The Atlantic Wire - Multitasking is real; Pigeons that do math

Born to multi-task. Everyone likes to think they can juggle tasks, like Gchat and blog, for example, better than their cube-neighbors. But research has crushed those delusions, finding that most people's work suffers as a result of splitting time between multiple tasks -- until now.

Looking at the brain activity of monkeys while the animals concentrated on multiple things, researchers at McGill found that  their neurons split into two "spotlights" -- beams of concentration -- rather than one spotlight that jumped from task to task. To them, that means we have evolved to concentrate on two things simultaneously.

"One implication of these findings is that our brain has evolved to attend to more than one object in parallel, and therefore to multi-task," explained researcher Martinez-Trujillo. Work Gchatters, celebrate: It's a real skill.