[extropy-chat] no electronics at Singularity Summit???

[Damien Sullivan]

On Wed, May 10, 2006 at 11:16:56PM +0100, Russell Wallace wrote:
>    On 5/10/06, Samantha Atkins <[1]sjatkins at mac.com> wrote:
> 
>      Many of us multi-task quite well and are adept at catching the new

>    nobody had laptops, but the reality was that these people were capable
>    of fully participating in the game and doing other things
>    simultaneously; and if my expectations didn't match current reality,

How true is this "quite well" and "fully participating"?  I have a dim
memory of studies actually looking at this, and finding performance
deficits, but I don't remember any specifics.  Well, cell phones
hampering drivers.  Some tasks do go well in parallel because they're
both automatic *and* using different parts of the brain; reading and
listening don't seem so segregated.

I hang out a fair bit with undergrad gamers, many of whom seem to have
the attention span of a ferret.  It annoys *them* sometimes, let alone
me, when they realize that their role playing game is inching forward
because half the players get distracted every five minutes.

-xx- Damien X-)