6 anuary/February 2022J
COURTNEY LINDER (PROFILE); ALAMY STOCK PHOTO (BRAIN)2
C a n ’ t S t o p
Thinking About
// S T R A N G E L Y C O M P E L L I N G A N D C O M P E L L I N G L Y S T R A N G E T O P I C S O U R S T A F F I S O B S E S S I N G O V E R //▶If you’re trying to read this magazine while
also listening to a podcast, you’ll probably end up
frustrated, losing focus on one or both tasks alto-
gether. There’s a reason for that: Your conscious
mind is incapable of dealing with more than one
thing simultaneously if those operations require
the same parts of the brain.
“Your [brain’s] language regions are pro-
cessing the sounds, the words, the meaning of
the sentences,” says Marc Coutanche, Ph.D., an
associate professor of psychology at the Univer-
sity of Pittsburgh. When you read and listen to
t wo separate things, he explains, you’re forcing
your brain to draw on the same resources.
“Imagine a circuit where you’ve got multi-
ple inputs and multiple outputs, but they share
the same wires,” Coutanche says. At best, what
you’re doing is serially switching between them.
That leads to a situation where you have a
Frankenstein’s monster of thoughts on your
hands. You can try to put a few things together,
but what you get in the end isn’t what youexpected. You might retain a
small bit of information from the
magazine and a sliver from the
podcast, but you won’t be able to
fully absorb both.
On the other hand, if you’re
drawing power from separate
regions of the brain, your conscious
mind can multitask.
You can drive while listen-
ing to a podcast, for instance, or
listen to the pod as you sketch.
That’s because one operation is
verbal/listening (engaging the
temporal lobe), and the other is visual-
spatial (engaging the right pari-
etal lobe). The two systems can operate without
crosstalk.
It turns out your brain is also pretty remark-
able at multitasking when it comes to the
unconscious mind.
“Simultaneity is possible for conscious
thought, and some activities that can be done
unconsciously, like controlling your body. This
is why you can walk and daydream at the same
time,” says Joseph W. Kable, Ph.D., a cognitive
neuroscience researcher at the University of
Pennsylvania. This is also why you can breathe,
blink, and take a sip of water while working on a
DIY project in your workshop.
There is a way you could sidestep your
conscious brain’s biological limitations: a
human-machine interface like Elon Musk’s
Neuralink (see sidebar), which could give your
brain a few extra circuits, literally and figu-
ratively, for multitasking in the same brain
regions. Until we get that implant, though, just
slow down and appreciate one thing at a time.Simultaneity is possible
for activities that can
be done unconsciously.
So why can’t our
conscious brains
seem to multitask?
COURTNEY
LINDER IS
A S E N I O R
E D I T O R A T
POP MECH. H E R
F A V O R I T E T O P-
ICS INCLUDE,
BUT ARE NOT
LIMITED TO,
THE GIANT
SQUID, PUNK
ROCK, A N D
ROBOTICS.
The world’s busiest
billionaire says you waste
serious brainpower taking
a thought, compressing
it into a few words, and
communicating it to anoth-
er person who must then
decompress those words
into a thought. But with adirect neural interface like
the one Musk is working on
through his brain implant
startup Neuralink, it could
be possible to improve the
bandwidth between your
brain’s cortex (the layer
that deals with functions
like long-term planning)and the digital world by up
to 1,000 orders of magni-
tude, according to Musk.
Someday, this could mean
telepathically talking to
others or maybe even up-
loading your consciousness
into a robot or another
person’s brain.ELON MUSK
WANTS TO
UPGRADE
YOUR BRAIN