The Liminal Librarian

It’s in Newsweek, so it must be true, see:

Some scientists suspect that the brain can be trained to multitask, just as it can learn to hit a fastball or memorize the Aeneid. In an unpublished study, Clifford Nass of Stanford and his student Eyal Ophir find that multitaskers do let in a great deal more information, which is otherwise distracting and attention-depleting. But avid multitaskers “seem able to hold more information in short-term memory, and keep it neatly separated into what they need and what they don’t,” says Nass. “The high multitaskers don’t ignore [all the incoming signals], but are able to immediately throw out the irrelevant stuff.” They have some kind of compensatory mechanism to override the distractions and process the relevant information effectively.

You say compensatory mechanism, I say coping mechanism…