In an intriguing study based on people’s abilities to resume a task after being interrupted to do a second task, researchers have concluded that the older you get, the harder it is to multi-task. Although why they needed a study to come to that conclusion, god only knows, because anyone over the age of 30 could have verified that for them in an instant. That’s as long as the elderly verifier could remember what the researcher had asked, of course.

But they did spend money on this project so here’s what they found: that while younger people could easily go back to a task they’d interrupted and resume it at top speed, people over the age of 60 could not do that. This is mostly because the older folks kept focusing attention on whatever task the interruption had involved rather than on the task that had preceded it.

Ergo, older folks have trouble keeping 2 things going at the same time.

Which is true, of course. But what the researchers didn’t find out – the study wasn’t set up to do that – is that unlike young people, who are obsessed with feverishly fiddling with their iPods, iPads, and phones at the same time and keeping it all straight, once we get to a certain age, about the middle of our lives, most of us stop caring whether we can do two things at once. This may be mainly because we can either hire someone to do some of those stupid things for us or because we realize that most of the things we thought were so important to do are not. Another thought is that when you’re a certain age, by the time a second task has rolled around, you can’t even remember that you had another task you were working on.