Men can't Multitask...or Can They (we)?

So I've got what I think is an interesting enquiry into the arguable ability of men to multitask. It's a generalization that many men can't multitask at all, and most are of a bit of a lesser ability to multitask as compared to women.

This is certainly true in my own case: I can multitask to a minor degree only, while historically my beautiful wife has been a multitasking master.

That said, there has been a change over the last year. You may recall (or haven't read) that the wife, the eldest, and I were involved in an auto accident at the beginning of summer 2011. We were rear-ended. The boy and I were fine, relatively speaking, my wife has not yet fully recovered, as she suffered a concussion and other slowly repairing brain damage, not to mention some structural damage that put her through a few surgeries to correct.

I mention this only to concentrate on a change in her ability to do things like multitask. It went away completely in that blink-of-an-eye when our car was struck. Thought processes took longer, and assembling sentences became a challenge; she could not speak about one thing while doing another. She went from a parallel-path machine to a serial one, if you'll forgive my computer analogy.

As I've watched her recover these past 10 months I've watched her ability to multitask return to close-to-normal. It's clear to me that there is a close relationship between one's ability to multitask with damage to a specific portion of the brain. Blunt trauma can cause us to lose this ability. Makes sense to me. Probably not a revolutionary thought, really.

What has this got to do with anything? Well, if I look at how boys grow into men, the stereotype, which was certainly true in my case, is that boys play hard...and get hurt a lot. Personally, I've had concussions, Once I was knocked out cold by a blow to the head. I've bounced my head off of the ground, other heads, baseballs, knees, ice, rocks, tiles, wood, and countless other hard objects. It may bare noting that I've also broken bones and teeth, dislocated ankles and shoulders, crushed tendons, and all kinds of other mechanical damage as a result of my endless pursuit of fun.

I have seen in the last year my wife struggling with symptoms that I've learned how to live with over decades. It occurs to me that my own inability to do any degree of multitasking might well be due to the foolhardiness of my youth. To extend that, it might be the same for men everywhere.

If we were to undertake a study of men who can vs. men who can not multitask, what did their respective childhoods look like? I would not be surprised to find that those men who CAN multitask were not so physical as children, and probably did not sustain as much head trauma as those men who CAN'T multitask.

Just a thought.


This said, I give you the following proof that men can multitask: