[Air-l] multitasking

[Dr. T. Michael Roberts]

Charlie,
I cannot multi-task and find your explanation of why
some people can and some people can’t convince. I’m
sitting here listening to instrumental music as I
write this. I can also read while listening to
instrumental music. I can neither compose prose nor
read it while listening to vocal music. The words
being sung distract me as badly as would two texts
each of them being spoken into the opposite ear. 

My attention ability is great enough that I can put
myself enough inside a text to let that text horizon
my experience for a while and experience whatever
world is being evoked by the text as an alternative
reality for that while. I only understood how there
could be people in the world who knew how to read but
did not read for pleasure when I grasped that everyone
does not fully immerse in a text in this way. I do the
same with a good film. I think it is easier to immerse
in a film than in a text because less cognitive
processing is needed to translate the signs into an
alternative reality to be inhabited for a while. I’m
assuming that attention ability includes a capacity to
read signifiers and experience that which is signified
as immediate.
 

I’m a distance educator (English, Education,
Psychology, and Statistics) and so is my SO (Math).
I’m convinced that she reads mathematical symbols and
immediately experiences a reality based on these signs
which I do not. She can also grade Algebra or an essay
while watching a movie. I can not grade essays and do
anything else that even remotely involves words at the
same time. We both have excellent attention capacity.
Her divide capacity is also excellent whereas mine is
all but non-existent.  
TMike 


--- Charlie Balch <charlie at balch.org> wrote:

> It is fascinating how we live in a world that is
> very different from that of
> even a few decades ago. The changes to our world
> expose different abilities.
> 
> I suggest a paradigm that we all have certain amount
> of "attention ability"
> and that we also have differing attention "divide
> abilities." A person with
> a high level of attention ability and a high level
> divide ability could
> effectively multitask. A more moderate attention
> ability with a combined
> moderate level of attention divide ability might be
> described as attention
> deficient disorder. 
> 
> A person with high attention ability but low
> attention divide ability would
> be able to do very well on some tasks. For instance,
> many persons who create
> computer code have been found to be border-line
> autistic. Autistics are very
> good at focusing on one thing such as the creation
> of computer code.
> 
> Like computer programming, new technologies are
> exposing talents and
> abilities that may not have been useful in earlier
> times. I find this very
> Darwinian.
> 
> Charlie
> LSU Doctoral Candidate (hopefully done soon)
> AWC Professor of CIS
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: air-l-bounces at listserv.aoir.org
> [mailto:air-l-bounces at listserv.aoir.org] On Behalf
> Of Sam Tilden
> Sent: Saturday, October 14, 2006 4:12 PM
> To: air-l at listserv.aoir.org
> Subject: Re: [Air-l] multitasking
> 
> Technically this is incorrect! They are better able
> to rapidly change the
> focus of attention. The article is the Journal of
> Cognitive Neuroscience.
>    
>   Sam
> 
> Nancy Baym <nbaym at ku.edu> wrote:
>   >As this is the Association of Internet
> RESEARCHERS, I wonder if anyone
> has
> >done any Research on multitasking -- to address the
> interesting 
> >conjectures that a bunch of people have.
> 
> 
> I don't have the citation, and it's not internet
> research, but the
> pscyhologist Barbara Rogoff
>
(http://psych.ucsc.edu/faculty/brogoff/index.php?Home)
> has done some cross
> cultural work between Utah, USA and South America
> and shown that the South
> American mothers are better able to multitask than
> the American mothers.
> What she did was to bring a toy for the child to
> play with while she
> interviewed the mother that was too difficult for
> the child to figure out
> alone. The American mothers had to alternate between
> attending to the
> interview and the child, while the South American
> mothers (and I apologize
> for not remembering the country in which she was
> working) could do both
> simulatneously.
> 
> Nancy
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“In so far as literature turns back on itself and examines parodies or treats ironically its own signifying procedures, it becomes the most complex account of signification we possess.” – John Deely

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