The Cost of Attention Switching

Despite our pride and fondness of multitasking, the brain isn't actually built to multitask. Multitasking increases our error rate by as much as 50%. And it doesn't speed things up either. Trying to multitask doubles the amount of time that it takes to perform each of the tasks at hand. When you introduce a third task, the brain's prefrontal cortex will discard the one it considers the least important.