Eli5: Why can’t we truly multitask? Why is our “multitasking” just setting something aside real quick to do something else? Why can’t our limbs perform different tasks at once?
In: Biology
Basically, our brains can only pay active conscious attention to one thing at a time, called our “locus of attention”. As far as we can tell, this is an architectural limit of our brains. It’s like asking why we can’t play three-handed piano pieces by ourselves…we only have two hands. Multitasking in the sense you mean requires more than one locus of attention and we’ve only got one. As a result, the only way we can approximate multitasking is to task-switch quickly…which is actually terribly inefficient and a bad way to work but sometimes we don’t have a choice.
We can have our limbs do different things at once, but only one of them can be something requiring conscious attention. That is, for example, how we can steer our car while sipping coffee or march while playing an instrument. The other function(s) need to be something we’ve trained enough that we can do it autonomously.
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