Multitasking means screwing up several things at once/ Think You're Multitasking? Think Again

Everybody multitasks. We have conversations while driving. We answer email while browsing the Web. It's hard to imagine living any other way. What would be the alternative, removing the seats from your car to ensure you only drive alone? Block every website not named Gmail? A world of constant single-tasking is too absurd to contemplate.

But science suggests that multitasking as we know it is a myth. "Humans don't really multitask," said Eyal Ophir, the primary researcher with the Stanford Multitasking study. "We task-switch. We just switch very quickly between tasks, and it feels like we're multitasking." In 1946, the world was introduced to history's first general-purpose electronic computer: ENIAC, nicknamed the "Giant Brain." At the time, the word multi-tasking did not exist. It first appeared in a magazine called Datamation in 1966, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, in the following sentence: "Multi-tasking is defined as the use of a single CPU for the simultaneous processing of two or more jobs."

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Why do we think we're so good at something that doesn't exist? We compensate for our inability to multitask with a remarkable ability to single-task in rapid succession. Our brains aren't a volley of a thousand arrows descending on an opposing army. Our brains are Robin Hood. One man with one bow firing on all comers, one at a time.