Recent brain research on the issue of performance has revealed some interesting things about how the brain attempts to handle multi-tasking.
Our brains are single core main processing units with sub processors arranged in committee style to control lower level functions. Sub processors work wonderfully in parallel, and place interrupts on the main core as they compete for main core processing time. The brain uses habits, automatic subroutines, to automatically handle the demand of the subprocessors, conserving cognitive load on the main processing unit. The main processing unit, which we call consciousness, can only process on a single issue at a time, and when the main core attempts to multitask it does this by devoting small slices of processing successively to each of the multi-tasks. Each task switch of the main processing core involves a small amount of overhead, and attempting to consciously multi-task too many activities eats up exponentially increasing overhead in the task switching activity, leaving very little concentration for the actual processing. This is why focused concentration achieves much more in the same amount of time than running in a scatterbrain mode.
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