When I was a kid, there was a trendy idea claiming that it might be beneficial for kids to try to do more multitasking, because it might be good for… reasons. While the trend quickly died down, I certainly drank a lot of the Kool-Aid back in the day and regarded my inability to concentrate as a good trait.

Now that I am much older, the narrative has shifted. Now it is all about how the latest neuroscience tells us that staying concentrated for a long time is better, and how a short attention span is a problem.

I just came across a post that mirrors this narrative today, and I think there is actually something to chew on here. I am no neuroscientist, and I will probably get all the facts horribly wrong, but I think whenever a societal trend flips, it is almost always about overcorrection. Other similar topics that come to mind would be social justice and religion, but those two topics are way too controversial. So, I guess I will just comment on the not-yet-overly-politicized topic of multitasking for humans.

As I’ve grown older, I do find myself having a better ability to concentrate. I remember when I was in grade school, I could not sit in a 40-minute lecture without constantly asking my friends how much time was left. My friends got quite annoyed sometimes because of that. This behavior continued all the way to my high school years, but by high school, I could actually sit through an entire 40-minute class. Concentration does seem to be a skill—a skill that you gain as your brain develops, or at least one that seems to be learnable in my case. I certainly find it quite beneficial to be able to sit down and do something for hours.

But this is actually not the claim often made by people who are pro-concentration and anti-multitasking. No, their claim typically has more to do with how the human brain functions. The central claim is that human brains are actually extremely slow at ‘context switching,’ and distractions of any kind are strictly harmful to productivity. Some people even go to the extreme of claiming things like music might be harmful because lyrics distract you from your current work. It distracts you from the “flow state” of mind, which, allegedly, is the best state for your mind to be in.

I think there are some studies on that; I am not sure. Again, I am not a neuroscientist. But claims of that kind feel quite suspicious to me because they contradict many other things you would expect a human to do—and arguably, beneficial things for a human to do. For example, typically, after intense sports, you need a recovery period. There’s also the age-old recommendation by literally all eye doctors that you should try to look away from the screen every 10 minutes or so. Clearly, many things that humans do require breaks from time to time, and sometimes quite often.

Many tasks that people typically regard as a single monotask also often consist of multiple different parts or cycles. For example, when coding, what typically happens is people need to think about what to code (like what features to add, what changes to make to the whole system), then how to code (the specific implementation), and finally debugging and testing. While most people regard “fixing tickets” as a singular task, the task itself almost always consists of many parts. If the claim is that multitasking of any kind is harmful, we must ask what multitasking even is in the first place: are we not supposed to be parsing the request and thinking about the implementation at the same time? Should we not think or look at unrelated stuff while the program is compiling? Are we not supposed to read documentation while we are trying to write code? Even with pure vibe coding, you still have the same issue. This is not only an unrealistic expectation but also something that is clearly dogmatic to the point of being useless advice.

I’d also like to challenge the idea that monotasking is not only unrealistic and unhelpful, but that it might lead to worse outcomes. As someone who writes from time to time, I don’t typically write the whole thing in one sitting (unless it is for useless blogs like this). What I typically do is write the first draft, and while I am doing it, I will browse X or YouTube. What often happens is I end up finding something more fun to add to my work, because algorithms are good these days. I am almost by definition doing tons of multitasking, but I personally believe that as a direct result of that, my writing is significantly more interesting. As an illustrator, I also draw from time to time, and the process of browsing and finding references not only helps with the final outcome but also changes what I decide to draw in the first place. According to the Internet™, this is le bad because you are not supposed to be browsing brainrot while working, but in both cases, I find myself producing results that are significantly better.

Thinking from an evolutionary standpoint, it only makes sense for humans to be able to multitask. First of all, as far as we know, human brain cells are heavily decentralized; each neuron only does a small thing. Some of our biological functions even operate on their own, such as the heartbeat. While sometimes under the control of your conscious brain, many of your important biological functions work on their own without you having to think about it. I don’t believe the thinking part of our brain is just so different from the rest of our nervous system that it has some perfectly centralized architecture. Most things in evolution are co-opted, and our ability to think is likely a result of that. As such, our centralized thinking function is probably an illusion of decentralized compute anyway.

It also makes sense from an environmental perspective. In any human habitat, there will be many things that one needs to keep in mind at any given time. When someone is marching to find food, they need to try to walk while keeping an eye out for fruit, looking around to be aware of predators, and talking to other humans to build social bonds. In modern times, when someone cooks, they need to look at the color, focus on the flame, and reason about the next step to cook, at a minimum. It only makes sense for the human mind to wander around because we always live in environments with a lot of what some might call “distractions.”

We also know that truly distraction-free environments are horrible for most people, as many of the sensory deprivation darkroom experiments—which wouldn’t pass a modern-day IRB—can tell you.

So why is the internet so obsessed with attention spans and single-tasking lately? I have some theories. One is that the ability to do one task for a long time is typically a trait of older people; sometimes it’s an acquired ability to enjoy one thing for a longer time, and sometimes it’s the inability to multitask as one ages. TikTok being the new thing means that older people want to reject what they don’t find particularly enjoyable. There is also the simple fact that culture almost always swings back and forth, because it is always fun to be a contrarian.

But the truth almost always lies somewhere in between. Just because strict monotasking is silly and probably counterproductive doesn’t mean extreme multitasking—like listening to the Bible and Mozart at 2x speed—is helpful either. The specific proportion of each thing is probably different for each individual at different stages of their lives, and the internet or society at large never likes an answer that just says “it depends,” even though that is most likely the most correct one.

So multitask or not, flow state or not—it doesn’t really matter. People should probably just try to do whatever they find productive, and if you want to go the extra mile, try to time and quantify it. No one is the magic statistical average; you are the only person who has your brain.