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21 Sep 09

The Vietnamese miracle - The Daily Princetonian

  • Vietnam still has a long way to go — beneath the surface lie several serious problems, not least of which is the potential danger of Western and regional corporations exploiting local workers or of corruption and nepotism undermining the stability Vietnamese believe should be the country’s top political concern. All the same, in 30 years, Vietnam has managed to transform itself from a nation ravaged by war to one in which serious economic growth has dominated the last two decades. In many ways, that’s nothing short of a miracle.

In Defense of Distraction

  • Over the last twenty years, Meyer and a host of other researchers have proved again and again that multitasking, at least as our culture has come to know and love and institutionalize it, is a myth. When you think you’re doing two things at once, you’re almost always just switching rapidly between them, leaking a little mental efficiency with every switch. Meyer says that this is because, to put it simply, the brain processes different kinds of information on a variety of separate “channels”—a language channel, a visual channel, an auditory channel, and so on—each of which can process only one stream of information at a time. If you overburden a channel, the brain becomes inefficient and mistake-prone.
  • The only time multitasking does work efficiently, Meyer says, is when multiple simple tasks operate on entirely separate channels—for example, folding laundry (a visual-manual task) while listening to a stock report (a verbal task).
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