Multitasking

Although we think that we are capable of doing several tasks at once, our brains are actually unable to and multitasking is a complete myth. It might feel like you do but our brain can only be focused on one thing at the time so our brain must switch it's attention between task. Have you ever tried to write something while talking about something else with a friend? Then you have probably experienced that you start to write whatever you are talking about and not what you were supposed to write. This is because the tasks involve communicating through speech and written words, and that causes lots of conflicts between them and the brain ends up focusing on just one of task. Although we can't multitask we can be masters of fast attention switches. A smartphone is a great example of us trying to do many things at a time. When most people are using their smartphones they have multiple apps up at the same time. They might me messaging someone and while waiting for their response they go to a different app like Instagram or Facebook. But because of our smartphones our attention spans have shortened and it's harder for us to pay attention for a longer time. Students get bored and restless during long lectures and they have a harder time learning and remembering things. Another thing is that we almost never put our phones down and we even try to work at the same time that we are using our phones. The problem is that when we give our attention to our phone for just a second, it takes us a while to get our focus back at the task that we were working on. And even though we think that we are saving time and multitasking we are actually wasting time and make everything take way longer than it should.