MakaylaTheAspie wrote:
There is no such thing!
i beg to differ- i knew a filipino housekeeper [at the hospital where i used to work] who spoke several languages fluently and obviously was extremely intelligent [she was slumming because she just came to this country and was trying to get an economic foothold here]- one day she saw me ineptly playing with my tetris game, dimly struggling to get past a few thousand points, and she spontaneously took it from my hands and while simultaneously discussing intelligence and learning theory with me, she glanced now and then at the tetris game and furiously yet absently worked the controls- in just a few minutes she made the machine go to 100,000 points and made the rocket take off at the end. and she only paid partial attention to the game while animatedly chatting with me. she could not have been merely switching attention, due to the vocabulary and concepts she was expressing while chatting with me, in addition to the intense high-level cognitive requirements of the game.
another example are musicians who play the traps [drum set] or theatrical wurlitzer organ- in both those instruments one has to move all of one's arms and legs out of full visual observation range, requiring acute levels of proprioception. in addition, in using the unique wurlitzer "2nd touches" [2nd contacts beneath the keys and pedals, which allow a quick-thinking performer to simultaneously play a chord or melodic figure while pressing a little hard on certain keys or pedals to play a counterpoint melodic figure], the multitasking reaches yet a higher level of complexity. switching between tasks cannot apply here because the performer's arms and legs are moving simultaneously along non-parallel, non-syncronized action paths, much too quickly for switching to be effective.
if these things are not examples of multitasking, then nothing is. what true multitaskers all have in common, is very high native intelligence and the total absense of any physical defects or organic brain addlements. simply put, [like the original astronauts who were all multitaskers themselves] they all have "the right stuff." the rest of us muddle through life ineptly, in comparison.