About Me

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I'm a life-long New Englander, father of 4 challenging kids (I know: I'm supposed to say "wonderful", but while that'd be true, technically speaking, it'd also be misleading), and fortunate husband to my favorite wife of more than 20 years. I've got over 20 years experience breaking things as a test engineer, quality engineer, reliability engineer, and most recently (and most enjoyably) a Product Safety / EMC Compliance Engineer. In the photo, I'm on the left.

Saturday, April 21, 2012

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:




11 comments:

  1. I must ask the hubs if he ever took a hit to the head lol.

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  2. It merely proves that a woman's brain has to be INJURED to equal a man's brain. just fact.

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    1. Hehe...to equal an injured man's brain, perhaps.

      I suppose we're all injured in one way or another!

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  3. I do like to start my day sniggering. Thanks for that. Though I did notice that none of these multi-taskers were able to put themselves back in the pants and zip them closed. I don't want to think about what happened when they left the room.

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  4. Being an IT guy, my JOB is to multi task, and without any degree of arrogance, I can say I do it fairly well. That said, I don't LIKE doing it, and I tend to pay less attention to detail. I do occasionally drop the ball on some of the things that I'm doing, but getting five or six things done at once, sometimes has that trade off.

    As I read, just before you started rationalizing the idea that men GET more cranial injuries, goes back to a post I'd made on a different blog once, about "caveman days".

    Just about every difference between men and women that I've noticed, can be relatively convincingly explained away from going back to the day of the cave(wo)men, though... who really knows?
    The theory is that just about everything we do, harkens back to the caveman days. Men talk less, women shop more / longer, because in caveman days, men would lose their prey (from which they would receive said damage), while women were free to chat with others and "network" while foraging for the biggest and best berries and such.

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    1. I don't recall you whacking your head too much when you were a kid. Nasty migraines, but not so much trauma.

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  5. I didn't know that about the car accident (yikes) and am very pleased to hear your wife is nearly back on track. Thank goodness the brain can recover like that.

    I was also really hard on my body in the name of fun/sport. Hmmmm. And I once tried to shave my teeth and brush my leg.

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    1. My father used to send us to bed saying 'comb your teeth and brush your head'. :)

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  6. I am great at multitasking, but it's too stressful, and I am not able to handle stress very well. I like to give everything I do my full attention.

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    1. I can do it in small bursts, but sometimes my attention just lingers. Stress I got in spades!

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