Appreciation Week: Susan Perry

If you want to keep up with current medical and behavioral research, MinnPost's Susan Perry is worth a daily read.

Her story for today, Think you're great at multitasking? Think again, is a good example of why I appreciate her. This is reporting on research I haven't seen elsewhere yet.

One of the questionnaires asked the students to rank their multitasking ability relative to other students. Some 70 percent of them said they were (like Garrison Keillor’s fictional Lake Wobegon children) “above average” at multitasking.

Of course, it’s statistically impossible for 70 percent of people to be above average on anything....

Indeed, the chronically multitasking students who had inflated estimates of their multitasking abilities were the least capable of doing it effectively. On the other hand, those students who tended not to multitask in “real life” were among the 25 percent who scored the highest on the study’s OSPAN test. They were much better able to keep their attention focused on the task at hand.

 Other recent stories I particularly enjoyed were:

• 'Motivated reasoning' helps myths persist about Obama's health-care reform, study finds
• Kitchen advances have had unintended consequences for the human body (did you know that the human overbite didn't exist until forks or chopsticks came into common use?)
• Skin problems top Mayo's list of reasons people visit doctors (this one was full of surprises)

Thanks, Susan, for keeping up and keeping me up on things.