From: Andrew Clough (aclough@mit.edu)
Date: Wed May 08 2002 - 12:58:55 MDT
At 02:21 PM 5/8/2002 +0200, you wrote:
>On Tue, 7 May 2002, YP Fun wrote:
>
> >The whole concept of threading is beyond
> >nature. Is there anything in nature capable of
> >multithreading. All human beings are singly
> >threaded. We live life over a single thread.
> >We can NEVER do two things at the same time
> >at any given time.
>
>I disagree. From personal experience, I know that I am able to listen to
>two conversations at the same time (works better if the voices
>are very different, and if one is on the right and the other on the left).
>This also discards all the "automatic" actions, like walking, eating and
>scratching my nose while reading a book and avoiding cars, all at the same
>time (don't try it, it's dangerous :-)
>
>Ciao,
>Alfio
Are those two conversations in different formats? I find that I can carry
on a verbal conversation while typing, but not follow two verbal
discussions at the same time. With two Instant Messaging conversations I
can just switch back and forth quickly, since the last remark is saved, but
that's not the same as doing two things at once. Of course I'm
significantly worse than average at picking conversations out of background
noise, so I might not exactly be a valid data point...
Driving is interesting. On familiar roads I can drive pretty much without
conscious thought at all. I can remember times when I've driven for
minutes while thinking intensely about something else. This ends when
something interesting happens, like a car pulling out in front of
me. However, afterwords I can remember both driving along for the last few
minutes and thinking for the last few minutes, but not doing both at the
same time.
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