Do you know someone who would like to vote their values in choosing a presidential candidate but is unsure who best represents them? Send them here. First, you clarify the relative importance of various issues by distributing points among them. Then you specify where you stand on the issues by taking a short quiz. The site will tell you how congruent to your priorities and viewpoints those of a given candidate are. There are quotes and video links typifying each candidate’s position on each issue. You can slice and dice it any way you like, by candidate across issues or by issue across candidates.

The last post to which more than one comment was entered was this, more than two weeks ago. And that was only two comments. You must go back several days further for any more of a conversation in response to one of my posts.

The vulnerable died more often than the hale and hearty. we learn. What in the world is the least bit surprising about that? (Yahoo! News)

I often think of New Year’s resolutions as frontal assaults on one’s stuck points or failings. That may be why they rarely work and people generally do not stick to their resolutions. Better to approach things obliquely when you are stuck. Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt’s oracular Oblique Strategies cards have long been a powerful way to do so, and can lead to some pretty powerful resolutions. You can get a new oblique aphorism every time you reload this page.

Kottke discusses why the Patriots should lose the Superbowl, to avoid becoming boring and to embody the ennobling tragic flaw. I am not much of a football fan but, living in Boston this season, I have to play one. And I have been saying essentially the same thing kottke says. As the season has progressed I have become fond of tweaking the noses of the ‘real’ football fans I find myself among with scurrilous comments about how the games are not worth watching because the outcome has not really been in question.

I was pointed to this article by kottke, who comments that, if he ever thought he was a multitasker, he was disabused of the notion after he had a child. My wife said the same thing after our son was born. Even going out to ‘kid-friendly’ social occasions was no fun for her, because of the stress associated with dividing her attention as called for when you care about paying attention to your child. That sounds like what is being described above. On the other hand, I was never distressed in those and similar situations. Clearly, some parents can socialize without dividing their attention… by ignoring their child’s interruptions of ‘adult conversation.’ But I never felt that was my story. Whenever the neuroscientists describe generalize about how ‘people’ do such and such a task, I always append the word ‘typically’. There is a spectrum of ability and dysfunction. Some people are better multitaskers than others. As I am sitting here writing that sentence, I am simultaneously thinking that it is not earthshattering news; indeed, it is probably a truism.

There is probably nothing special about the capacity of multitasking to “wear down our system through biochemical friction.” Readers of FmH will know I refer from time to time to the emerging understanding that stress hormones mediate actual tissue damage in the CNS, whatever the source of the stress. If multitasking is stressful or depressing to you, the demand to do it will wear you down. If you are more successful at it and not as stressed out, it will not wear you down, or not as much.

Certainly, in a modern world in which multitasking demands impinge on us more, vulnerabilities which exist in the population will be brought out. A new sort of selective pressure is being brought to bear on mental fitness. But I think the more significant finding of the research described above is the conclusion that multitasking demands we concentrate on the act of concentration rather than the content of the task, i.e. shifting activity from the hippocampus (which places significance on experiences and facilitates their storage in memory) to the striatum. But wait a minute. Is it necessarily a dire outcome if we do more things by rote in a world which enforces certain rote routines on us? It seems to me the key to successful multitasking is being strategic in picking which tasks you multitask at. It is simple — multitask at the rote tasks. But this is no new insight and it did not take functional MRI to tell us — there are certain tasks you must do with heart and attention and others you can do by rote, and you must take care to choose wisely. A simple example — someone can always tell, talking to me on the phone, if I have a computer screen open in front of me and am dividing my attention between reading and talking. It takes some care not to let the onscreen material be compelling and steal my attention at the moment I should be giving my heart to the person to whom I am talking. I have to look away from the screen or close my eyes.

One of the absurdities of the current romance with the reductionist concept of attention deficit disorder is that the control of attention is a complex multifaceted process with many parameters and many ways to be deficient. We have to sustain our attention, focus it, avoid distractions, shift flexibly on demand but not shift too much. We have to restore our attentional focus after falling victim to distraction. We have to modulate the depth and breadth of our attention. We need the ability for unfocused mindfulness. Each of these aspects of the attentional process is mediated by different neural circuitry.

Being better or worse at multitasking — dividing our attention — is only one of the ways to be better or worse at control of attention. For example, much of what passes for skill at sharing simultaneous attention among multiple tasks may really be skill at timeslicing, rapidly shifting. Or prioritizing the relative importance of foreground and background attention. Or balancing the focus and the unfocus.

Another factor in the stress imposed by multitasking may be not the challenge to neurocognitive control processes but to our self-presentation and self-integration. There are subtle or not-so-subtle influences to bring different personas to different tasks, especially when we interact remotely across electronic media. People have vastly different capacities to inhabit, balance and shift among different facets of their personality. At one extreme are those chameleonic individuals who reshape themselves in response to the demands of whatever context in which they find themselves; at the opposite extreme, those people who seem ‘themselves’ consistently across all contexts. The modulation and control of persona is, analogously, as complex and diverse as that of attention. The presentation of self in everyday life, to use Goffman’s term (1959), can either be comfortable or impose tremendous stress on the performer.