One thing we humans do well is adapt.  We brag about this ability in every documentary that looks at the history of Homo sapiens.  It is true, though, that we seem to have an uncanny knack for conforming to a given situation.  And this goes well beyond putting on a sweater when it gets a little chilly.

If you believe in evolution (and the three of you out there who don’t should probably just go read something else), you know our ancestors lived in trees.  But we eventually came down, stood upright and figured out how to domesticate animals for our own uses.  Ten thousand years ago, before the first signs of this domestication came on the scene, our lives were pretty straightforward: eat, mate, eat, teach the young, eat, die.  When you’re only around for forty or so years, you don’t have much time for frivolity, so basically it boils down to have a kid, pass on your wisdom (which typically consisted of how to hunt, where to hunt, and when to hunt), and that’s it.  At that point in human development, we didn’t have to worry much about multitasking.

Then came domestication and agriculture, and with it came chores.  Now you didn’t just have to be concerned with feeding your own family, you needed to feed the livestock, too.  And you needed to grow food for that livestock, so you spent most of your day tending crops intended for your animals.  Your tools for all this farming were limited and if they broke, you’d need to either fix them or be able to make a new one.  You may also need to repair your grass roof now and again, but these things seem kind of mundane when you consider what we deal with today.  I’m sure these people had it rough and I wouldn’t change places with them for all the mead in the village, but the number of issues on which they needed to focus their attention were few.  Animals, food, family, home.  And I’d guess that, more often than not, these things were dealt with one or maybe two at a time.

I don’t mean to belittle the existence of our ancestors – I know their lives were fraught with stresses we don’t even think about today, like, “Where does our next meal come from if the crops fail?” or, “I wonder what monsters will visit tonight?”  But today, with all our modern conveniences, in order to get by you need to have the ability to juggle ten tasks at once.  Think about something as commonplace as driving, for example.  Your eyes are constantly darting side-to-side, up to the rearview, forward again, to the side mirror, forward again, to the left, to the right – all while one hand controls the wheel, your foot pressure increases, decreases or moves to another pedal, your mouth chatters into the cell phone cradled in your neck, your other hand moves between the radio knob, the defroster and your soda and in your head you’re singing, “Devil Went Down To Georgia”.  That’s multitasking at its finest and we all do it everyday.

But if you think adults are good at it, take a look at today’s teens.  They’ve grown up with all sorts of new technology that we didn’t have as kids and they’ve adopted it as their own.  Cell phones (with text messaging, built-in still & video cameras as well as day planners, games and an Internet connection) are a modern teen’s link to all other teens everywhere.  If they don’t have their cell, you can probably find them on your antiquated landline, if you still have one.  Barring that, they’ll be chatting it up on the computer, carrying on text conversations with up to ten different people in ten different chat boxes.

My son has an Xbox 360, a video game console for those of you who don’t pay attention to such things.  This console can connect to the Internet so my son can play his games with groups of others across the world.  He has a headset so he can actually speak to the people he is playing with.  The other day I came out of my office to find him playing a game with several people online, speaking with them through his headset.  Not unusual, but he also had the phone cradled on his left shoulder and he wasn’t sitting in front of the TV playing, he was sitting across the room at the computer, on which he was chatting and listening to music.  I told him that if he was done with the Xbox, he should put it away, but he wasn’t done, he was just typing to his friends whenever he got killed in the Xbox game – all while holding a three-way conversation on the telephone with his girlfriend and another friend whose name is Dude.  That’s multitasking.  I’d like to see a goat farmer from 6000BC do that.

When kids are born into technology, it becomes a part of their lives quickly.  The technology itself allows for speedy communication, fast retrieval and instant gratification.  Growing up  “techie”, these kids need more and more to feel fulfilled.  Going back to the Xbox, Ryan has a game called “Guitar Hero” in which a large guitar-shaped controller with multi-colored buttons is used by players to replicate a series of multi-colored dots that stream down the screen.  It’s easy when there’s only one dot coming down at a time, but in “Expert Mode”, they come down in sets of two and three – and very, very fast.  I totally suck at this game, but Ryan is impressive to watch.  What he’s done lately is used special codes that increase the game’s maximum speed by a factor of five.  When those dots flow down the screen, they move so fast, each is only on the screen for less than a second.  With only a few weeks of practice under his belt, he manages to hit about 75% of those flying dots – an amazing feat if you saw it in person.  Then he slows the game down to its normal high speed and competes with others over the web.  As you can imagine, he usually beats all challengers.

To see how quickly the information is fed to him, processed, then acted upon is stunning.  It’s already reached the point that he doesn’t even have to think about it at all – it just comes to him.  You or I would be left in the dust, but to today’s generation, they need this kind of over-stimulation.  What would stress us out completely is all in a day’s work for teens all over the world.  This only proves that we are all at least capable of high-speed multitasking, if not proficient at it.  Technology will only make life move faster and faster, but we seem to have the ability to adapt to it, or at least our kids do.  I’ve often thought that I should stop him and make him slow down, but I’m not convinced that would be in his best interest.  Perhaps he and his friends are just pushing the envelope of human capabilities.  Perhaps they’re just showing us all how to maximize our potential.  Perhaps one of them will discover the cure for cancer while prospecting Mars while accepting the Nobel Prize for creating cold fusion while unlocking the secret of immortality – without ever leaving their living room.