The human brain is always multitasking. That doesn’t mean we’re good at it

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“You kind of build a little program,” Riesenhuber said, “and then you send it to the other part of your brain, and then that takes over for that task.”

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Cox called the finding “a proof of concept” in an email to National Post. Once trained, he wrote, some participants sorted the cars just as well with a second task added as they did without the additional task.

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But practice won’t make texting and driving work together any easier, Riesenhuber said, because you can only look at one thing at a time. “I don’t want people to think, oh yeah, I do texting and driving a lot and that’s going to work,” he said. “I mean it’s just not going to work because you look at different places.”

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How many other tasks can be combined with training “is an exciting open research question,” Cox wrote.

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Risk of errors

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In the health-care field, multitasking often isn’t a choice. A pharmacist who is constantly being interrupted with calls could fill the prescription incorrectly.

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“It is common for people to multitask, but this is at-risk behaviour as it increases the risk of error,” Natalie Borden, CEO of the Institute for Safe Medication Practices Canada, said in an email to National Post. The organization analyzes reports of medication incidents, including near misses.

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Pharmacies in participating provinces reported more than 27,600 medication incidents last year, an increase of six per cent over the year before. Environmental, staffing and workflow problems were the top contributing factors in 2024 and 2025, with interruptions “a large proportion of that,” Borden wrote. She called the problem “a system issue, and not an individual practitioner issue,” since frequent interruptions and unpredictable workloads are “not within the control of individual staff members.”

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Distracting devices?

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Checking a phone at dinner or during a movie is multitasking. Minda said people handle quick shifts of attention well but struggle to stay focused on one thing, “because your brain is always looking for the next thing.”

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One lab test of multitasking has people remember strings of letters while solving simple math problems. In a study published in 2022, Minda’s lab tried to repeat an experiment that found a phone on the desk made students worse at the test by competing for their attention.

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“Having the phone on your desk or in your bag didn’t seem to make you any worse,” he said.

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He suspects students had learned to cope after years of being told to put their phones away in school. “If I tested people now,” Minda said, “I might find a different result.”

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He got through high school and university with no device competing for his attention. Now most people have one, he said, but “unfortunately, our multitasking abilities are about the same, and humans are still really distractible.”

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People can manage the distractions from devices, because texting or scrolling TikTok while studying is voluntary, said Allison Drody, a postdoctoral research fellow in psychology at Queen’s University in an email to National Post. “We have some choice over when we multitask and with what activities.”

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Someone at a desk in an office, for example, could turn off nonessential notifications during work hours to reduce the temptation to multitask.

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Minda said most people, himself included, have trouble looking away from their device when they have nothing else to look at.

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