Your brain comes equipped with a neural bottleneck that thwarts multi-tasking ... according to researchers at Vanderbilt University. So what? What does that say about people who tend to do many things at once?
Neuroscientists Paul E. Dux and René Marois found that when we handle two things at once, the brain slows down.
You’d think that with your 100 billion neurons processing information at rates of up to a thousand times a second, you could do two tasks at once, without a problem. Not so....
Researchers described a central "bottleneck" that exists in the brain and prevents people from doing two things at once. Check out the results published in the Dec. 21 issue of Neuron. Could this research contribute to a ban of cell phone use while driving.
Researchers found that that the central bottleneck is created by an inability of the lateral frontal and prefrontal cortex, and also the superior frontal cortex, to process two tasks at the same time.
Interestingly neither Marois nor Dux use their cell phones while driving, because they found that dual-task slow down can lose the driver up to a second, and that could create a crash when faster response times are needed to make a critical judgment.
My question is ...Then why can we chat with a passenger and still drive a car without problems...? What do you think?
Ellen I find the opposite. If I'm really thoughful about what the passenger is saying, I can't completely focus on my driving. This is one area that multitasking definitely slows down my brain. Thoughts?
Posted by: Robyn McMaster | January 22, 2007 9:41 AM | Permalink to Comment