A friend of mine once taught me a speed reading trick that blew my mind: sing a song — one you know by heart, lyrics and all — while reading a piece of text. When you’re done, stop everything and write down what you remember from what you read.
You’ll remember a whole lot more than you’d expect.
The reason? Our brain doesn’t need to sub-vocalize — that inner voice reading every word back to us — to process what we see. As soon as we see the words, the brain has already taken them in. The singing just gets that inner narrator out of the way.
Now, fair warning: this works better for getting the gist than for deep comprehension. For complex material, that inner narrator actually helps us synthesize ideas. But as an exercise in noticing how much our brain can take in without conscious effort, it’s eye-opening.
That little exercise started me down a path of thinking more deeply about focus, attention, and what we actually mean when we talk about “multitasking.”
Playing Guitar and Singing
I play guitar and sing, and people sometimes point to that as an example of multitasking. You’re doing two things at once, right?
Not exactly.
When I’m playing a song, I know that when I land on a G chord, that’s where the chorus starts. When I switch to another chord, I should be singing a different part of the lyrics. It’s all stitched together. I’m not playing guitar and singing as two separate activities — I’m splitting attention between two threads woven into one context: the song.
Think of a drummer. Is a drummer doing four things at once — kick drum, hi-hat, snare, crash? I guess it depends on what one is counting. A drummer is playing a song. Not two songs. One song. Within that one act, different limbs are doing different things at different times, but they all serve the same purpose.
The Difference Between Splitting Attention and Multitasking
Here’s where it gets interesting. When I get a new album — yes, I still buy CDs — and I try to listen to it while working, something very different happens. As a musician, I don’t just hear music as a listener. I listen to the layers, the arrangement, the production choices. I pay attention to the lyrics from a songwriter’s perspective. That’s a whole separate context from my work.
So if I put on that album and try to code at the same time, am I really doing both? Not really. I’m focusing on the work, and then — oh, that chorus was interesting — and then back to work. The music keeps playing, but am I really listening to it? Only in quick flashes, when I pull my attention away from one context and lend it to the other.
That’s what multitasking actually is: constantly switching between different contexts, giving a little bit of attention here, a little bit there. Psychologists call this “task switching,” and every switch carries a real cost — our prefrontal cortex has to disengage from one set of mental rules and load up another. Research suggests this can significantly reduce productivity. It’s not just exhausting. It’s expensive.
When Multiple Things Become One
Think about learning to drive a car with a manual transmission. At first, you’re thinking: clutch, first gear, where’s second gear, don’t stall. Every action demands your full attention. That’s multitasking — multiple things competing for the same mental resources.
But over time, all of those separate actions collapse into one thing: driving. You don’t think about shifting gears. You don’t think about the clutch. You just drive. The individual tasks didn’t disappear — they merged into a single context. There’s a term for this in psychology: automaticity. What starts as an explicit, conscious effort eventually moves into procedural memory — the kind of knowledge your body just knows how to execute without your prefrontal cortex having to manage every step.
The same thing happens with music. When I was learning a song on guitar, I had to focus entirely on the chord changes. Then entirely on the lyrics. Then, slowly, I started stitching them together. At some point, playing that song stopped being two tasks and became one. It wasn’t 500 separate notes and 100 separate words anymore — it was one integrated program. One schema, as psychologists would call it.
Context Is Everything
The real insight for me is this: as long as the smaller tasks are grouped within the same context, it’s not multitasking. It’s multi-threading.
Driving and texting? That’s two different contexts fighting for the same attention. That’s true multitasking, and we’re terrible at it.
Playing a song — guitar, voice, rhythm, dynamics — all within the same musical context? That’s multi-threading. The brain handles it much more efficiently because it doesn’t have to keep switching contexts. This aligns with Cognitive Load Theory: when tasks share the same mental model, the brain doesn’t have to fully reload its “operating system” to switch between them. The relevant associations are already warm, already active. The startup cost is minimal.
Less Splitting, More Living
Understanding this has changed how I approach my day. If I can keep my work within one context — no random meetings pulling me out, no notifications dragging my attention elsewhere — I can multi-thread effectively. I can hold several related threads in my mind and move between them fluidly, because they all belong to the same song.
But the moment I introduce a completely different context — an unrelated interruption, a surprise meeting, a quick check of something that has nothing to do with what I’m working on — the cost goes way up. It’s like taking the wrong exit on the highway. You might be going 200 miles an hour, but if you’re going in the wrong direction, speed doesn’t matter.
The brain can’t multitask. But it can multithread — beautifully — when we’re deliberate about keeping things in context.
Something worth paying attention to.
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