Are men better at multi-tasking than women?
A new study claims to have answered the argument once and for all
Can men multi-task? It’s an age-old question to which the answer – from women at least – is almost always a resounding ‘no’. But be it tapping your head and rubbing your stomach, or balancing a phonecall with watching television and cooking a meal, there are surely times when men can successfully take on more than one task.
And it’s true, we can. But not as well as women, says a new – and bound-to-be contentious – study from Swiss neuroscientist, Dr Tim Killeen.
To answer the gender mystery once and for all, Killeen and his team at University Hospital Balgrist in Switzerland put over 80 healthy people on treadmills, and asked them to maintain a normal walking pattern while trying to solve a tricky brain-teaser.
Women completed the verbal task – the Stroop Test, where the name of a colour is printed in a non-matching colour and you’re asked to identify the colour of the ink – with little to no change in gait.
Men simply couldn’t. Scanned with infrared cameras to record the treadmill walking patterns, men’s techniques broke down when confronted with the mental task and the act of walking.
“In men, the verbal task appears to overwhelm the left brain,” says Killeen. “We were surprised to find such a consistent gender difference in how two relatively simple behaviours ― cognitive control and arm swing ― interact with one another.
“I think this shows that younger women may be able to resist interference of these two fairly specific behaviours” Killeen added.
So, like it or not, there’s our answer: men are scientifically worse at multi-tasking than women. And this blow comes just weeks after we finally proved the existence of ‘man-flu’. Well, you win some, you lose some – although if the competition involves multi-tasking, we men will lose every time.
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