The daily life imposes on us frequently to be aware of several things at once. According to a study, as women, and particularly mothers, who more work in multitasking? Apparently, they spend nearly half their time doing two or more things at once. Work, housework and childcare make the switch multitasking brains of women who have children are working at full capacity. On the contrary, parents only spend a third of their time to multitasking and more rewarding activities. To read more interesting article like this you can also visit http://women-running-together.com/
Another previous study, published in PNAS, pointed to the female brain is better wiring to do several things at once.
In any case, how do you get the brain serve several different tasks at once?
We can walk and talk at the same time, or even add a third task, like listening to music, and a fourth, like eat us ice cream. This is automatic “programs” running without paying little attention. It is much-automated tasks that we carry out without paying little attention.
But things change when we have to concentrate on the job we are doing. Think of how difficult it was to drive us and have a conversation with the passenger, when we were novice drivers. Strictly speaking, we cannot do two things at once that require our concentration simultaneously. However, we all have the experience of talking to someone, but also be able to capture a significant word in a conversation we hear around us and divert our attention to it.
That is precisely how we have to do two things at once, shifting attention sequentially from one to another. How he does the brain? Thanks to a symmetrical structure located in the center of the brain called the thalamus.
About the size of two small nuts joined by the medial-anterior part of the thalamus receives all the information from the senses except smell. Its mission is to select the really relevant information, to send it to the cerebral cortex, where it is processed consciously and a response is issued. This answer again pass through the thalamus before running. Without the work of intermediary thalami cerebral cortex could not function at full capacity.
It is what happens in some disorders, such as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, characterized by difficulty focusing on a task. Several studies suggest that the thalamus, considered the switch multitasking brain may not be working properly.
And how the thalamus decides what information is relevant? Well, this is marked by our interests and expectations at all times, for the work we are doing or the place where we are headed. If we walk down the street and we are hungry, restaurants labels will become important information for the brain at that time. Or if you need to find a taxi, the green light indicating that they are free focus our attention.
Again is the thalamus which, acting as a switch diverts attention to the most important task sense we are conducting at that time, as in the previous examples would view, temporarily blocking the information coming from the other senses. A recent study published in Natureparticular which is the outer covering of the thalamus, called reticular nucleus, which actually carry out the task to divert attention from one task to another.
Everybody can do several things at once? According to a study conducted between conductors and published in Plos One, people most often do several things simultaneously are the least prepared to work in multitasking. According to the study, they are more impulsive, more prone to seek new sensations, and overconfidence and unrealistic in their ability to do several things at once.
However, people who scored higher a test to measure your multitasking skills were precisely the least work simultaneously on several activities, because they have a greater ability to concentrate on a single task, which absorbs them.
And, according to the study, people who are involved in several tasks at once often have difficulty keeping your attention on something concrete, because your brain filters the relevant information worse.
