there are now countless young female drivers who are completely oblivious to their surroundings while driving. In the past they were dangerous when talking to fellow passengers; now they seem to talk all the time. I have even bumped into a number of them while walking on the street when rounding a corner and running into these self-absorbed creatures. Distracted walking is a real issue these days.
@irlandes–I am one year older than you are and have trouble even handling one task at a time.
I expect I will come to that soon enough. There are always going to be personal differences, caused by many factors including diet and health. And, what we don’t use, we lose. I have driven well over 250,000 miles since I retired, and I assume that keeps up my driving skills, whereas if I drove only around town, my skills would probably be shot by now. As I have said elsewhere, for several years I could listen to talk radio and talk to my wife and eat a sandwich at 70 mph on open country. Now I find myself turning off the radio except in open country with little traffic, and when traffic gets dense, I ask my wife not to talk to me.
Someone said we have to deal with the lowest denominator. I don’t agree. There are old people who are prohibited from driving after dark; we do not prohibit everyone from driving after dark. And, not everyone can get a commercial driver’s license.
As far as driving after dark. we have more than enough technology to develop night vision displays in cars, which show the road in the dark, while tuning out the offensive headlights that are what really cause the problems.
@Whitey I don’t think mustitasking skills deteriorate with age.
This is a free country and you can believe anything you want, no matter how wrong it is. And, I say again, you are projecting, in a big way. it is actually very insulting to be told that it is all in our imagination or caused by our ignorance that we think we used to be able to do much more than we can now.
As another poster has said,there is considerable scientific basis for knowing people reduce that ability as they age.
It’s strange you would be insulted at something I didn’t say. I never said anything like “it is all in our imagination or caused by our ignorance.”
I realize our reflexes slow with age, but the idea that we can somehow do two or more things at a time and do any of them well is to suggest people have somehow evolved new cognitive abilities in the last 20 years that we didn’t have before. Evolution doesn’t work like that. It takes much longer for a species to actually evolve. What we actually see is a trend, and we judge it anecdotally as something new. Every generation does this. Every generation thinks the one that follows it is somehow faster, or smarter, or dumber, or less wise than previous generations. It’s not our imagination; it’s our perception as we pass through our lives and reexamine age groups to which we once belonged through the lens of what our life is like now.
Maybe you didn’t experience any youthful hubris. Maybe you forget how it felt to be young. Maybe you weren’t the type of young person who experienced youthful hubris. Whatever the case, we’re not objective observers in life, and we judge everything through the context of our own experiences.
There’s nothing more complicated than perception, and it shapes the way we see the world.
There are some people who think they can multitask, but if you read their e-mails, and deal with them on a daily basis, you realize they don’t do any one thing very well. Instead, they do a half-a##ed job in several areas when they should be focusing on one thing at a time so they can do each thing well. Multitasking is a myth.
Making a blanket statement like “multitasking is a myth” does not take into account that “multitasking” is a continuum. Walking and talking at the same time is a level of multitasking that I presume almost all the readers of this forum can do, as is eating and reading. Walking on a balance beam while explaining particle physics, maybe not so much. Are jogging and juggling two different tasks? If so, then “joggling” (juggling while jogging) must be multitasking, and it’s not a myth. So much has to do with the level of concentration involved in each task, which is certainly a function of practice. We all multitask at different levels every day. That said, I agree that splitting your concentration can certainly impair the quality of the results.
David, the point of walking and talking, or eating and reading, is that you can do one of the activities without thinking about it. That’s not the multitasking I speak of. What I call “multitasking” is to engage in more than one activity that requires your attention.
Docknick
A few years ago I was following a bright red VW New Beetle on a multi lane 35mph city street. It was very erratic, swerving in and out of it’s lane. I backed off as I was thinking drunk driver. It suddenly veered right, jumped the curb, and stopped before colliding with the pumps of a gas station! I looked as I passed by. Teenage female with cellphone stuck to her ear while waving her free hand rapidly. I could imagine her conversation. "Buffy! I almost had a big crash! It was so cool!). ARRRRRRRRRH!
Irlandes,
I am quite familiar with the Rio Grande Valley and driving in Mexico. My ex wife was born in Alamo. My former Brother in Law lived in McAllen and now lives in Edinburg. They have relatives which I have visited in Donna, Pharr, and Mission. My Brother in Law did most of the driving in Mexico. Reynosa, Progresso, and all the way down to Monterey. I have driven from La Paz to Los Angeles in the mid 1970s, a few times in the Puerto Vallarta/ Tepic area, and around much of the Yuca’tan. While traveling on a toll highway. Smooth pavement, 4 lane with median, much like an interstate. The speed limit was 120kph (about 75mph). We were slowly gaining on another vehicle in the right lane. A mini van taxi was about 1/8th mile behind us and had been there for at least 30 minutes. We were the only vehicles in sight. I finally closed on the slower vehicle, signaled, moved to the left lane, and proceeded to pass. When I was beside the slower vehicle I heard an engine “screaming”! The taxi was “flying” by us at about 90mph on the gravel shoulder! My wife was screaming “what are they doing”! I replied " obviously zero macho points are awarded for passing on a 4 lane while staying on the pavement". I have only seen this kind of behavior in the USA once with a 4 wheeled vehicle. I was tailgated by a couple in a crappy little car for about 2 miles through 2 legal passing zones with no oncoming traffic. They then passed me on a blind curve and narrowly missed an oncoming pickup! I don’t know why??? I have been passed far to many times in these conditions by 2 wheeled sport bikes (donor cycles)! They seem to think their minimum speed is 100+mph!!!
Get to meet brand new people every day, sure i might be 60 but thinking I am 35, yes I put up a new 6’ privacy fence, 25 panels with an old fashioned post hole digger, for the posts, and sure I made a 20 hour round trip to the cabins because the dock guy left the docks where there used to be beach and were now under water, and hauled them up to the bank, the worst part about thinking I am 35 is how long I have to wait to retire, sorry what were we talking about?
Whitey, again you are talking in absolutes instead of a continuum. “requires your attention”- does that mean all of your attention, 80%, 60% ? As I said, I agree that there can be a point where performance is impaired, but the lines are not so easily drawn.