Practice Makes Men A Multitasker!

Pulse

oi-Staff

By Super Admin

Monday, May 16, 2011, 17:36

You've heard for a long time that the fair gender is better multi taskers than the masculine heroes. While there are many arguments on the truth of this statement, even men can have some skills in multi tasking. A new study has proved that even men can be multi tasking with practice.

It's the training and practice that makes men multitaskers. A key limitation to efficient multitasking is the speed with which our prefrontal cortex processes information. This speed can be drastically increased through training and practice.

With training, the 'thinking' regions of the brain become very fast at doing each task, thereby quickly freeing them up to take on other tasks. The fundamental reason we are lousy multitaskers is because our brains process each task slowly, creating a bottleneck at the central stage of decision making. Practice enables our brain to process each task more quickly through this bottleneck, speeding up performance overall. Even after extensive practice, our brain does not really do two tasks at once. It is still processing one task at a time, but it does it so fast it gives us the illusion we are doing two tasks simultaneously.

Paul E. Dux, a former research fellow at Vanderbilt, and now a faculty member at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia conducted this study. The findings are published in journal Neuron.