Cognitive bottlenecks: the inherent limits of the thinking mind

To make matters worse, lots of multitasking requires decision-making: Do I answer this text message or ignore it? How do I respond to this? How do I file this e-mail? Do I continue what I’m working on now or take a break? It turns out that decision-making is also very hard on your neural resources and that little decisions appear to take up as much

Our short-term memory is also limited. We need strategies not to waste its capacity with thoughts we can better delegate to an external system. While the estimations of our long-term memory capacity are wildly diverse and rather speculative, psychologists used to tend to agree on a very specific number when it came to short-term memory: We can hold

When we multitask, we overload the brain, and the processing shifts from the hippocampus, which enables us to remember and imagine, to the striatum, which is responsible for rote tasks.44 This makes it harder for us to learn a task or, after a period of multitasking, even to remember what we were doing.

The limitation of consciousness is demonstrated by the fact that to understand what another person is saying we must process 40 bits of information each second. If we assume the upper limit of our capacity to be 126 bits per second, it follows that to understand what three people are saying simultaneously is theoretically possible, but only by mana