Are Pianists Superhuman Multitaskers?
When I was in the 8th grade, I went to a local music show with my friends in our town. This was around the time I had just started my piano lessons. At the concert, there was a pianist who caught my attention.
I was amazed by how he played the piano using both his left and right hands. It looked like magic, the way his hands worked together to make beautiful music.
It was the first time I witnessed the term “multitasking” in the context of humans.
But was he genuinely multitasking?
The Origin
In 1965, IBM published a paper that used the word “multitasking” to describe the abilities of the IBM System/360 computer.
The word “multitasking” wasn’t meant to explain how humans work when it was first thought up. It was mainly about how computers could handle lots of jobs at once.
Why Humans Cannot Multitask?
Human attention is often compared to using a zoom lens.
Imagine you have a camera with a zoom lens — you can zoom in to focus on a small, specific area and see all the details, or you can zoom out to see a larger area all at once. But there’s a catch — you can’t zoom in and out simultaneously.
This zooming ability is like a built-in filter in our brain. It helps us ignore things that aren’t important at the moment.
Because of this natural filtering, it’s tough to multitask effectively. We can switch between tasks, but when we do, we might miss important details because our brain focuses on one thing at a time.
It’s like trying to watch two different movies on two screens at once — you won’t catch everything that’s happening in either one.
The Switch Cost Effect
When we try to focus on two things at once, it takes some extra mental effort and time. This is known as the “switching cost” or “switching penalty.” It’s like a little speed bump in our thinking process.
Think about it this way: you’re enjoying a slice of pizza, and suddenly, someone offers you an ice cream cone. When you switch from eating pizza to savouring ice cream, there’s a brief moment where your taste buds need to get used to the new flavour.
This pause happens because your brain needs a short time to switch from one food to another.
In the same way, when we switch between tasks, there’s a little delay as our brain shifts from one job to another. Many studies confirm that this delay:
- slows us down,
- makes our work less accurate,
- affects how well we remember things,
- causes decision tiredness and
- makes it harder to be as productive as we would like.
The Multitasking Pianist
We have established that it takes work to multitask. But what about the piano player I watched? Or a person listening to music while driving a car? Aren’t they multitasking?
The answer is yes and no.
Imagine your brain is like a superhero with superpowers. It can do many things at once, like walking and talking or chewing gum and playing a game. But there’s a limit to how much it can do simultaneously, just like a superhero can’t save two cities simultaneously.
Scientists (Kahneman and Tversky: 1973, 1979; Tombu and Jolicoeur, 2003) believe our brain has a limited amount of power, like the superhero’s energy, and it has to share this power between the things we’re doing.
If two tasks are easy, like walking and talking, our brain can easily share its power between them, and we do them both well.
But if the tasks are complex, like trying to solve two tricky puzzles simultaneously, it’s like our superhero splitting their energy in half. That makes it challenging to do both tasks well because each gets less of the superhero’s power.
Likewise, through lots of practice and coordination training, a pianist becomes skilled at using both hands to play a melody.
When you examine a sheet of piano music, you’ll notice that the pianist is really doing one task at a time. Even though they’re using both hands, the job is essentially the same: playing one note on the treble staff and one note on the bass staff simultaneously.
Multitasking is a tricky balance for our brains. While computers can easily do multiple things at once, our minds work best when we focus on one task at a time. Switching between tasks takes time and attention.
So, if you’re planning to do 20 things at once, remember that is not the way your brain is wired.
I’m a Learning Experience Designer by day and a nighttime author. I use my cognitive psychology knowledge to craft engaging learning experiences that unlock people’s full potential.
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