How the brain limits our ability to multitask

It consists of two complementary stages: goal-shifting, in which one decides to divert their attention from one task to another, and rule activation, by which the instructions for executing one task are switched off, and those for executing the other are switched on. Multitasking involves dividing one’s attention between the tasks, and because each task competes for a limited amount of cognitive resources, the performance of one interfers with that of the other. The greater the similarity of the tasks, the more interference there is, but there is also interference between completely dissimilar tasks.

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