The Brain Cycle

If you know, our human brains can't multitask. Search online, you'll find that our brain are tasked to do one thing at a time. The illusion of multitasking is actually your brain switching from one task to another very quickly rather than really doing things in parallel.

That means our brain has a fault. If you're a "chronic multitasker" (considered a disease in one's opinion), you'd probably had great difficulty doing single-tasking. The brain had got used to switching so quickly it's hard to settle down. Then, why is it considered a disease?

Well, if you ever try both multitasking and single-tasking, you'd notice that single tasking (no switching tasks) puts your brain in a calm, relaxing way to deal with stuffs. Yes, some stuffs are stressful, no matter if you're single-tasking it or not; however, consider you're doing simple tasks that doesn't take much brainpower, doing it single-taskingly actually implies less strain than when doing multiple such tasks at a time.

The topic today, is about brain cycle. Let's first understand: when you switch from one task to another, there's some "remnant" left behind that occupies your brain resources. It's like a short-term memory to cache where you'd left off, so when you return to it, you'd continue to pick up from where it is. To switch from one unfinished task to another, one recommends writing the task down, sit there doing nothing for 5 minutes (or you can go to toilet, drink some water, basically nothing that occupies your brian resources), then that 5 minutes clear the task from your brain into the piece of paper, then you can start something new. You would not want something to keep occupying your memory while you want full focus on something new.

However, it so happens that sometimes, when you finish something, your brain can immediately disallocate the memory in the brain and you don't need to wait 5 minutes before switching to another task. One called that the "brain cycle", because when you finish one task, a cycle is complete totally, nothing left behind; then you can immediately start another cycle to do something new, related or totally unrelated.

It doesn't always works though; if you're too excited with the current job that when you finish something, your brain comes up with something new, then you need to write down that something new somewhere, brainstorm it all out first, before you can clear of your memory. It's a process to calm yourself down, ask your brain that we have something else to do at the moment so anything you come up with, we'll write it down and read it back next time, to continue with the task that we haven't started yet.

Conclusion, no specific conclusion. Read back to the paragraphs and each is a conclusion per se.

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Some note on multitasking. While some multitasking is clear, others aren't thought of as multitasking when in fact they are. For example, using more than one computer screen is considered multitasking. Unless you're doing a single job and only that job (like game programming requires 2 screen sometimes); otherwise, one screen do one thing, another screen do another thing, is considered multitasking.

Also, multitasking have a difficulty of choice. You can't choose to prioritize which one to do first. Not only that, but each task inflicts temptation on you to do this for a while, the switch to do that for a while, to calm the bull inside your heart.

That's probably it. Leave a comment if you know something extra about multitasking other than the obvious ones.