Tired of hearing about the Nobel Prizes?

Every morning lately, NPR has been leading off with the physicist or chemist or doctor to be awarded with the Nobel Prize for this or that. Fascinating stuff... But Saturday marked the awarding of this year's Ig Noble Awards.

The Ig Nobel Prizes honor achievements that first make people laugh, and then make them think. The prizes are intended to celebrate the unusual, honor the imaginative -- and spur people's interest in science, medicine, and technology.

My favorite one was the study of why pregnant women don't tip over - I remember distinctly feeling as if that might just happen to me when I was hugely pregnant... Anyways, I thought it might be a nice bit of humor to break up a full week!

Multi-tasking hurts your cognitive abilities

From the Chronicle of Higher Education's Brainstorm blog, a post whose title says it all: "Multitasking is Dangerous to Your Health."

Think you can talk on the phone, send an instant message and read your e-mail all at once? Stanford researchers say even trying may impair your cognitive control.

The primary finding was that "People who are regularly bombarded with several streams of electronic information do not pay attention, control their memory or switch from one job to another as well as those who prefer to complete one task at a time." When people spend months and years trying to multitask, their mental habits follow. Most important, their capacity to filter out distractions and irrelevant items deteriorates. As one of the researchers put it, "They're suckers for irrelevancy." The researchers set up experiments that isolated the ability to ignore things that didn't help subjects complete a problem, and low-multitaskers did well, high-multitaskers poorly.

(Now, if only I could convince my dad that this is true....)