I spend the majority of my day multitasking. The more productive I am, the better I feel about the day. I never sit quietly and have breakfast (my only quiet meal before my kids get up) without doing work or reading or getting something else done while I eat. Sometimes it's a good thing because I'm very efficient and able to get a lot done. Sometimes it's not so good because I tend to live life at a frantic pace, staying busy all the time. I've always been like this, and it's something I know I need to work on. But it's gotten even worse since I had kids. I'm always trying to get a million things done at once. And because of that, my memory has become terrible since becoming a mom. I used to have a great memory, but these days, if I don't write things down, I forget them. Now I know it's not just me. A new study shows why your brain will not allow you to easily do more than two things at once. The research, published in the journal Science, had participants perform a letter-matching task while their brains were scanned. When given two tasks, the part of the brain known as the medial prefrontal cortex (MFC) divided so that half focused on the first task, and half focused on the second. So if you're trying to work on two things at once (like me eating breakfast while working on the computer), your brain adjusts to allow that to happen. But when you add a third task to the mix, things don't go so smoothly. "Here, they saw the subject's accuracy drop considerably. It was as though, once each hemisphere was occupied with managing one task, there was nowhere for the third task to go," according to the study. Participants performed as if they forgot one of the three tasks completely. So maybe that's why I can only focus on a few things at a time before I start to forget what I was going to write on the grocery list or who I was about to call. I can stop blaming it on getting older and just blame it on my brain (haha). What do you think? |
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