Multitasking is a myth: Our brains are programmed to do one thing at a time — in fact, everytime we assume that we are multitasking we are actually jumping from one task to another, a neuroscience professor at MIT’s Picower Institute for Learning and Memory says, according to the Wall Street Journal. This practice impacts the quality of all of our tasks and eventually leaves us with brain fog — we can’t recall which task we started on first and have no idea where we stopped. This juggling of tasks butchers our creativity and makes us more vulnerable to making mistakes.

The solution? Monotasking: Silencing our notifications, organizing our emails into batches to be refreshed every 15 minutes, and assigning periods of deep work v breaks will result in true “productivity” as opposed to trying to do everything at once. We shouldn’t take advantage of pauses, too — a bowl heating in the microwave for 2 minutes, for instance — as a chance to “put that time to use” doing something else, suggests a productivity coach. In fact, allowing your brain to wander isn’t a waste. On the contrary, daydreaming is an activity we should be doing more of, rather than looking for distractions.

The illusion of a “felt presence”: Unlike hallucinations — which are typically registered by the senses — the impression that someone is “right there with us” originates less from a tangible sound, smell, touch, etc. and more from an unexplained feeling or intuition, according to BBC Future.

This could be a result of many things, but scientists have hypotheses: One possibility could be that this inkling is due to atypical activity in the parts of the brain that are responsible for creating meaning from the data collected by our senses — leading to a sort of blurring of our bodily boundaries, according to an associated professor of psychology at Durham University. Another theory refers to “predictive processing,” which is more likely to happen in situations where the brain fails to make sense of the world we live in — due to extreme physical stress, an illness, or something else. In that scenario, the mind may overcompensate for the gaps in knowledge by using data it has stored from experience.

Guardian angels or ghosts? “Felt presence” may sound ominous, but it isn’t always that way. While women and Parkinson’s patients are more likely to interpret the experience negatively as a threatening situation, it can be comforting to other people, particularly those who may be in physical danger.

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