The Myths of Multitasking

In the fast paced world, there is always a lot to be accomplished in a specific time. The first thing which a person is told by his manager when he joins an organisation is, "We have lot of work in office. You will have to do multiple work simultaneously." "Alright !" the new joinee will reply with a grin on his face. If this was not enough, the manager would rub salt on the wounds, "Have you ever done Multitasking?" The person would speak in his heart, "When I brush my teeth, I breath! When I sleep, I dream! Is this not multitasking?" Multitasking is a myth. It is never possible to do multitasking because our brain has the capacity to do only one task at a time. What people call multitasking is in fact multiswitching. When we are talking on phone and also parallelly take notes on the pad, we feel that we are very smart and are doing multitasking. But our brain is a power house. It has got unbelievable power and unfortunately we use only a fraction of its power. When we are doing one activity we are using only a small fraction of the brain and the response time from the brain is unbelievably fast. If somebody says, "HOW ARE YOU?" Our brain has such a fast response time that even between hearing the individual alphabets, it can still analyse multiple activities. The classic example for this is the guy who does jugglery with multiple balls in the circus. He will have 8-10 balls in his hand and will toss one ball, then toss another, catch another ball for a fraction of a second and throw that ball again. Not one ball falls down during his act. People think that he is so skillful, he seems to be doing some kind of magic. But what he is indeed doing is multiswitching. He is using greater power of his brain compared to us. If we do same work over and over again, that is stored subconsciously in our brain. Now the brain will do its work because the mind has understood how to utilize that power of the brain. Suppose we are brushing our teeth in the morning, it becomes a habit. So we can parallelly read book and also cook food. There will be powerful multiswitching between the sections of the brain and different work will get completed simultaneously. We can do multiple other work, as well, if we use amazing powers of the brain. It is because the brain is like an atom bomb and what we are doing is not utilizing even a fraction of its power. There are people who do meditation and those who have greater concentration powers. They are very focused on their work at hand and they can use greater powers of the brain. This is exactly the reason why people who have great concentration powers become scientists and dynamos in their fields. A soccer player might have his foot near the ball. But there is a powerful communication between the mind and the brain and they are aware of their opponents, the goal keeper and the goal post. Even the powerful computers cannot do multitasking. If the computer is of very high configuration, it will use greater computing power which will enable it to do powerful multiswitching. However, we have to be careful when we try to do multiswitching. It is possible that we may not have great concentration levels and are not able to use proper powers of the brain and because of this we will end up messing all the work we do. It is always better to take one task at a time and then once it becomes a habit then we can start using powers of multiswitching. Methods like meditation, yogasana and pranayama will always aid in the process.