Almost two weeks back now from a relaxing vacation in Provence, France

A relaxing vacation means enjoying the peace and quiet of Southern France, enjoying the good food, excellent wine, the good weather, seeing some nice sights and catch up on some reading.
Most of my vacation reading went to the 1000 page CISSP exam guide as I needed to start preparing for my exam (planned for the 8^th of September). However, I also packed some fiction and some popular science magazines. I like the popular science magazines on vacation because they are light reading and they offer some interesting facts about various topics. Downside of these magazines is that they tend to oversimplify the science behind the facts and sometimes make obvious mistakes.

Nevertheless, I read an interesting article in Quest about psychological views on our human attention span. I had some misconceptions about this (thanks to popular believe). Some of the things I learned:

• Men and Women are equally good or bad in multi-tasking. Researchers have shown that there is no sexual difference in the human ability (or inability to multi-task).

• We can do two things at the same time but only one of those things can be a difficult task which requires our conscientious brain part. This means that we can for example drive a car and have a conversation with the person sitting next to us. This because, for experienced drivers, driving a car is an automated task which does not require our full attention. For student drivers, this is a different case as driving is not yet an automation and does require their full attention.

• Although we can drive a car and have a conversation, there is a difference when we have a conversation with someone next to us than when we have a conversation with someone on the phone (handsfree or not). This is because the person next to us shuts up when the traffic situation gets dangerous or warns us if we don’t drive carefully. The person next to us does that because he knows that the driver’s attention is required on the road in those cases. The person on the phone does not have the traffic context and thus cannot warn us for danger. He keeps talking no matter what situation the driver is in, or how the driver is driving. This makes having a phone conversation in the car more dangerous than you might think.

• We are not good in multi-tasking between tasks which actually require our full attention span. If we multi-task between for example reading e-mail, typing an sms, writing a report and reading other information, we can only do one thing at a time. This means we need to context switch constantly to finish all tasks simultaneously. Researchers have shown that when doing this, our IQ drops 10 whole points and the quality of our work drops as well. Therefore, it is better to finish a task or sub-task, giving it your whole attention span before moving to the next one.

Another article focused on the psychological virtues of doing nothing. It seems that when our brain is un-stressed and is not focused on anything, the creative processes start and great ideas are born. So I plan to be very creative!