Your brain is behaving like a laser beam
As you are reading this sentence and trying to figure out where it is going, your brain is behaving like a laser beam - you are paying attention.
Notice that the laser beam above can only point narrowly in one direction. All around it is black, not seen. This is just the way your brain works too.
You may be thinking, “Oh, OK,” without remembering that you are often trying to pay attention to more than one thing at once. Daily life is like that, pulling us from one activity to another. In fact, it is not possible to multitask, with one exception. Not you, not me, nobody can concentrate on two ideas at once.
You might respond, “But there’s a word for multitask! People use it all the time. What are they doing if not multitasking?”.
What a lot of research has found is that people are not doing multitasking, but instead are rapidly moving from one task to another. They are doing rapid serial tasking. [Why Multitasking Doesn’t Work (clevelandclinic.org)]
What’s wrong with that? It’s cognitively expensive and emotionally wearing to start-stop Thing 1, then start-stop Thing 2 and go back to Thing 1.
OK, you might ask. But why does this matter?
In life, in the workplace, you can either (with your narrow-beam attention) do a mental task OR think about whether you could do that task differently or not at all.
The prefrontal cortex can follow or question:
I can do these things...
OR
I can...
Notice that the laser beam above can only point narrowly in one direction. All around it is black, not seen. This is just the way your brain works too.
You may be thinking, “Oh, OK,” without remembering that you are often trying to pay attention to more than one thing at once. Daily life is like that, pulling us from one activity to another. In fact, it is not possible to multitask, with one exception. Not you, not me, nobody can concentrate on two ideas at once.
You might respond, “But there’s a word for multitask! People use it all the time. What are they doing if not multitasking?”.
What a lot of research has found is that people are not doing multitasking, but instead are rapidly moving from one task to another. They are doing rapid serial tasking. [Why Multitasking Doesn’t Work (clevelandclinic.org)]
What’s wrong with that? It’s cognitively expensive and emotionally wearing to start-stop Thing 1, then start-stop Thing 2 and go back to Thing 1.
OK, you might ask. But why does this matter?
In life, in the workplace, you can either (with your narrow-beam attention) do a mental task OR think about whether you could do that task differently or not at all.
The prefrontal cortex can follow or question:
I can do these things...
- Write a report
- Answer emails, Slack, etc
- Lead, follow in a meeting, etc
- Follow any other process
OR
I can...
- Question the need for the report
- Wonder whether there's another option that would be better
- Pilot test an option
- Compare results
This is critical thinking!