Of course the brain can multi-task.
Of course it can do two things at once.

In every moment, your brain is processing billions of “bits” of information about your internal status, your environment, what your conscious attention is currently on. How many times have you experienced having a word or name you couldn’t remember pop into your mind minutes or even hours later? How often do you decide to let something “cook” in the back of your mind while you go on to other things?

What these studies refer to is our ability to *consciously* be aware of multiple things. And our consciousness is indeed much more limited in its capacity, as demonstrated in these studies.

It is critical in discussing the capacity of the brain to make distinctions between our conscious, deliberate processing (what Guy Claxton calls the “Hare Brain”) and the unconscious processing that goes on behind the scenes (what Claxton calls the “Tortoise Mind”).

Karen