Multitasking

There has been a lot of discussion at OOTJ and elsewhere about multitasking. Like many parents, I questioned my teenagers' ability to do homework while checking email, instant messaging, and watching television. I simply didn't understand how all tasks could be performed equally well. It turns out that there is a scientific basis for my concern. According to an article published recently in Science, the brain is configured to handle up to two tasks at a time, but no more. Click here for an abstract of the article; full text is available for a fee. The Science article was the subject of a piece that appeared on LiveScience.com, a website that reports on scientific and technological advances for laypeople. The research showed that when confronted with two tasks, the medial prefrontal cortex (the part of the brain that is colored green in the illustration) divides--half of the region focuses on one task, and half focuses on the other task. If a third task is added to the mix, the brain seems to "forget" one of the three tasks and returns to a binary sitation it is equipped to handle. The brain is simply not designed to perform accurately more than two tasks at once.

The Old Brain

There has been a lot of information published about how students in their teens and twenties learn as well as strategies that instructors can adopt to increase their pedagogical effectiveness. Certainly this is important information--I know how much I have benefited as a teacher from these insights. Nonetheless, it was interesting for me to read this article from today's New York Times Education Life section on how older people learn. I must confess that I have a personal interest in this subject, not only because I occasionally have students who are not of traditional law-school age, but also because I often need to learn new things and sometimes find that to be a bit of a challenge. Is it fair to blame this difficulty on the fact that I am getting older?

According to the article,

Brains in middle age, which, with increased life spans, now stretches from the 40s to the late 60s, [...] get more easily distracted. ...

[C]an an old brain learn, and then remember what it learns? Put another way, is this a brain that should be in school?

As it happens, yes. While it's tempting to focus on the flaws in older brains, that inducement overlooks how capable they've become. Over the past several years, scientists have looked deeper into how brains age and confirmed that they continue to develop through and beyond middle age.

Many longheld views, including the one that 40 percent of brain cells are lost, have been overturned. What is stuffed into your head may not have vanished but has simply been squirreled away in the folds of your neurons.

[This can make it difficult to retrieve information because] neural connections, which receive, process and transmit information, can weaken with disuse or age.

The article offers some specific recommendations for adults to employ to make it easier to retrieve information, connect new information with what is already known, and keep our brains in shape. For one thing, we can actively seek out ideas and thoughts that are contrary to what we believe.

Teaching new facts should not be the focus of adult education ... Instead, continued brain development and a richer form of learning may require that you 'bump up against people and ideas' that are different. In a history class, that might mean reading multiple viewpoints, and then prying open brain networks by reflecting on how what was learned has changed your view of the world.

Learning a foreign language, taking a different route to work, doing anything that causes the brain to stretch is how we nourish our brains and keep them young.