As the writer points out
"Over the last twenty years, Meyer and a host of other researchers have proved again and again that multitasking, at least as our culture has come to know and love and institutionalize it, is a myth. When you think you’re doing two things at once, you’re almost always just switching rapidly between them, leaking a little mental efficiency with every switch."
In other words our minds are capable of paying attention to only one thing at once. We are capable of sharing our attention between two or more tasks only because we are capable, or seem capable in our own minds, of doing them with relatively efficiency by doing this rapid switching back and forth. However, don't be fooled.
Only in the last ten years—thanks to neuroscientists and their functional MRIs—have we been able to watch the attending human brain in action, with its coordinated storms of neural firing, rapid blood surges, and oxygen flows. This has yielded all kinds of fascinating insights—for instance, that when forced to multitask, the overloaded brain shifts its processing from the hippocampus (responsible for memory) to the striatum (responsible for rote tasks), making it hard to learn a task or even recall what you’ve been doing once you’re done.
So, certain kinds of tasks can be accomplished using this method, but ones that rely on bringing together ideas or whose goal is to remember something obviously would not be successfully accomplished. However, the writer notes:
The only time multitasking does work efficiently, Meyer says, is when multiple simple tasks operate on entirely separate channels—for example, folding laundry (a visual-manual task) while listening to a stock report (a verbal task). But real-world scenarios that fit those specifications are very rare.
So, sometimes we may have the sense that we are actually succeeding in multitasking and this may give us the illusion that we are capable of truly doing several things at once at any time.
The unanticipated encounter
However, as much as we want to be the type of people who are capable of concentration and attention to tasks, we have to acknowledge the power of the interruptions that surround us, and most of us would not willingly give all of them up, at least all of the time. As the writer points out:
The Internet is basically a Skinner box engineered to tap right into our deepest mechanisms of addiction. As B. F. Skinner’s army of lever-pressing rats and pigeons taught us, the most irresistible reward schedule is not, counterintuitively, the one in which we’re rewarded constantly but something called “variable ratio schedule,” in which the rewards arrive at random. And that randomness is practically the Internet’s defining feature: It dispenses its never-ending little shots of positivity—a life-changing e-mail here, a funny YouTube video there—in gloriously unpredictable cycles.
This is the reality, the life-changing is frequently the unanticipated. And, as the writer goes on to discuss, one of the problems of drugs people take to concentrate their attention is the very narrowness and restricted nature of the focus it provides.
Adderall users frequently complain that the drug stifles their creativity—that it’s best for doing ultrarational, structured tasks. (As Foer put it, “I had a nagging suspicion that I was thinking with blinders on.”)
