When you were in school, didn’t you try doing your homework in front of the TV or listening to music. When your parents asked you to focus on your homework, didn’t you say you could do both at the same time?

 
Join the club!

 
But guess what, we were wrong. Our parents were right. Research in neuroscience has proved that the human brain can only think about one idea at a time. Irrespective of the age, gender or the person’s IQ.

Pierce Howard, director of research for the Centre For Applied Cognitive Studies says, ‘Notwithstanding teenagers’ claims that they can do homework in front of the TV, the brain cannot focus on more than one stimulus at a time’. Enough research studies have shown that we can’t multitask. Period!

 
We are biologically incapable of processing attention-rich inputs simultaneously. Have you noticed when you are trying driving and trying to search for a difficult-to-find address, you unconsciously turn down the volume of the radio?

 
Coz, you don’t want anything, including background music, to interrupt your thoughts and search. Bet you didn’t realize this till now!

 
Nobel prize-winning economist Herbert Simon said, ‘Human beings consciously operate largely in serial fashion. The more demanding the task, the more we are single-minded’.
 
Psychologist Edward Hallowell summarized the mental impossibility of multitasking by comparing it to playing tennis with numerous tennis balls at once.

 
I am sure you still think you are an exception and that you had always multitasked in life. And successfully too. Sorry, it’s just an illusion. Behavioural scientist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi sums it eloquently: ‘Humans cannot really successfully multitask, but can rather move attention rapidly from one task to another in quick succession, which only makes us feel as if were actually doing things simultaneously.’

 
Deflates your ego and makes you angry, right?

Come to think of it, you didn’t multitask that either. Your ego was first deflated and that made you angry!

 
Now that you are a parent, if you have trouble asking your kids to focus on their homework without listening to music, sit down with them and explain all these research findings.

And be ready to have the door banged at your face. Remember, that’s exactly what you did when you were a teenager!