ONE OF THE MOST COMMON defences of phones is the idea that they’re making us better at multitasking and, in so doing, more efficient. Unfortunately, this isn’t true. There’s actually no such thing as multitasking (that is, simultaneously processing two or more attention-demanding tasks), because our brains can’t do two cognitively demanding things at once.* When we think we’re multitasking, we’re actually doing what researchers call “task-switching”. Like cars making sharp turns, our brains need to slow down and switch gears every time we stop thinking about one thing and engage with another –
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