aaleks wrote:Beside dictations, there was also such thing as "Изложение". I don’t know how it should be called in English, maybe a narration. It looked like this: some story had been read three times by a teacher and after that we were supposed to write down the story (what we had memorized) as precisely as possible. I don’t sure if it might somehow help with listening, but who knows.
I sound exactly like the 'genfortælling' (literally 're-telling') we had in Danish schools in my childhood, except that the original version wasn't repeated three times - we could also just be told to read it ourselves. The idea was that we then knew what to rite about, and all the necessary words should be known - not a bad idea, but I have always preferred making up my own stories.
reineke wrote:Your brain can't swipe and hear at the same time, scans show
A new study shows that people who are focused on visual tasks actually can’t hear what's going on around them because hearing and vision tap the same brain regions, according to a report published Tuesday in the Journal of Neuroscience.
The researchers have dubbed this hearing deficit: inattentional deafness.
Lavie and her colleagues suspected that the brain might have problems multitasking when it was given a visual task that required concentration."
In this moment I'm listening to the mightly Faust Symphony of Liszt Ferenc, and I'm writing this comment in English, and once in a while I look at the television where the two new Mythbusters try to blow up something. And just a few minutes ago I was solving a sudoku in my kitchen while eating a pear and listening to Faust.
I do believe the researchers who tell me that true multitasking at the conscious level is impossible, but they always forget to tell the other side of the story, namely that instead of sustaining a real double or triple focus we do something different: we slice time into minute segments and switch our attention between our competing tasks. As long as we feel a continuity between each occurrence of each task we may think we are multitasking - and in a sense we are. The thing that can cause problems in this process is if one task becomes so difficult that we can't leave it and expect just to continue when we return. Even having to concentrate on one specific task for a few seconds means that we lose the perceived continuity within the other tasks. Therefore it was actually misleading when for instance the old Mythbuster teams tested whether people can multitask by serving them difficult calculating or reasoning problems per telephone while they drove a car - and of course they couldn't. But give them simple and less intrusive tasks, then the result would almost certainly be different.
Another way of shaking the perception of multitasking is if the tasks interfere, and here I'm fairly sure that my listening to music is disturbs my writing less than it would be to listen to someone speaking to me - especially if I had to write in weak language or about a difficult subject.