Word: malmgren
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...current issue of Science, Malmgren and several colleagues explain that as far as human correspondence goes, when and how long you choose to sit down and e-mail your friends or family has less to do with your desire to get in touch than with a larger - and less random - system of outside factors...
...reach that conclusion, Malmgren's team analyzed the letter-writing oeuvre of 16 people important enough that their correspondence has been thoroughly archived - people like Einstein, Darwin and Hemingway. Initially, Malmgren says, researchers believed that old-fashioned letter-writing would follow different rules of behavior from e-mailing, but the new analysis suggests that they're actually very similar. "It's analogous to some areas of physics," says Malmgren, "where you might have two fluids with very different densities and viscosities but they ultimately follow the same laws of fluid dynamics." (See 20 things you need to know about Einstein...
...turns out that just three mechanisms combine to explain both activities. The first is our propensity to continue repeating a task once we've started: "Once you send one e-mail or write one letter, you tend to do another," says Malmgren. The second is our circadian sleep-wake cycle, which limits the available time we have to devote to letter-writing. The third is that we typically work on the same days each week, further restricting when and how long we spend getting in touch with friends. (See TIME's brain covers...
...example, can't necessarily engage in personal correspondence except at night or on weekends. Some people have lots of friends and family to keep in touch with, while others are naturally more solitary. And circumstances can change over time. "In the early part of his life," says Malmgren, "Einstein didn't write many letters. Later, as he became famous - and had a secretary to help him - he wrote a lot more. Freud was steadier. Each had a personal writing rate...
This study is just the beginning for Malmgren. "Our model only describes how we do one activity," he says, "but we actually juggle lots of things. So it's interesting to consider how we transition between them." One way to get a handle on how people multitask is to look at online activity, the focus of his group's next analysis: it involves a lot of different behaviors - such as chatting, game-playing and reading - but under a single umbrella. "There's potentially a lot wrapped up into one," says Malmgren...