Are you a multi-tasker? If you're a male, you have probably been told that multi-tasking is a peculiarly female attribute and you will just have to settle for moving ("plodding" is the term I have often heard) from job to job because you simply (from "simpleton" I have also often heard) cannot hold two or more procedural concepts in your X chromosome-deprived mind. Women multi-task; men don't. Live with it.

Ha, not true. And it's universally not true; that is, women don't do it either. There is no clinical evidence to show anyone performing two cognitively-demanding tasks at the exact same time. People who appear to have this ability are really just competent at sequentially attendig to different tasks. But who cares?

Even if it's true that the activity we call multi-tasking simply describes a proficiency at rapidly switching attention among various elements of a job or among discrete jobs, it's still a thing – a proficiency. Women may have been observed preparing meals while holding babies on hips and chatting with friends as hubby enjoys a beer behind his newspaper, but let's not get all femmi-chauvi about it. What's more, there's lots more of those "everyone knows" misconceptions out there.

In the 70's we had "Men are from Mars; Women are from Venus" books, articles and workshops. Vive la différence and all that, but let's not get carried away. Even I have slandered women at times by saying that the entire sex bonds by talking, whereas men bond by throwing round objects at one another or by banging tools on metal. It was cute, y'know, but a terrible undervaluation of some really dynamite female pitchers I have faced, and a sad exaggeration of the average male's skill in the use of tools, mine in particular. Still, the concepts sold a lot of print and seminars. Here's some other "myth-takes" that have been or still are making the rounds.

Left-Brain and Right-Brain Thinking are two quite different processes and certain activities are the sole occupation of one side of the brain or the other. That false notion also sold a lot of books. Remember getting that copy of Drawing from the Right Side of the Brain? The best research I have read recently came from a teacher. Well, OK, one Dr. Iain McGilchrist was a professor of literature at Oxford University in England. But he became interested in the issue of brain hemisphere function and went back to school, notably to the faculty of medicine, and after a lot of time teaching and recording findings as a working psychiatrist in various institutions, he wrote the book on Brain Hemispheres titled The Master and His Emissary and more recently The Divded Brain and the Search for Meaning. I read the first and I'm pecking at the second, but they're big books and I'm retired and lazy. You can check out his web site at https://channelmcgilchrist.com/about/  and you should/might-want-to know that he "plans to write a critique of contemporary society and culture from the standpoint of neuropsychology, as well as a study of what is revealed by the paintings of subjects with psychotic illnesses."

I must have it.

I'm married.

To Beverly.

Back to our brains and the hemisperes thereof. Both sides perform both functions – a little differently perhaps,but not in the complete isolation so often ascribed to them. There; I just reduced over 500 pages of tightly-reasoned, massively-researched academic prose to one sentence. Whew! Read the book. I'm tired.

Sleep Debt is an excuse I have sometimes used to justify spending a day on the couch after an all-night session studying (on one occasion it was the effect of single malt consumption on coherent expression) or pretending to be a concerned husband while wife was giving birth. Seriously, as all of us can attest, there are times when emergencies of family or work can dominate our wake-sleep cycles, and we feel really tired when the emergency is over. So get eight hours and go back to work – or change the baby. The evidence from the people who regularly rack up those long, long hours of concentrated work – medical personnel, soldiers, fire-jumpers come first to mind – is that regular energy levels are restored within a very short time. Yes, maybe those people are young, athletic folk who have grown accustomed to the stress in question, but the studies I looked at said the evidence was pretty generalized. Damn.

Some myths for teachers in training have had a long lifetime. The Oak Park & Hawthorne Effect are among the most enduring. Oak Park was a pseudonym for a school in California where teachers were given false information about the ability levels of students with some listed as superior and others as below average, and wonder-of-wonders, the first group made huge gains in IQ scores within a year. and the experiment was written up as Pygmalion In the Classroom. Nope. The criticisms were many, with the most thorough showing the researchers had falsified not only student records but also their own collected data and had misinterpreted data, or had based interpretations on insufficient or shoddy research methodology to produce preconceived results. Now, generally speaking, you may believe that human beings will perform well if thought well of and poorly when thought ill of, but 'taint necessarily so.

The Hawthorne Effect is the effect of positive correlation of performance with whatever the researcher applies as a treatment – the self-fulfilling prophecy. C.E. Snow studied the effects of lighting on worker output in a Western Electric plant way back in the mid-twenties and way out in the Hawthorne Works in Chicago. Every time the researchers increased the light, the job performance increased. However, before the researchers packed up and wrote their dissertations, someone suggested continuing the experiment and the lights were gradually dimmed over the course of a few more weeks with the guys in lab coats still wandering about taking notes. Performance continued to increase until it was as dim in the factory as the hope in Snow's heart. The other factor in all this was that the researchers and plant foremen were males and the assembly line workers were females. That situation created a strong impulse for workers to "do right by the menfolk". Nowadays "Hawthorne Effect" means you get what you expect to get because you want to, or subjects (human ones anyhow) want you to get it, and a careful researcher designs experiments to avoid or to compensate for this effect.

Then there was the Pain-Punishment Study or the Milgram experiment. Everyone knows about that study wherein subjects were told they were to administer an electric shock to "subjects" every time those people failed to give a correct response. The real subjects were the ones administering those shocks. There was no electricity and the actor "subjects" were told to fake responses of pain to see how extreme the applications would become. In truth, many of the students refused to participate when their role in the experiment was described, even going to report the work to university administrators. Others did participate, and true, some progressed to pretty extreme levels. They also dissolved in tears of relief when the truth of the experiment was explained to them.

The Milgram Experiment did have a serious intent, although it would never be permitted today. What responsibility would a civilian population feel if a group of subjects – average German citizens regarding treatment of Jews or resistance participants in WW2 Nazi-occupied Europe – were being tortured or killed? Or substitute average Israeli or Jewish-anywhere citizens regarding treatment of Palestinians in present-day Gaza. Even our own nice Canadian and US  attitude towards our weapons manufacturers who produce white phosphorus (banned by international treaty) and which is dropped indiscriminately on civilians in Gaza. We have evidence of all of these situations. Not good, but the students on our campuses appear to be doing better at protesting than their elders.

Now with elections coming up in the US and in Canada, we can expect a media-money feeding frenzy as each political faction buys space for their slants on problems and solutions. South of the border, Trump will continue to give speeches that are personal attacks rather than policy proposals, and here at home, the same procedure will likely ensue. Political debate often comes down to slogan slanders. "Axe the tax" and "Spike the hike" are cute, but won't survive analysis. We could yell back, "Max the facts" as a request for substantive enquiry but slogans are still just shallow crowd calls.

While working on my French lessons recently, I did find a use for those slogans as they encapsulate some useful phrases and ideas. Here's one from 16thC France courtesy of M. Voltaire. You can translate it, I'm sure.

Ceux qui peuvent vous faire croire à des absurdités peuvent 

vous faire commettre des atrocités.

It might be applicable to the slander suffered by our own Birju Dattani after the rant from Zionist forces caused him to resign from his recent appointment as head of our Human Rights Commission.

I could go on for a long time, but you're probably getting bored, and so I'll leave it with a reference to my favourite fact-checker – Snopes which referenced Wikipedia and their page listing some common misconceptions that they have debunked.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_common_misconceptions 

Check it out after a good night's sleep.