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Study pinpoints the limits of multitasking

Here’s a neat bit of mind-hack research: A couple of psychologists have found that multitasking is easier to do if the various streams streams of info you’re trying to monitor arrive in different modes.

Which is to say, it’s relatively easy to drive a car and listen to music because they’re different stimuli: One is primarily visual, while the other is auditory. In contrast, trying to conduct two conversations at once is hard because they’re both vocal information. As one of the researchers puts it:

Humans learn “sequential structure from multiple sources at the same time, as long as the sensory characteristics of the sources do not overlap,” Christiansen said.

This is only the press release — study won’t be published until next month — so I don’t know more about their experiment or their findings. But as I wrote in my life-hacking piece of last year, this is a problem the computer industry has been grappling with for years. People are running more and more applications simultaneously on their computers — chat, word processing, web surfing, email — and there’s only so much screen space. Since each of these programs relies mostly on visual stimuli, they all wind up overlapping and confusing the heck out of us.

Now, as reseachers like Mary Czerwinski have found, getting a larger screen can improve your productivity by up to 10% merely because it lets you juggle more visual inputs at once. But clearly there’s still an upper limit to our attention. So maybe the answer lies, as the folks in the ambient-technology community would argue, in moving some of our computing tasks away from the screen? If more computing information came to us via audio, we could monitor more streams at once without having the data collide with one another.

Of course, we could also just stop the madness and turn some of those streams off, heh. But where’s the fun in that?


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I'm Clive Thompson, a writer on science, technology, and culture. This blog collects bits of offbeat research I'm running into, and musings thereon.

Currently, I'm a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine and a columnist for Wired magazine. I also write for Fast Company and Wired magazine's web site, among other places. Email or AOL IM me (pomeranian99) to say hi or send in something strange!

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Recent Entries

The “Milky Way Transit Authority” map

Should automobile software be open-sourced?

My Bookforum review of Jaron Lanier’s “You Are Not A Gadget”

Molecular secrets of the “iron-plated snail”

Garry Kasparov, cyborg

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a bunch of stuff

January 31, 2010 » 07:29 PM
V. A. To me death seems to be an evil.
M. What, to those who are al­ready dead? or to those who must die?
A. To both.
M. It is a mis­ery, then, be­cause an evil?
A. Cer­tain­ly.
M. Then those who have al­ready died, and those who have still got to die, are both mis­er­able?
A. So it ap­pears to me.
M. Then all are mis­er­able?
A. Ev­ery one.

January 24, 2010 » 03:22 PM

One of the more interesting trends is family, which came in at number five. Specifically, discussion about family, moms, dads, daughters, etc. jumped during 2009. With Facebook users getting older, this isn’t a big surprise. However, the fact that the mention of “kids” jumped by a factor of five this year is rather dramatic. It’s tough to know what this means, though. (via Facebook Unveils Most-Mentioned Topics of 2009

)

January 15, 2010 » 01:36 PM

BEYOND AWESOME. They are announcing a recall of the Plush Uterus “due to a potential choking hazard for children”. To apply for it, “Please send an email to the address below with the subject line, ‘UTERUS OPT OUT’”.

January 14, 2010 » 10:04 PM

“To order, please TYPE “YES” IN CHECKBOX BELOW TO AGREE YOU UNDERSTAND THIS PLUSH MUST BE KEPT AWAY FROM KIDS (it is a sex organ, after all). If it is not checked, WE WILL NOT SEND THE UTERUS.” (via @ibogost)

January 11, 2010 » 01:45 PM

I watched Space: 1999 back in the day, but I swear to god I do not remember this scene.

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Collision Detection: A Blog by Clive Thompson