As society has developed, improvements in technology (which have made video games possible) have increased the standard of living while at the same time requiring greater specialization and division of labor. The levels of education and... well, *concentration* necessary to invent and effectively use such technologies can only occur in an environment where people feel reasonably safe. If any trip down the highway runs the risk of being attacked by brigands, everyone needs to keep that primal brain right at the forefront, ready to fight for your life. That interferes with the ability to accomplish more complex tasks on a regular basis. (Sociology 134: Culture of Personality lecture, UCLA, 1994.)
So, decreasing violence is necessary to increasing technological advancement. But the technology doesn't actually cause the decrease in violence; rather, the decrease in violence is a prerequisite to the tech. There is a feedback loop when those improvements (especially in communications) are employed in the mitigation and prevention of violence, but the causative relationship you seem to be drawing is unlikely at best.
. . . they don't have violent video games in somolia. ..
Control group: Pirates Test Group: Nerds who read/. and play Halo
I love it! We'll drop a bunch of Halo-playing/. nerds in Somalia, and bring a bunch of Somalian pirates to random universities across the US, and see what happens to their rates of violence and death!
An awful lot of prison inmates are on drugs to control mental health issues. You really don't want a guy deciding not to take his meds for schizophrenia and having a psychotic break in the middle of the cafeteria.
Is that what happens when the insanity defense fails (or isn't attempted) - they get sent to normal prison but given drugs to control their insanity? Doesn't seem right....
Insanity defense only works if you're insane enough that you cannot tell right from wrong. If you can tell right from wrong, but you don't have the impulse control to avoid doing something just because you know it's wrong, you still go to prison.
Or, if your misdeeds were not directly motivated by your insanity at all... say, your psychiatric condition was adequately controlled by medication, but you got drunk and ran a red light and killed someone (voluntary manslaughter). Or maybe your condition was not identified/diagnosed until *after* you were arrested, tried, convicted, and incarcerated. You may even be under treatment for conditions related to incarceration, such as PTSD or clinical depression.
Yeah, it's not right. IMO, committing a crime is, in most cases, almost proof that you're not in your right mind. But I don't make the rules.
Where is the choice of not spending the money in the first place?
You'd like to include an option to forgo medical care completely?
Because, see, here's the problem: you might choose not to pay for any sort of insurance. But, when you're dying, you'll probably still go to the hospital. You may rack up more medical bills than your house is worth. You may or may not be employed at the time, or have assets sufficient to cover what you owe. Guess who pays, then?
It's like car insurance. If there was some way to prove that you had the means to cover up to, say, $1 million in expenses, then it'd make sense to let people completely forgo coverage. But very few people fall into that category, and most of *them* will have private insurance anyway. So, we require people to be insured to drive. You can choose not to drive, and you can choose not to go to the hospital when you're bleeding to death or can't breathe or whatever. But if you're going to go to the hospital, then yeah, I think it's fair to insist you have coverage.
I have no problem with it being catastrophic coverage, either. I haven't read the current proposals, so I don't know for sure that that's not an option. Care to apply a citation?
Let's cut to the chase: I have first hand experience working with Medicaid, Medicare, and private insurers. The first two cannot find their collective asses with both hands; the latter, while expensive, have been efficient.
You are a privileged individual, then. I have had the following experiences with private insurers:
* Being billed YEARS later for fees that were mistakenly not charged at the point of service, each for a sum of less than $50, but adding up to a couple hundred. They hounded me for MONTHS, with no proof that I owed them the money other than they said so. I finally threatened to sue them for harassment and they gave it up.
* One day I went to fill a prescription. My health insurance policy (not provider) had changed, so I knew my prescription cost might change, but was I SHOCKED when they said I owed $558! Turned out that there was a miscommunication between my new employer and my insurer, so they dropped me by mistake. Fortunately, the pharmacy comped me a week's supply of my medication, and it was my employer's job to sort out the problem.
* Another company mistakenly had the service provider (an anesthesiologist who worked as part of a surgical team) bill me, and then reimbursed me for the fee. Not how it's supposed to be, but not *that* big a deal. Unfortunately, I accidentally destroyed the check (put it in my pocket then put it through the laundry). I called, all apologies, to ask for a replacement, and they said no problem... but then THAT time, they sent the check to the provider, who cashed it. They told me *I* would have to collect my money from the provider. Yeah, right. I didn't hire him (the hospital did), I had no business relationship with him, and he had been double-paid due to two insurer screwups and one (relatively minor) me screwup. It took me about six months to get them to cut me a new check.
* I received an invoice for services that didn't seem quite right (birth of my first son). I asked for an itemized bill. They sent it, and the line items DID NOT ADD UP to the total. It took me, again, months, to get a correct statement.
* My oldest son was born at the beginning of July. I had just finished classes for grad school, and had coverage through September, but my son needed to go on my husband's plan. He was automatically covered under my old insurance for a month (California law), but we had chosen a pediatrician that was in network for the new plan. I was also on the new plan already, but completed the birth on the old plan. But... the pediatrician we chose was from a different medical group from my doctor on the new plan, and was outside the network for my University coverage. We COULD NOT bill insurance for services in that 30 days under my son's name, only under mine. Therefore, we couldn't bill services for a provider outside the practice my PCP was in. We paid out-of-pocket for his 2-week checkup, because there was no way either insurer could pay THAT provider for it at THAT time, even though he was in-network for the new insurer. There was no resolution possible for that issue; we just gave up.
And I can't tell you how many times I've called my insurer to try to find out what my coverage is and they just plain don't know. Their response is "Submit a claim, and maybe we'll pay it." Gee, thanks. I'm one of those funny consumers that likes to know what my costs are likely to be BEFORE I incur them.
OTOH, I've had experiences in many other areas where public has been far more streamlined than private. For example, I can't *tell* you what a breath of fresh air it was going from Southern California Edison for power to LADWP. Signing up for service, I kid you not, took all of two minutes... and the last 30 seconds was me thanking the rep for a great experience with a great company. Oh, and we've had far fewer momentary power cuts since moving, too. Don't *even* get me started on the difference between USPS and UPS... sufficeth to say, the postman has never randomly left oth
this and a private medical company? You find out about the error when a government agency does it.
Not only that... the letter says "You've been diagnosed with X," whereas the letter from the private insurer says, "Your coverage has been terminated" without mention of the (erroneous) diagnosis.
I do want to say that I would like to see some more good studies done on that. Particularly looking at the fact that there is an increase no matter which branch, job, or duration in the military. that's very odd and does smell of a flawed study.
Or a feature of military service that doesn't have to do with how you serve... like the vaccination schedule or elements of the training process. Or heck, the food. Maybe some chemical they use in the living quarters.
There's a lot of things that could explain such a difference. I agree we need more research to determine what they are.
2 If someones file has the code they should already be diagnosed right.
We're still stuck using ICD9 coding. We were supposed to switch to ICD10 years ago, but it keeps getting delayed, mostly because of the arcane field of medical billing software. ICD9 is a half-assed system, based on decades-old knowledge of disease and injury, that you can't even be sure whether you'll find the disease you want under the part of the body it affects or its taxonomy.
So it doesn't surprise me at all that the ICD9 code for ALS is ambiguous for other neurological diseases.
Oh, really? This is a government bureaucracy we're talking about.
THIS is what we'd ALL get if Obama and the Dems win their attempt to have a government takeover of health care.
Well, everyone who chose the public option. Which, at least to begin with, would mostly be people who have no healthcare at all right now. Healthcare with occasional administrative errors is probably going to save more lives than no care AT ALL.
Besides which, I've had bad lab results and mistaken reports from private healthcare, too. Even large-scale errors. And it's certainly not simply healthcare that has this happen...I've gotten notices from utilities that my service was going to be cut off when I'd paid my bill, or that my credit card was stolen when it wasn't, or that I was denied for something when I was approved. It does happen, and it happens at least as often in private business as in government.
Re:Instead of wasting their money on vending machi
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Drug Vending Machines
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The vending machines are cheaper than the people. That's the whole point.
(Or at least, that's what the marketing materials say. They probably don't have sufficient personnel to do a proper cost-benefit analysis, or evaluate the product for suitability.)
Why should they make sure? This is a prison, not a mental institution. If a diabetic prisoner does not want to take his insulin, that's his problem.
An awful lot of prison inmates are on drugs to control mental health issues. You really don't want a guy deciding not to take his meds for schizophrenia and having a psychotic break in the middle of the cafeteria.
Also, if a diabetic doesn't take his Glyburide (insulin is injected, so probably can't be administered by the machine... I don't imagine prisoners are given unsupervised access to needles), and goes into a diabetic coma, he's then admitted to the hospital on the public dime. We *still* have to take care of their health problems, even if they create them themselves. Ensuring medication compliance saves public money.
Isn't that the kind of thinking/stats that kept the flawed Ford Pinto or the road despite being a time ticking bomb ?
No, not at all.
The Pinto *did* have a flaw that made it significantly more dangerous if it was in a typical rear-end collision. The reasoning was economical: Ford saved money by paying out enormous settlements when the flaw happened to cause greater injury or death than would normally be expected in an accident, rather than recalling and repairing ALL flawed Pintos.
The analogy, in this case, would be if the risk was already proven (which it's not; there has NEVER been a comprehensive analysis of how actual driver behavior or accident rates is affected by cell phone use), and I was suggesting that the COST of the accidents was lower than the COST of passing and enforcing legislation.
I am not suggesting anything of the kind. If we do the analysis, and find that, yes, cell phone use HAS increased the danger on the road, we absolutely *should* ban use of phones while driving (and should also look at other factors involved, as ceoyoyo mentions below). But until we've actually examined what *really* happens, rather than using inappropriate proxies in controlled conditions, we should stop assuming we know how everything works.
...or perhaps you're too focused on the single-minded task of reinforcing your male superiority to notice when men multitask to the detriment of their performance.;-)
You talk about the national health insurance plan as if it is some clearly laid out plan. Why do you think they tried to rush it through Congress before anyone could have time to read it?
Multitasking in humans is a myth. You might be able to rapidly switch between tasks, but processing more than one thing simultaneously can't be done.
Glad to hear you've got the human brain all figured out, because no one else does. I think you might have some errors there, though, because there are any number of tasks humans can definitely do at the same time
1) I can see and hear at the same time. Both these tasks are very processing-intensive, and go on during most of my waking hours, along with other tasks I may be accomplishing.
But I do find that blocking out sensory input from other channels can help me focus harder on a particular channel. Most commonly, I find this when I'm doing something by touch, such as finding an object in my purse, or fastening something behind me. I can do it a lot easier if I close my eyes.
I cannot read and listen to speech at the same time at all. I've previously read that this is a very rare skill in men but not that uncommon in women (Unfortunately I cannot find anything relevant when googling so I might be misremembering something else).
I can't listen in realtime while reading... but frequently, if someone says something to me while I'm reading, if I STOP reading, I can then play back what they said from the buffer and respond. But I literally don't understand the content of what they said until after I stop reading and take about half as long as it took them to say it to remember hearing it and interpret it into meaning.
And, FWIW, I'm female. Maybe women have bigger buffers? (Oh, git yer mind out o' the gutter!)
I tell someone x is followed by y and z. They hear x and immediately ask about c. Well, c could be related in some instances but I already told you in this instance it's x, then y, then z. But wait, why is y there? That's the sequence. And then after several more rounds the person will exclaim with a sudden revelation "Why, this is x, then y, then z!" Of course, you numpty pillock.
You've been eavesdropping on my conversations with my husband, haven't you?
Thing is, he's NOT much of a multi-tasker. We have those conversations when all he's doing is talking to me (and I'M doing the cooking). But I tell him something, and immediately a question pops into his head, and apparently, he's INCAPABLE of letting me finish what I'm saying and finding out whether or not his question is relevant, much less addressed by the rest of the sentence.
Yes. Essentially, what he showed was that multi-taskers were worse at concentrating on an externally-identified stream than single-taskers were. He didn't actually find out how ANYBODY did at multi-tasking.
A better way, even without changing the experimental setup, would be to, for example, ask everyone after the first experiment how many blue rectangles there were. The multi-taskers are probably more likely to get that right than the single-taskers, since they aren't blocking the blue rectangles as effectively. With the N-back test, they could have asked all the participants to list all the letters they could remember hearing, and probably the multi-taskers would remember a larger number of them, while the single-taskers would mostly just remember the ones that they flagged during the experiment.
In fact, I cannot understand folks that listen to music and work
I think you're confusing listening with having music on as background noise.
I have the same issue as the GP. The only music that I can use as "background noise" is classical. No lyrics, not even very interesting. I don't particularly like classical music, but it doesn't overtly bother me like jazz does.
If it's music I actually *like*, I'll get distracted from the task at hand and listen to it.
But, different strokes for different folks. I remember one time, my ex walked into the living room to ask me a question while I was sitting and reading a book. While talking, he picked up the TV remote, hit the Power button, surfed to a channel showing something vaguely interesting, put down the remote, concluded the exchange, and left the room. With the TV on. While I, on the other hand, don't turn on the TV unless I intend to watch it, because if it's on, I *will* pay attention to it.
Slashdot Mirror
I would wager that the decrease in violent crime that have occurred this century are related to the rise of violent life like video games.
Related? Well, probably so. *Causatively* related? Probably not.
As society has developed, improvements in technology (which have made video games possible) have increased the standard of living while at the same time requiring greater specialization and division of labor. The levels of education and... well, *concentration* necessary to invent and effectively use such technologies can only occur in an environment where people feel reasonably safe. If any trip down the highway runs the risk of being attacked by brigands, everyone needs to keep that primal brain right at the forefront, ready to fight for your life. That interferes with the ability to accomplish more complex tasks on a regular basis. (Sociology 134: Culture of Personality lecture, UCLA, 1994.)
So, decreasing violence is necessary to increasing technological advancement. But the technology doesn't actually cause the decrease in violence; rather, the decrease in violence is a prerequisite to the tech. There is a feedback loop when those improvements (especially in communications) are employed in the mitigation and prevention of violence, but the causative relationship you seem to be drawing is unlikely at best.
. . . they don't have violent video games in somolia. . .
Control group: Pirates /. and play Halo
Test Group: Nerds who read
I love it! We'll drop a bunch of Halo-playing /. nerds in Somalia, and bring a bunch of Somalian pirates to random universities across the US, and see what happens to their rates of violence and death!
An awful lot of prison inmates are on drugs to control mental health issues. You really don't want a guy deciding not to take his meds for schizophrenia and having a psychotic break in the middle of the cafeteria.
Is that what happens when the insanity defense fails (or isn't attempted) - they get sent to normal prison but given drugs to control their insanity? Doesn't seem right....
Insanity defense only works if you're insane enough that you cannot tell right from wrong. If you can tell right from wrong, but you don't have the impulse control to avoid doing something just because you know it's wrong, you still go to prison.
Or, if your misdeeds were not directly motivated by your insanity at all... say, your psychiatric condition was adequately controlled by medication, but you got drunk and ran a red light and killed someone (voluntary manslaughter). Or maybe your condition was not identified/diagnosed until *after* you were arrested, tried, convicted, and incarcerated. You may even be under treatment for conditions related to incarceration, such as PTSD or clinical depression.
Yeah, it's not right. IMO, committing a crime is, in most cases, almost proof that you're not in your right mind. But I don't make the rules.
Where is the choice of not spending the money in the first place?
You'd like to include an option to forgo medical care completely?
Because, see, here's the problem: you might choose not to pay for any sort of insurance. But, when you're dying, you'll probably still go to the hospital. You may rack up more medical bills than your house is worth. You may or may not be employed at the time, or have assets sufficient to cover what you owe. Guess who pays, then?
It's like car insurance. If there was some way to prove that you had the means to cover up to, say, $1 million in expenses, then it'd make sense to let people completely forgo coverage. But very few people fall into that category, and most of *them* will have private insurance anyway. So, we require people to be insured to drive. You can choose not to drive, and you can choose not to go to the hospital when you're bleeding to death or can't breathe or whatever. But if you're going to go to the hospital, then yeah, I think it's fair to insist you have coverage.
I have no problem with it being catastrophic coverage, either. I haven't read the current proposals, so I don't know for sure that that's not an option. Care to apply a citation?
Let's cut to the chase: I have first hand experience working with Medicaid, Medicare, and private insurers. The first two cannot find their collective asses with both hands; the latter, while expensive, have been efficient.
You are a privileged individual, then. I have had the following experiences with private insurers:
* Being billed YEARS later for fees that were mistakenly not charged at the point of service, each for a sum of less than $50, but adding up to a couple hundred. They hounded me for MONTHS, with no proof that I owed them the money other than they said so. I finally threatened to sue them for harassment and they gave it up.
* One day I went to fill a prescription. My health insurance policy (not provider) had changed, so I knew my prescription cost might change, but was I SHOCKED when they said I owed $558! Turned out that there was a miscommunication between my new employer and my insurer, so they dropped me by mistake. Fortunately, the pharmacy comped me a week's supply of my medication, and it was my employer's job to sort out the problem.
* Another company mistakenly had the service provider (an anesthesiologist who worked as part of a surgical team) bill me, and then reimbursed me for the fee. Not how it's supposed to be, but not *that* big a deal. Unfortunately, I accidentally destroyed the check (put it in my pocket then put it through the laundry). I called, all apologies, to ask for a replacement, and they said no problem... but then THAT time, they sent the check to the provider, who cashed it. They told me *I* would have to collect my money from the provider. Yeah, right. I didn't hire him (the hospital did), I had no business relationship with him, and he had been double-paid due to two insurer screwups and one (relatively minor) me screwup. It took me about six months to get them to cut me a new check.
* I received an invoice for services that didn't seem quite right (birth of my first son). I asked for an itemized bill. They sent it, and the line items DID NOT ADD UP to the total. It took me, again, months, to get a correct statement.
* My oldest son was born at the beginning of July. I had just finished classes for grad school, and had coverage through September, but my son needed to go on my husband's plan. He was automatically covered under my old insurance for a month (California law), but we had chosen a pediatrician that was in network for the new plan. I was also on the new plan already, but completed the birth on the old plan. But... the pediatrician we chose was from a different medical group from my doctor on the new plan, and was outside the network for my University coverage. We COULD NOT bill insurance for services in that 30 days under my son's name, only under mine. Therefore, we couldn't bill services for a provider outside the practice my PCP was in. We paid out-of-pocket for his 2-week checkup, because there was no way either insurer could pay THAT provider for it at THAT time, even though he was in-network for the new insurer. There was no resolution possible for that issue; we just gave up.
And I can't tell you how many times I've called my insurer to try to find out what my coverage is and they just plain don't know. Their response is "Submit a claim, and maybe we'll pay it." Gee, thanks. I'm one of those funny consumers that likes to know what my costs are likely to be BEFORE I incur them.
OTOH, I've had experiences in many other areas where public has been far more streamlined than private. For example, I can't *tell* you what a breath of fresh air it was going from Southern California Edison for power to LADWP. Signing up for service, I kid you not, took all of two minutes... and the last 30 seconds was me thanking the rep for a great experience with a great company. Oh, and we've had far fewer momentary power cuts since moving, too. Don't *even* get me started on the difference between USPS and UPS... sufficeth to say, the postman has never randomly left oth
this and a private medical company?
You find out about the error when a government agency does it.
Not only that... the letter says "You've been diagnosed with X," whereas the letter from the private insurer says, "Your coverage has been terminated" without mention of the (erroneous) diagnosis.
I do want to say that I would like to see some more good studies done on that. Particularly looking at the fact that there is an increase no matter which branch, job, or duration in the military. that's very odd and does smell of a flawed study.
Or a feature of military service that doesn't have to do with how you serve... like the vaccination schedule or elements of the training process. Or heck, the food. Maybe some chemical they use in the living quarters.
There's a lot of things that could explain such a difference. I agree we need more research to determine what they are.
2 If someones file has the code they should already be diagnosed right.
We're still stuck using ICD9 coding. We were supposed to switch to ICD10 years ago, but it keeps getting delayed, mostly because of the arcane field of medical billing software. ICD9 is a half-assed system, based on decades-old knowledge of disease and injury, that you can't even be sure whether you'll find the disease you want under the part of the body it affects or its taxonomy.
So it doesn't surprise me at all that the ICD9 code for ALS is ambiguous for other neurological diseases.
So, the VA can't afford cleaning staff, IHS can't afford doctors, and Medicare can't afford accounts payable staff?
And somehow, this is going to be solved by spending LESS gov't money on healthcare?
No, he just needs to prove that he can't afford an alternative, that his continued VA treatment is need based.
And with Medicaid, he'd need to requalify every six months, so that's pretty generous.
I didn't know the technicians working for Lockheed and Boeing were civil servants. I stand corrected.
I didn't know that any of our health care proposals involved hiring doctors, lab technicians, and pharmacists all as civil servants, either.
If you have no income, they can't charge against your taxes.
If you have an income, you can pay out-of-pocket for private coverage, or you can pay (a lot less) for public coverage.
Sounds like people have choices to me.
Oh, really? This is a government bureaucracy we're talking about.
THIS is what we'd ALL get if Obama and the Dems win their attempt to have a government takeover of health care.
Well, everyone who chose the public option. Which, at least to begin with, would mostly be people who have no healthcare at all right now. Healthcare with occasional administrative errors is probably going to save more lives than no care AT ALL.
Besides which, I've had bad lab results and mistaken reports from private healthcare, too. Even large-scale errors. And it's certainly not simply healthcare that has this happen...I've gotten notices from utilities that my service was going to be cut off when I'd paid my bill, or that my credit card was stolen when it wasn't, or that I was denied for something when I was approved. It does happen, and it happens at least as often in private business as in government.
The vending machines are cheaper than the people. That's the whole point.
(Or at least, that's what the marketing materials say. They probably don't have sufficient personnel to do a proper cost-benefit analysis, or evaluate the product for suitability.)
it's the prison administration flushing the meds, not the prisoners.
Why should they make sure? This is a prison, not a mental institution. If a diabetic prisoner does not want to take his insulin, that's his problem.
An awful lot of prison inmates are on drugs to control mental health issues. You really don't want a guy deciding not to take his meds for schizophrenia and having a psychotic break in the middle of the cafeteria.
Also, if a diabetic doesn't take his Glyburide (insulin is injected, so probably can't be administered by the machine... I don't imagine prisoners are given unsupervised access to needles), and goes into a diabetic coma, he's then admitted to the hospital on the public dime. We *still* have to take care of their health problems, even if they create them themselves. Ensuring medication compliance saves public money.
As a famous cat put it: THIS IS WHY WE CAN'T HAVE NICE THINGS.
I'm pretty sure it was Satchel's owner who said that...
Isn't that the kind of thinking/stats that kept the flawed Ford Pinto or the road despite being a time ticking bomb ?
No, not at all.
The Pinto *did* have a flaw that made it significantly more dangerous if it was in a typical rear-end collision. The reasoning was economical: Ford saved money by paying out enormous settlements when the flaw happened to cause greater injury or death than would normally be expected in an accident, rather than recalling and repairing ALL flawed Pintos.
The analogy, in this case, would be if the risk was already proven (which it's not; there has NEVER been a comprehensive analysis of how actual driver behavior or accident rates is affected by cell phone use), and I was suggesting that the COST of the accidents was lower than the COST of passing and enforcing legislation.
I am not suggesting anything of the kind. If we do the analysis, and find that, yes, cell phone use HAS increased the danger on the road, we absolutely *should* ban use of phones while driving (and should also look at other factors involved, as ceoyoyo mentions below). But until we've actually examined what *really* happens, rather than using inappropriate proxies in controlled conditions, we should stop assuming we know how everything works.
...or perhaps you're too focused on the single-minded task of reinforcing your male superiority to notice when men multitask to the detriment of their performance. ;-)
You talk about the national health insurance plan as if it is some clearly laid out plan. Why do you think they tried to rush it through Congress before anyone could have time to read it?
You mean like the PATRIOT Act?
Glad to hear you've got the human brain all figured out, because no one else does. I think you might have some errors there, though, because there are any number of tasks humans can definitely do at the same time
1) I can see and hear at the same time. Both these tasks are very processing-intensive, and go on during most of my waking hours, along with other tasks I may be accomplishing.
But I do find that blocking out sensory input from other channels can help me focus harder on a particular channel. Most commonly, I find this when I'm doing something by touch, such as finding an object in my purse, or fastening something behind me. I can do it a lot easier if I close my eyes.
I cannot read and listen to speech at the same time at all. I've previously read that this is a very rare skill in men but not that uncommon in women (Unfortunately I cannot find anything relevant when googling so I might be misremembering something else).
I can't listen in realtime while reading... but frequently, if someone says something to me while I'm reading, if I STOP reading, I can then play back what they said from the buffer and respond. But I literally don't understand the content of what they said until after I stop reading and take about half as long as it took them to say it to remember hearing it and interpret it into meaning.
And, FWIW, I'm female. Maybe women have bigger buffers? (Oh, git yer mind out o' the gutter!)
I tell someone x is followed by y and z. They hear x and immediately ask about c. Well, c could be related in some instances but I already told you in this instance it's x, then y, then z. But wait, why is y there? That's the sequence. And then after several more rounds the person will exclaim with a sudden revelation "Why, this is x, then y, then z!" Of course, you numpty pillock.
You've been eavesdropping on my conversations with my husband, haven't you?
Thing is, he's NOT much of a multi-tasker. We have those conversations when all he's doing is talking to me (and I'M doing the cooking). But I tell him something, and immediately a question pops into his head, and apparently, he's INCAPABLE of letting me finish what I'm saying and finding out whether or not his question is relevant, much less addressed by the rest of the sentence.
Yes. Essentially, what he showed was that multi-taskers were worse at concentrating on an externally-identified stream than single-taskers were. He didn't actually find out how ANYBODY did at multi-tasking.
A better way, even without changing the experimental setup, would be to, for example, ask everyone after the first experiment how many blue rectangles there were. The multi-taskers are probably more likely to get that right than the single-taskers, since they aren't blocking the blue rectangles as effectively. With the N-back test, they could have asked all the participants to list all the letters they could remember hearing, and probably the multi-taskers would remember a larger number of them, while the single-taskers would mostly just remember the ones that they flagged during the experiment.
I think you're confusing listening with having music on as background noise.
I have the same issue as the GP. The only music that I can use as "background noise" is classical. No lyrics, not even very interesting. I don't particularly like classical music, but it doesn't overtly bother me like jazz does.
If it's music I actually *like*, I'll get distracted from the task at hand and listen to it.
But, different strokes for different folks. I remember one time, my ex walked into the living room to ask me a question while I was sitting and reading a book. While talking, he picked up the TV remote, hit the Power button, surfed to a channel showing something vaguely interesting, put down the remote, concluded the exchange, and left the room. With the TV on. While I, on the other hand, don't turn on the TV unless I intend to watch it, because if it's on, I *will* pay attention to it.