Here's a picture of an animal. It's an elephant. And this one's an African elephant. And the thing about elephants is they have noses but their noses, whilst based on the same organ as our nose are enormously more complex. The trunk of an African elephant has something like 100,000 muscles in it. It is capable of very precise movements.

An African elephant can quite literally lift a bone China cup with tea in it. It can move it from one table to another and put it down precisely onto the saucer of another bone China tea said without doing any damage at all. And yet the very same trunk can lift a log Wang at I can throw it like you and I can throw a pencil. The elephant is able to do one thing at a time. And he's able to do it amazingly well. Now, let's have a look at another animal.

What's this one? That's right, it's an octopus. And what do we know about octopuses? Well, we know that they have eight legs, let's call them their tentacles, their hydrostatic organs that can move around. We also know that octopuses have nine brains they have a brain like us, in what is equivalent to our head, which does most of the processing. But then there is a small brain at the top of each of the tentacles, which has enables the octopus to control each of those tentacles.

Independently. octopuses can solve problems they can solve. On mazes, and they can do so independently with each tentacle operating on its own. An octopus can do eight things at a time, not nearly as well and as powerful as an elephant can genuinely multitask. So I guess my question to you is this. Are you an elephant?

Or are you an octopus? attached to this module, you will find a very simple, not very scientific quiz that will establish how many hands you need to do the work that you choose to do in the way that you choose to do it. When you do that, you'll get a number between one and eight. And when I've done this in workshops, I find typically that most people score somewhere between four and seven. Yes, there are some exceptional people who score eight and there are very, very few people who score One, two, very few octopuses and very strangely, very few human beings in the two arms. Now, what's all this about?

Obviously, this is about multitasking. multitasking is inefficient. But first, we need to understand what multitasking is. So in the next video, I'm going to talk to you about what multitasking is, why it doesn't work. And if you choose to do multitasking, how to use our knowledge of the way your brain works, to do it effectively