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“ Complaints of forgetfulness among women in
their 40s and 50s are so prevalent that Peter M.
Meyer, a biostatistician at Chicago's Rush University
Medical Center, in the late 1990s conducted a study
intended to gauge how deeply the hormone changes
of menopause disrupt women's memory.”
“Instead, he got a lesson on women and multi‐
tasking. The tests of short‐term memory and verbal
memory consistently showed that women of this
age, though they complained of forgetfulness, were
not missing a step.”
“Their forgetfulness appeared to be a function of
depression, stress and "role overload" — the multi‐
tasking of many roles at once — Meyer concluded.”
reading a newspaper.
Unfortunately, this amazing power is not true of
your conscious mind and is perhaps due to its tiny,
limited processing power compared to your mighty
subconscious mind.
When your brain engages in several tasks that re‐
quire conscious attention it “discounts” the attention
applied to each by spreading its processing power
across each of the tasks...that spells bad news for
your productivity!
It has been shown in many experiments that peo‐
ple who multitask have bouts of forgetfulness and
reduced short‐term memory
Gary Small, a neuroscientist and author of the
book iBrain, warns that children who spend their
formative years multitasking lose out on chances to
“ Trying to learn while doing something else, such
as doing homework while watching TV, sends
information to an inappropriate part of the brain”,
explains Professor Russell Poldrack, a psychologist
at the University of California.
“Using brain‐scans, he has found if we multitask
while studying, the information goes into the stria‐
tum, a region of the brain involved in learning new
skills, from where it is difficult to retrieve facts and
ideas. If we are not distracted, it heads to the hippo‐
campus, a region involved in storing and recalling
information.”
“There is a cost to the way that our society is
changing. Humans are not built to work this way”,
Professor Poldrack, University Of California says.
“We're really built to focus.”
focus on developing crucial, but slow‐forming, inter‐
personal skills.
“With the weakening of the brain’s neural cir‐
cuitry, controlling human contact, our social inter‐
actions may become awkward and we tend to misin‐
terpret ‐ and even miss ‐ subtle, non‐verbal mes‐
sages,” he says.
Multi‐tasking denies us essential pauses in
our mental space.
“We need this time to develop our inner resources
and grow neural connections in the cortex humani‐
tatis ‐ the part of brain that makes us civilized crea‐
tures”, says Daniel Siegel, associate clinical professor
of psychiatry at UCLA Medical School in America.
I feel a big factor that played in getting my own
stress‐related disorder is the crazy multitasking I
had to do at work.
As a pharmacist, not only do we have to label, dis‐
pense and check prescriptions, but we also have to
manage the store and the staff, answer the telephone
and perform patient consultations‐all at the same
time!
I am sure many people can relate to my own sce‐
nario. I feel this modern day multitasking has been
David Shenk is the author of the famous book,
The Genius in All of Us: Why Everything You’ve Been
Told About Genetics, Talent, and IQ Is Wrong.
Shenk argues we have before us not a “talent scar‐
city,” but a “latent talent abundance.” Shenk states
“the vast majority of us have not even come close to
tapping what scientists call our ‘un‐actualized po‐
tential.’ ”
Shenk reveals science is revealing the attainment
of “genius” to be the product of highly concentrated
effort.
Shenk also cites some of history’s great achievers
— Ted Williams and Michael Jordan, Mozart and
Beethoven — as examples of individuals who
worked hard, day and night, to master their chosen
fields.
Malcolm Gladwell also seems to agree, at least in
part, with this notion. In his recent work, Outliers,
Gladwell looked at people who rose above the rest
and achieved incredible success in their respective
endeavors.
An interesting point Gladwell makes is all people
successful in their respective fields all have one
December, 2011 Yang-Sheng (Nurturing Life) 39