I can clean my oven, watch TV, drink a beer, smoke a cig, polish my nails, have sex with my B/F...& microwave popcorn...providing he is doing it from behind & it only takes 4 & a 1/2 minutes...

I am not one. I don't like having to do multiple things at once. I get too confused. How about you?

I can cry and masturbate at the same time....the down side is...I gotta use twice the amount of tissue.

I hope to use that skill on America's Got Talent next season.

when people multitask we get stupid because the brain slows down when it has to juggle tasks

when people multitask we get stupid because the brain slows down when it has to juggle tasks

I multi-task a lot at work. I have to. I wouldn't consider myself stupid, though. Not by a long shot.

When we multitask, we get stupid.

That inflammatory title is from a section header in "7 Dumb Things We Do", by Joeseph T. Hallinan, published in March 2009 Reader's Digest. The article begins on page 166. I'll be quoting for section 3, page 170-171. With a source as great as Reader's Digest, I'm sure this is the final word on this topic.

"3. When we multitask, we get stupid. The brain slows down when we have to juggle tasks. [...] researchers asked adults to identify two images [...] when the participants saw colored crosses and shapes at the same time, they needed almost a full second of reaction time to press a button. Even then, they often made mistakes. If the participants were asked to identify the images one at a time [...] the process went almost twice as fast."
"Switching from task to task creates other problems. We can forget what we were doing or planned to do. The to-do list in our brains is known as working memory, and it keeps track of all the short-term stuff we need to remember [...]."
"But the contents of our working memory can evaporate like water in a desert; only after about two seconds, things begin to disappear. Within 15 seconds of considering a new problem, you'll have forgotten the old problem. In some cases the forgetting rate can be as high as 40 percent.Working studies have found it takes up to 15 minutes to regain a deep state of concentration after a distraction."

And now a quote Sharky can use against old fogies, same article, end of section: "This was especially true for older [people]. The older we are, the harder it becomes to screen out distractions. The decline is noticeable after age 40."