Why is it that despite volumes of research to the contrary, we generally think that we can multitask? Some of us even believe that we are good at it.

The problem seems to be that the research contradicts our experience. We’ve all multitasked in meetings without problems. Perhaps we’ve driven a car while texting without driving off the road. These experiences gives us a false sense of confidence in our ability to focus on more than one thing at a time.

Daniel Simon and Christopher Chabris have finally provided an explanation that seems to reconcile the science with our experience.

Simon and Chabris are most famous among business people for a popular video used in training workshops and meetings. The video involves people passing basketballs to one another. If you haven’t seen this yet, I’d strongly recommend that you take a look here before reading any further.

The video provides a stunning example of selective attention. In their new book, The Invisible Gorilla: And Other Ways Our Intuitions Deceive Us Chabris and Simon explain what is happening.

The reason that many people don’t see the gorilla is that it is unexpected given the task being performed.  Our brain is constantly receiving visual, tactile, and auditory stimuli. In order for us to function, our brain has to make a decision as to which of those stimuli should be made conscious. It turns out somewhat paradoxically that our brain tends to filter out things that we don’t expect to see or hear. You would think the opposite would be true but it’s actually more efficient to ignore the exceptions. This is an important point when it comes to multitasking.

The reason that many of us are “successful” at multitasking is that most of the time we are in rote situations – nothing unexpected is occurring. We don’t get into accidents when driving and texting because accidents and the things that cause them to happen are pretty rare. Similarly, the reason that we don’t miss much in meetings is because unfortunately, most meetings these days don’t have a lot of content or discussion that is particularly new or unusual. It’s usually the same old stuff. Our multitasking success is less about skill and more about luck and probability. Unfortunately, when the odds go against us and the unexpected occurs, we often find out that our skills weren’t as good as we thought.

So, perhaps we are good at multitasking in situations that actually don’t require our attention in the first place. But, that’s not when problems are going to occur. We aren’t so good when we find ourselves in unexpected territory. Unfortunately, we don’t know when those unexpected things are going to happen so we can’t proactively decide when it’s time to pay attention.  Don’t confuse probability with skill.  The odds of you missing something might be small since there usually isn’t something to miss.  However, as the research shows, the odds of you missing something important or unexpected when it does happen are huge.  Do you really want to take that risk?

If you find that you can multitask at work, you might not be doing things that really are stretching yourself or your business. It might be time to put down the Blackberry and pick up some new, more aggressive goals.