| HN Mirror

1. https://www.apa.org/topics/research/multitasking - Not a study. Focuses on productivity (not health, or perceived well-being, supports the idea that the brain have dedicated structures for multi-tasking.

2. https://www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1073/pnas.0903620106 - It's about media multitasking, like watching multiple videos at the same time. Irrelevant.

3. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12710835/ - About driving. Driving itself is already a multitasking effort.

4. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4174517/ - Media multitasking again. Irrelevant.

5. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12172848/ - Study itself admits that has limitations, did not adjust to participants practice levels.

6. https://otl.du.edu/plan-a-course/teaching-resources/the-mult... - Not a study. Reference links broken. Useless.

7. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11543232/ - Editorial article, not a study.

8. https://ics.uci.edu/~gmark/chi08-mark.pdf - About interruptions, only deals with unplanned multi-tasking (in which there are interruptions).

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I am aware that there are cognitive loads on some kinds of multi-tasking. That does not translate to all kinds of multi-tasking though.

To say that "the brain is like a computer, single thread" is misleading. There are scenarios in which the brain exceeds in multi-tasking (playing instruments like drums, playing games, etc), and there is plenty of evidence that we're tuned for it in all kinds of ways (but not all of them).

Furthermore, I'm not defending we should multi-task. I just think the metaphor and the "brain is mono thread" idea is both wrong and dumb.