According to neuroscientist Earl Miller, "People can't multitask very well, and when people say they can, they're deluding themselves." And, he said, "The brain is very good at deluding itself." Miller, a Picower professor of neuroscience at MIT, says that for the most part, we simply can't focus on more than one thing at a time. What we can do, he said, is shift our focus from one thing to the next with astonishing speed.
"Switching from task to task, you think you're actually paying attention to everything around you at the same time. But you're actually not," Miller said. "You're not paying attention to one or two things simultaneously, but switching between them very rapidly." Miller said there are several reasons the brain has to switch among tasks. One is that similar tasks compete to use the same part of the brain.
"Think about writing an e-mail and talking on the phone at the same time. Those things are nearly impossible to do at the same time," he said.
"You cannot focus on one while doing the other. That's because of what's called interference between the two tasks," Miller said. "They both involve communicating via speech or the written word, and so there's a lot of conflict between the two of them." LINK
From what Dr Miller said above, I obviously cannot multi-task like a computer. What I do is get the things done by putting them on auto. For example, this afternoon, my main focus is on updating my blog. But at the same time, I have put my clothes in the washing machine to wash. Meanwhile, I am marinating my salmon and the rice for tonight's dinner which happens to be salmon porridge. While all these are going on, I have also put chlorox on the toilet bowls and tile cleaner on the toilet floor to let the chemical do the cleaning for me. To put it in a nutshell, I don't qualify as a multi-tasker but am instead a clever housekeeper.
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