>Incredibly, people can walk and chew gum at the same time. This includes the ability to refocus their attention when they experience unusual events. No. They

>Incredibly, people can walk and chew gum at the same time. This includes the ability to refocus their attention when they experience unusual events. No. They can't. That 'refocus' you mention is proof of that. it's getting old having to say over and over again that this isn't actually the case : humans switch contexts and lose focus -- you're not as good at multi-tasking as you think, nor is anyone. So , people can walk OR chew bubble gum , and if these choose to they can pay contextual switching costs between the two to make outside spectators believe that they can do two things at once. Don't fall for the ruse, there is a cost even if it's a small one. Similarly, in a disaster i'd rather be surrounded by fit young soldiers without cell-phones -- alert and aware -- than I would be surrounded by the typical multi-variant airliner crowd that must have their attention drug away from the device by the sound of crunching metal. It's obvious to me that a group of alert and ready people will outperform 'the other group' in an escape in nearly every metric, i'd hope that the same would be obvious to the other humans trying to escape fiery wreckage alongside me. [0]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7075496/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7075496/ [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_multitasking https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_multitasking