http://www.livescience.com/health/brain-mu...mit-100415.html

two tasks at once only, thank you. Now to figure out how the brain do that, and make a chip that can do the same, so that one can have any number of tasks going if one is willing to fork over the crash...

Hmm, so I guess all those people who can pat their head, rub their tummy, whistle, and walk all at the same time aren't multitasking? Hell, I just did that (sans the walking, though I'm pretty sure I could have managed that) while plotting the steps to cooking tonight's dinner in my head.

I'm beginning to suspect that either this really doesn't count as multitasking (lemme guess; all those tasks actually count as the "trying to disprove the article" task?), or the researchers kind of missed the mountain while studying the mole hill.

i wonder if they could as "automated". That is, you can start a repeating motion, and the body will keep doing that without constant monitoring.

with walking, you do not think about each step before you take it (at least not on a familiar route). So yes, there may be more tasks then two possible (depending on definition of task) but you can at best keep a conversation going (beyond automated canned responses, resulting in the familiar "are you even listening?!") and do something like putting a puzzle together at the same time (each demands a certain level of concentration, but do not step on each others physical needs).

Hobgoblin, you are correct. much of the stuff we do can be attributed to muscle memory and reflex. None of us had to think heavily about how to walk since we were kids. You repeat an action enough times it all just becomes reflex. A good example is me playing my Trumpet. I have played it for nearly 25 years. When I warm up I don't even think about it anymore I just run through the exercises while listening to my girlfriend quite easily. But doing something that is more intensive or we don't do every second of our lives it does kinda seem like that article. Following a TV show while reading is a good example. I do that a lot.

I thought there was a chip in Augmentation that did the attention splitting thing though.

there is, tho i dont recall its precise rules effect right now.

I cant think, read and take part in a conversation at the same time.

Those all require using similar parts of your brain though. They're saying your brain, as a whole, cannot do more than two active tasks at a time. I'm pretty sure I've cooked while talking on the phone (an example they used) while also thinking the person I was talking to was a complete douchebag for calling me while I was cooking. Despite the apparent impossibility of such a thing.

Maybe I'm some kind of awesome new mutant.

And there's two implants like that. The Encephelon and the Attention Co-Processor.

However in that above case my said think was about I believe a maths(or philosophy) problem completely unrelated to the other tasks I was doing.

They don't suggest that - what they are saying is your brain doesn't work on them both at the same time. Instead, it thinks about talking, then changes to cooking, then changes back to talking etc.

And it stores the information about the one task in half the frontal lobe while it thinks about the other task in the other half of the frontal lobe.

Add a third task into the mix (say, cooking, talkinging on the phone, and reading a book) and you can't do any of the three.

so its mostly a question of "ram" for buffering task data?

Well, "ram" in our brains is more equivalent of our short term memory (which holds about 7 items). The frontal lobe is more like our CPU (and its "dual core").

So if you're only doing one task at a time (just switching from one to the other repeatedly), how is that multitasking? And why is it only multitasking if it's distributing the workforce in the front lobe, but not in "muscle memory" or otherwise "automated" portions? I'm just having trouble grasping the premise and why it's such a limited definition.

Because you can only think about two goals at once.

"I need to make sure this doesn't burn" and "Listen to what Aunt Betty is trying to tell me."

As soon as you add something else into that mix you forget one of your tasks.

Yet I can read, talk on the phone, and watch TV all at the same time. And answer questions about any of those three tasks as they are asked.

Does my speed at reading slow down while doing that? You betcha. But I'm still able to do it while performing the other two tasks.

See, that's the thing. Its talking about average people.

God help me if I ever try to do two things at--

Oooh, shiney! *Dives after sparkly thing*

Have you ever actually been tested on your multitasking ability? Studies have shown that people who rate themselves higher as multitaskers are actually worse at it.

Not unlike drivers in that respect.

I have ADOS.

Attention Deficit Ooo Shiny.

So yes, I'm pretty sure I can't multitask well.

Shouldn't it be "you can't think about more than two things at once" than actual multitasking? Because those ideas are not synonyms of one another, as previously pointed out.

As the experiment that was run stated, "multitasking" was "performing two jobs with different goals at once."

I didn't read the article, but I heard a radio blip about it. They offered people money to perform some task. Then offered them more money to do a second task at the same time (and one would assume this is not "pat your head and rub your belly" but something that actually requires thinking) and watched these people's brain activity as they performed both tasks.

The first task takes up the entire frontal lobe. When the second task comes along the information about that task is shunted over into the left frontal lobe and the right frontal lobe deals with the second task.

It should be noted that when you're "doing two things at once" you don't perform them as well as if you were doing one at a time. This is why it's becoming increasingly illegal to talk on a cell phone while driving: most people prioritize the second task (phone conversation) over the first task (driving).

Exactly my point. Multitasking != Thinking.