with life getting more demanding and hectic all the time it seems there's only one way to cope multitasking gurus and life hackers make a living telling us how to get better at it but can we actually multitask the term was first used in the 60s to describe computer performance the human brain though is not a computer and human attention is a very limited resource some psychologists model visual attention has been like a spotlight it can only be shown in one direction at any one time our primary focus what we're paying most attention to is like
the brightly lit area in the center of the beam it can also be understood as being like a zoom lens we can choose to narrow our focus to concentrate in detail or widen it to be aware of more things simultaneously but we can't be zoomed in and out at the same time even though we're constantly receiving a huge amount of information from our senses it's only possible for a small amount to make it through to conscious awareness watch the next section very carefully and pay particular attention to how many balls bounce in the circle how
many can you count seven right but did you also notice that little dinosaur what about the changing shape of the circle or the smiley face on one of the balls this shows just how powerful focused attention is being able to filter out irrelevant detail is an amazingly useful tool that it means we can miss things that are right under our noses an effect known as inattention blindness you can see this very clearly in the famous invisible gorilla experiment where NASA concentrates exclusively on how often basketball plays and white pass the ball most people completely miss
the gorilla walking across the screen and beating his chest we just don't have the capacity to process everything at once this is a particular problem when we try to multitask we can switch attention from one task to another and back again but when attention is overloaded we miss things and the result is nearly always that we perform tasks less well than we would doing one at a time it's only truly possible to do two things at once if they require different sets of cognitive resources for example it's totally possible to read a book and listen
to music at the same time which would suggest that driving while talking on the phone is not a problem as long as it's a hands-free phone it's not that simple though research has shown that while talking on the phone we have a tendency to create mental images and this uses the same visual resources needed for driving and if visual resource has become too stretched it's perfectly possible for a driver to look directly at a hazard but just like with that little dinosaur fail to see it not everything will make it through to conscious awareness so
multitasking makes us up best inefficient and at worst downright dangerous if you're feeling like you should be doing 17 things at once remember that's just not the way your brain is wired [Music] thanks for watching don't forget to subscribe and click the bail to receive notifications for new videos see you again soon
