http://www.physorg.com/news170015185.html

Training increases brain processing speed and improves our ability to multitask, new research from Vanderbilt University indicates.

"We found that a key limitation to efficient multitasking is the speed with which our prefrontal cortex processes information, and that this speed can be drastically increased through training and practice,” says Paul E. Dux, a former research fellow at Vanderbilt, and now a faculty member at the University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia and co-author of the study, which was published in the June 15 issue of the journal Neuron. "Specifically, we found that with training, the 'thinking' regions of our brain become very fast at doing each task, thereby quickly freeing them up to take on other tasks.”


Bonus: http://www.mindhacks.com/blog/2009/08/m … e_don.html

Multi media, we don't need it do we?

"People who spend lots of time monitoring multiple sources of information are worse at switching between tasks and are less able to focus exclusively on single sources according to a new study published in the Proceedings in the National Academy of Sciences.

It's a well designed, rigorous study of the type that we are sorely missing in the debate over the psychological effects of media which, sadly, often amounts to little more than hot air.

It's also been picked up by hundreds of news sources, almost all of which miss the subtlety of what it's actually telling us...

... what we can't tell from this study is whether heavy parallel media monitoring causes these effects, or whether people who are less able to exclusively focus and switch prefer more media concurrently. Maybe they're actually absorbing more of it in total. We don't know from this study."

Last edited by ruiner (2009 August 27, 7:07 pm)