In our society, to be able to deal with themselves, work, family at the same time, women tend to exploit a skill that is traditionally attributed to them, the so -called multitasking. Often, however, it is not such an effective solution as it seems
It is three in the afternoon and, sitting at the desk with the agenda in hand, Valeria looks around: in the living room, between games and bibs, the remains of the birthday party of the day before are scattered. In the spacecraft, her 2 -month -old boy, asleep, grants her the opportunity to finally sit down to work. The other daughter, however, will return from kindergarten in less than an hour.
The things to do always seem too many, the time available always little: The accountant’s letter clears her from the fallage above the computer, an urgent translation is waiting for the desk, the dirty dishes call it from the sink. Despite having decided that at this moment the work has the priority, Valeria feels crushed from all sides. Whenever the silence falls in the house, in his head the questions are played, as if his brain starts several programs at the same time: has he set all the appointments? Did you prepare the lessons? What had he said to do, the pediatrician, for conjunctivitis?
What is it?
Sometimes a mother would just want to stop and concentrate. This happens above all to mothers who work, perhaps from home. The possibility of managing the times of one’s work independently, in fact, clashes with strong interference between the personal spherethat domestic and that professionalinevitable when the spaces of work and family life coincide.
In the management of these interference, a competence that neuroscience experts calls multitasking or “multi-processuality”. The term, which comes from computer science, indicates the ability of an operating system to perform multiple programs together. In the case of human beings, it refers to the ability to do more things at the same timededicating the same attention to all, alternating or superimposedly: the researcher Linda Stone, in 2007, defined it “Partial attention continues”.
A long -standing habit
Are we talking about a new phenomenon? In reality, women are said to be multitasking “forever”and in fact this feature seems to have a historical and social origin.
The brain of every human being is perfectly able to process more information together, even if not all with the same precision, and in the digital era our minds are partially reconfiguring to manage large quantities of data.
But The brain is a muscle and, as such, it must be trained. For this reason, women, who, in many companies, have been dealing with both domestic management and children’s education for some time, have developed a capacity to “Attention divided” which, throughout history, has gradually reinforced, first with their gradual entry into the world of extra -domestic work, then with the spread of free professions. The multitaskingtherefore, today it characterizes the life of many women and it is what allows them to “keep together” the multiple dimensions that make up their identities.
The mental load of women
But it is really a resource, or it can become source of frustration? The question is debated: among the scholars there are those who consider it an essential ability to face the contemporaneity and those who consider it an “unnatural” response and conditioned by the pressing requests for productivity and efficiency typical of our time.
Several women admit that the need to deal with more things together, combined with a difficulty in delegating, is not so effective in the long run because it causes tiredness, nervousness and a considerable increase of what is defined “Mental load”. Many of them, at some point, would like to be able to do exactly the opposite: to stop thoughts, put them in order and face them one by one, giving priority to what they perceive as more urgent.
In their feeling, this last ability seems to characterize men instead, even when fathers: if women, who became mothers, tend to divide their attention, trying to “Keep everything together” (home, work, self -care and children), men generally make one thing at a time, which allows them to have more realistic expectations on their performance. A comparative study of 2013, confirmed by subsequent research, would have highlighted the different brain architecture of men and women Compared to multi-processuality and management of domestic and working tasks.
The brain and pregnancy
Whether it is typical of women or men, doing more things together or doing one at a time are undoubtedly two different ways to organize the actions and mental processes, and there are also different effects that are obtained on the surrounding world.
There are more and more women who, despite trying out of habit or cultural tradition of dealing with everything, would like save and optimize energyespecially after the arrival of a child. According to the latest neurobiological research, motherhood changes the brain precisely in this sense: it triggers not only of hormonal adaptation mechanisms, but a real renovation of brain connections, strongly influenced by supports, or obstacles, encountered by the future mother in her Life environment.
Since pregnancy, the woman perceives a kind of “Cognitive weakening”due, in addition to tiredness, to a reduction in the volume of cerebral gray matter in the rear and in the average frontal cortex, the areas involved in the perception of oneself and of sociality. The brain is preparing to specialize for maternity tasks: it is oriented towards the outside, that is, towards the child.
THE maternal neurons They become very sensitive “antennas” capable of intercepting even the minimum needs of the child. It seems that these brain changes are preserved for about two years after childbirth, once sufficient to consolidate certain care habits.
For shared cure
This process goes into the opposite direction to the principle of multitaskingwhich pushes instead to activate on several fronts, often for Avoid guilt. The multitaskingthen, a resource remains potentially but, so that it does not become a waste of energy and the cause of malaise, it must be oriented in the right direction, which is that of shared cure: a complex experience, often declared in words but not always carried out in fact, with respect to which society must promote active support interventions for parenting and each of the parents bring its own strategies and, if necessary, learn to review the priorities.
