Quod Erat Demonstrandum

Fact: Baseline Humans Suck Like The Intake Valve On A Jet Engine.

Just stumbled on this. Whilst preparing a banquet for twelve, teaching young Anouk the basics of bird photography, founding a new multi-deist religion based on Flemish politics and convincing the misses to do some exotic dancing to fund my weed habit.


Gamers are better at multitasking than baseline humans. A researcher at Oregon State University is measuring the "switching cost" of going from one task to another, like paying attention to your mobile phone and to the road in front of you. Multitasking gets more expensive the more complex each individual task is. She concludes that gamers have higher proficiency at multitasking, however.
There are individual differences in the costs of multi-tasking, Lien said. In her lab studies, a typical response to a single stimulus might take 300 milliseconds. Adding a second task increases the response to about 800 milliseconds. A millisecond is 1/1000th of a second, so the delay may not seem like much – until you extend the difference to a car driving 60 miles an hour and realize the response rate more than doubles, Lien said.
In her lab studies, she has yet to test any volunteers who are immune to delays in multi-tasking, though she says some students do much better than others.

"I have to say that the best ones are those who play a lot of video games," she pointed out. "Those are lab studies, however, and not driving tests."


Cheers to BoingBoing