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Based on an article on brain laterization, it's said that a lateralized brain can do two tasks simultaneously.

Lateralized chicks could pick food out of the pebbles with one eye and one half of the brain while using the other eye and other half of their brain to monitor the skies for predators. Not only could non-lateralized chicks not complete the two tasks simultaneously, but their performance of the single task deteriorated. This suggests that the evolutionary advantage of lateralization comes from the capacity to perform separate parallel tasks in each hemisphere of the brain.

While multitasking might still be too difficult, are there ideal ways of doing two different tasks at the same time? What kind of tasks are suitable for bitasking?

For example, could a person read a book and then listen to another audio book at the same time? Are some people better at typing while talking on the phone than others?

What limitations apply to bi-tasking? Would one be able to easily access and store short or long term memory? Is there a significant loss to motor control and such?

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could a person read a book and then listen to another audio book at the same time? - unlikely, considering that in both cases one is processing speech (reading / listening may be possible, but dialog would present a problem). I don't have a reference for this at the moment, but similar processing tasks will overlap each other. Reading/listening would overlap while doing dishes/listening would not. –  BenCole Jan 26 '13 at 18:58

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