From: Lee Corbin (lcorbin@tsoft.com)
Date: Tue Jun 18 2002 - 01:12:02 MDT
On Saturday, June 01, 2002 3:19 PM Phil Osborn made a
remark that hit home:
> Men in particular have difficulty trying to multitask...
and this accords completely with my own experience, only
I'd phrase it as the questions:
1. Do women indeed multitask better than men?
and
2. If so, why?
First, discussions such as these always must have
the following vital disclaimer or its equivalent:
All differences between similar groups are only
statistical and *do not* necessarily apply to
any particular person.
Especially not to the people on THIS list 8-D
When I was 22 I taught the 4th grade, and one day for some
reason had to go down to one of the 2nd grade classrooms to
discuss something with a teacher there. I walked in while
Ms. X was showing a little boy how to cut colored paper
into certain desirable shapes. She looked up at me and
listened attentively to my question, and we began to
discuss it. Her attentions to the little boy and her
guidance of his clumsy fingers didn't falter, and to
my further astonishment she suddenly yelled at two boys
in the back of the room who were evidently beginning to
engage in mischief. It was clear that while she was
holding up her end of the conversation with me, she had
utterly no trouble at all being conscious of nearly
everything else happening in the class too, and at the
same time giving verbal and physical guidance to the
boy trying to cut the paper figures.
I left that classroom quite humbled, and realized that
if I lived a million years (this was before uploading)
I'd never be able to handle a group of 2nd graders the
way that she could.
Later, a friend who is quite knowledgeable about the ways
and means of hunter-gatherer women gave me her explanation:
women had to learn to multitask while handling children
and doing other tasks simultaneously. Google says
http://www.cnn.com/2001/US/08/07/gupta.debrief.otsc/
Apparently it's true.
Not too long after the above incident I was trying to
figure out what was going on. Noting on the one hand
men's predominance in most areas of academic and
intellectual performance---which may or may not be
entirely due tradition and discrimination against
women---it occurred to me that men might compartmentalize
better while women multitask better. This would follow
if men's minds more resembled the water-tight compartments
of a ship, and women's minds a well integrated large
office. Also it might be explained the alleged emotionalism
of women (in accounts by men): men perhaps by nature find
it easier to shut out emotions when concentrating on
certain tasks for which they believe emotions to be
unimportant.
I'm rather proud of having made the above conjectures,
because five or six years later I read that indeed
women's corpus callosums are wider than are men's.
There is more interconnectivity one therefore
imagines, between women's hemispheres than men's.
Although Google showed up *some* reports that there
was *no* difference, I took the following from
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/1999/05/990518072823.htm
"The new data shed light on earlier observations concerning the corpus callosum, a large
body of nerve fibers that connects the right and left hemispheres of the brain. Those
studies showed that women have a relatively larger corpus callosum than men. The corpus
callosum, however, is composed of white matter, the tissue type seen in this study at
lower overall proportions in women than men in the brain, suggesting that evolution has
placed a priority on this structure in women.
"The implication of women having more white matter connecting between the hemispheres of
the brain is that they would have better communication between the different modes of
perceiving and relating to the world," says Raquel Gur. "On the other hand, men would
demonstrate a stronger concentration on working within any one of those modes."
Lee
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