 The concept of multitasking is a very hot topic at the moment. Even though the brain is an amazing information processing machine, it also has capacity limits. The brain's resources are finite. So understanding multitasking comes back to mechanisms of attention. We simply can't give priority to everything at once, and there's probably a good reason for that. We survive in the world, not merely through our sensory systems, but by behaving in certain ways, moving or speaking. If our attention system gave equal weighting to everything in the environment, how would our motor system, which is what controls behavior, know what to act on? We see this play out in robotics. If you don't give an attention system to a robot, in other words, a program to assign priority to one of several possible actions, and you give the robot a choice to move to one of several objects, it does nothing. It just sits there encoding the two stimuli, but can't react to either of them because they're weighted equally. Certainly, there are some things the brain can do simultaneously. We call this parallel processing. But almost everything that we call multitasking isn't really multitasking. We really actually do two or three things at once. What we generally do is switch very rapidly between the different tasks. In the classroom, if a task requires lots of parallel processing, it's understandable that for students doing something for the first time, they can hit the capacity limit quite quickly. For example, solve an equation, write it in the book, and plot it on a graph, all more or less at the same time. If you've done it before, then it's fairly straightforward. But for someone learning how to do all three things for the first time, there'll be costs in terms of what we call cognitive load, which we look at more closely later in this module. One question that's being explored at the moment is whether people can be trained to be good multitaskers or whether good multitaskers are born that way. We don't know the answer to that one yet. A system that rapidly switches serially between two tasks can emulate a system that does two things in parallel. So it's difficult to say for sure whether we can truly multitask or whether we're just able to switch very quickly between two things. Having said this, people try to multitask a lot and are very bad at it. But training can help. But this raises another important question, which is whether training can truly transfer from one multitasking environment to another. We know that if you train a particular multitasking scenario, you'll get better at that scenario. But whether that transfers to all multitasking paradigms or how we can get transfer is very much an open question. And of course answering these questions is very important because if we can truly achieve transfer, imagine the powerful implications, not just to education but in clinical settings. People with psychiatric or neurological impairments often have deficits in areas of attention, working memory and multitasking. So if we can achieve transfer, this could significantly improve their quality of life. If a person has high cognitive load, this means they are more likely to be distracted from the task and will find it difficult to focus their attention. At the same time, you don't want cognitive load to be too low. We don't want there to be nothing to focus on, so it's about finding the right balance. A task shouldn't be so easy that there's nothing to focus on, but a task should also not be so overwhelming that a person loses the ability to maintain attentional focus. Stress can add to one's cognitive load because it uses the brain's resources. If you're under stress, you might be devoting attention to thinking about the stress or stimulus, and that can impair task performance. That's why in sporting competitions, people triumph with the opposition under stress. People make mistakes when they're under stress. For a learner, feeling confused can be very stressful. Certainly, when our predictions about how the world works are disrupted, we can find that confronting or confusing. But confusion can be positive if it's managed properly. I like to think of this more as puzzlement than confusion. Puzzlement is when you might think, hmm, I wasn't expecting that. What questions should I ask? What do I need to know to find a solution? Confusion is more like when you're completely baffled. I don't know where to start. I don't even know what questions I should ask. Puzzlement is the positive side of confusion, the constructive side. So perhaps an effective teacher would take a student who displayed confusion and be able to bring them back to a state of puzzlement. They'd then be in a more receptive state to ask the right kinds of questions.