[voidr]

What if our brain is actually a multi core machine that has millions of cores? Would you still force it to use one core?

What if the task you just put into background kept working on it's own?

I think humans were built to multitask, our environment is too complex to be single threaded, think driving: you need o pay attention to multiply things at the same time.

[greenyoda]

Software development seems to be something that's very different than what humans were "built" (evolved) for. During the millions of years over which our brains evolved, we had to be acutely aware of our environment so that we didn't get eaten while foraging for food. Driving might be similar to that: keeping your eye out for danger while your main goal is navigating your car to its destination. But that doesn't suggest to me a million-core machine -- it's more like a foreground process with a couple of lower-priority background processes. And adding just a few extra distractions to driving -- cell phones, texting, kids yelling in the back seat -- increases the probability of accidents, which suggests that our capacity for attention is quite limited.

However, software development calls for a very different kind of mental work, one we couldn't have evolved to be good at since our species only started doing it very recently: juggling multiple levels of abstractions in your head along with countless low-level details. That's so hard to do that trying to do it concurrently with other tasks severely degrades our ability to do it. Paul Graham wrote about this very eloquently in his essay "Holding a Program in One's Head" (http://paulgraham.com/head.html).

[forgottenpaswrd]

"What if our brain is actually a multi core machine that has millions of cores?"

The brain has billions of cores on parallel units, but they are unconscious.

"Would you still force it to use one core?"

No, you can't use only one at all, but you use "the one",the conscious brain(that could only do one thing at the same time) to coordinate them all, you should "force" the millions of cores to work in the same thing at the same time.

"I think humans were built to multitask, our environment is too complex to be single threaded, think driving: you need o pay attention to multiply things at the same time."

They were built to multi task over the same thing. If you go hunting but you are also thinking on your girlfriend while you remember the taste of the food you ate yesterday and try your nephew does not get hurt you won't be as efficient as someone that focus all their senses and thoughts over one single task.

[wahnfrieden]

Yes, maybe the question is wrong - it's not about whether or not we multitask. I can't easily occupy my consciousness with multiple tasks, but I can let my unconscious mind handle something (and interrupt my conscious mind when it needs to - e.g. when a car is swerving out of control in front of me) while I perform something with my higher levels of consciousness.

[philwelch]

Actual research suggests differently: http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/brain-sense/200908/the-m...

[groby_b]

Fantastic that you believe that. Unfortunately, pretty much all science on that topic contradicts you. There's a metric ton of studies that show that our brains worked best focused on a single task.

[swah]

Perhaps its a bad analogy? The "single task" you're working on also has sends signals to you.