Record number of motorists prosecuted for driving while using mobile phones
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From: Adrian on 17 Mar 2010 13:03 NM <nik.morgan(a)mac.com> gurgled happily, sounding much like they were saying: >> > Collecting his medication is for his benefit, certainly not mine. >> In that case - you could argue that using his blue badge was ok even >> when he was not in the car because the journey was for his benefit. > AIUI this is the case. So you see no problem with parking in a disabled bay at the supermarket to do your weekly shop, so long as you were getting him a pint of milk at the same time?
From: Ret. on 17 Mar 2010 13:08 Conor wrote: > On 17/03/2010 10:10, Ret. wrote: > > >> It has nothing to do with intelligence Conor - it has everything to >> do with the biological limitations of the human brain. > > Rubbish. I can put a RJ45 connector on CAT6 in about 15 seconds, > almost without thought. I expect it'd take you a good few minutes > concentrating extremely hard. Sorry Conor, you cannot escape from the simple fact that the human brain is useless at multi-tasking: Research on human multitasking Since the 1990s, experimental psychologists have started experiments on the nature and limits of human multitasking. In general, these studies have disclosed that people show severe interference when even very simple tasks are performed at the same time, if both tasks require selecting and producing action (e.g., (Gladstones, Regan & Lee 1989) (Pashler 1994)). Many researchers believe that action planning represents a "bottleneck", which the human brain can only perform one task at a time. Psychiatrist Richard Hallowell[2] has gone so far as to describe multitasking as a "mythical activity in which people believe they can perform two or more tasks simultaneously." http://www.physorg.com/news170349575.html Social scientists have long assumed that it's impossible to process more than one string of information at a time. The brain just can't do it. But many researchers have guessed that people who appear to multitask must have superb control over what they think about and what they pay attention to. Is there a gift? So Nass and his colleagues, Eyal Ophir and Anthony Wagner, set out to learn what gives multitaskers their edge. What is their gift? "We kept looking for what they're better at, and we didn't find it," said Ophir, the study's lead author and a researcher in Stanford's Communication Between Humans and Interactive Media Lab. http://www.futurepundit.com/archives/002161.html June 07, 2004 Brains Can Not Process Two Tasks In Parallel Faced with two tasks to do at once the brain appears to switch back and forth between them rather than thinking about them in parallel. It's readily apparent that handling two things at once is much harder than handling one thing at a time. Spend too much time trying to juggle more than one objective and you'll end up wanting to get rid of all your goals besides sleeping. The question is, though, what makes it so hard to process two things at once? Two theories try to explain this phenomenon: "passive queuing" and "active monitoring." The former says that information has to line up for a chance at being processed at some focal point of the brain, while the latter suggests that the brain can process two things at once - it just needs to use a complicated mechanism to keep the two processes separate. Recent research from MIT points to the former as an explanation. Yuhong Jiang, Rebecca Saxe and Nancy Kanwisher, in a study to be published in the June issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the American Psychological Society, examined the brain activity involved in multitasking. They gave people two simple tasks. Task one was identifying shapes, and for some subjects, task two was identifying letters, for others it was identifying colors. The subjects were forced to switch from one task to the other in either one and a half seconds or one tenth of a second. When they had to switch faster, subjects would take as much as twice as long to respond than when switching more slowly. Using MRI technology, Jiang, Saxe and Kanwisher examined subjects' brain activity while performing these tasks. They observed no increase in the sort of activity that would be involved in keeping two thought processes separate when subjects had to switch faster. This suggests that there are no complicated mechanisms that allow people to perform two tasks at once. Instead, we have to perform the next task only after the last one is finished. http://scienceblogs.com/neurophilosophy/2007/08/how_the_brain_limits_our_abili.php We know well that it is very difficult to concentrate fully on more than one task; researchers are now beginning to gain an understanding of the neural bases of the limits of multitasking (and some hope to overcome them with augmented cognition). Recent neuroimaging studies in which participants switch between one task and another have implicated several regions of the frontal cortex as bottlenecks to the processing of information. It is emerging that multitasking places excessive demands on executive control centres in the frontal lobe. Hence, multitasking is counterproductive - not only does completion of all the tasks take longer than if they were performed one at a time, but performance on all tasks is also impaired. (This next bit is particularly relevant): it was found that the auditory and visual stimuli produced overlapping activation of regions in the frontal and parietal lobes, and that there was significant interference when the visual stimulus was presented within several hundred milliseconds of the auditory stimulus. But it was also found that, when there was a small interval between the two stimuli, activity in the prefrontal and middle temporal cortices correlated to the visual stimulus was suppressed. Sensory modality-specific activity in the visual cortex was also reduced, and there was a corresponding impairment in awareness of the visual stimulus. ----- In other words - when the brain is concentrating on auditory input (mobile phone conversation), the ability to respond to visual stimulus (something happening in the road ahead), is impaired. ------- So there it is Conor - you are either mistaken about your multi-tasking abilities - or you are Superman. Which is it? Kev
From: NM on 17 Mar 2010 13:33 On 17 Mar, 17:03, Adrian <toomany2...(a)gmail.com> wrote: > NM <nik.mor...(a)mac.com> gurgled happily, sounding much like they were > saying: > > >> > Collecting his medication is for his benefit, certainly not mine. > >> In that case - you could argue that using his blue badge was ok even > >> when he was not in the car because the journey was for his benefit. > > AIUI this is the case. > > So you see no problem with parking in a disabled bay at the supermarket > to do your weekly shop, so long as you were getting him a pint of milk at > the same time? No, according to the book that came with the badge it wouldn 't be a problem but that's irrelevent as I don't do it anyway.
From: Adrian on 17 Mar 2010 13:51 NM <nik.morgan(a)mac.com> gurgled happily, sounding much like they were saying: >> >> > Collecting his medication is for his benefit, certainly not mine. >> >> In that case - you could argue that using his blue badge was ok even >> >> when he was not in the car because the journey was for his benefit. >> > AIUI this is the case. >> So you see no problem with parking in a disabled bay at the supermarket >> to do your weekly shop, so long as you were getting him a pint of milk >> at the same time? > No, according to the book that came with the badge it wouldn 't be a > problem I think you need to re-read the book. The extracts Kev posted disagree with that analysis. > but that's irrelevent as I don't do it anyway. I see no difference between that and the scenario you defend.
From: Ret. on 17 Mar 2010 15:02
Conor wrote: > On 17/03/2010 17:08, Ret. wrote: > >> Sorry Conor, you cannot escape from the simple fact that the human >> brain is useless at multi-tasking: >> > Can you tie a shoelace whilst holding a conversation? > > Yes. > > >> So Nass and his colleagues, Eyal Ophir and Anthony Wagner, set out to >> learn what gives multitaskers their edge. What is their gift? >> >> "We kept looking for what they're better at, and we didn't find it," >> said Ophir, the study's lead author and a researcher in Stanford's >> Communication Between Humans and Interactive Media Lab. > > Here's a clue: They can do one of the tasks so well and have done it > for so long that it requires little attention to complete. > > >> June 07, 2004 >> Brains Can Not Process Two Tasks In Parallel >> Faced with two tasks to do at once the brain appears to switch back >> and forth between them rather than thinking about them in parallel. >> > > Agreed. See above. > > >> In other words - when the brain is concentrating on auditory input >> (mobile phone conversation), the ability to respond to visual >> stimulus (something happening in the road ahead), is impaired. >> > > Only to you. I seem to have little problem doing it. For example, take > amateur radio. Whilst operating and having a conversation, I'm on the > laptop filling in a log and finding out about the person I'm talking > with. OK, we'll just have to accept that you are Superman - or just abnormal. Perhaps like Steve Martin - The Man with Two Brains? Have a go at this: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2009/07/19/technology/20090719-driving-game.html And then tell us honestly how you got on... Kev |