Pigeons Can Multitask Better Than Humans, Study Shows

Photo by sanjiv nayak on Unsplash

The times we feel the most productive are when we feel the busiest. When we have so much to get done we rapidly switch between tasks, trying to get everything done at once.

There’s a common misconception, especially in the startup culture, that we are much more productive when we multitask. That having more on the go will allow us to get more done in a shorter time. This is sometimes even a ‘skill’ that is listed on job postings.

Research has disproven this idea time and time again, suggesting that we’re much more productive when we’re doing the opposite — focusing on one thing at a time. But a group of German researchers took a different angle on this idea. They tested the human’s ability to multitask versus that of a pigeon.

The Study

Researchers from Ruhr University performed a set of behavioural experiments with both a group of pigeons and a group of humans.

For context, bird brains don’t have as many layers as human brains, but the neurons in their brains are much closer together. This means that they have around 6x more nerve cells per cubic millimetre of the brain, making the average distance between each neuron half the distance than in a human’s brain.