Uncover the truth about multitasking, how to deal with interruptions, entering a flow state, finding the right environment and much more…
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It can feel really good but it is reducing productivity by up to 40 percent.
It can feel really good but it is reducing productivity by up to 40 percent.
Multitasking can reduce productivity by up to 40 percent, research finds.
And now brain scans show why.
Changing from one activity to another interferes with brain activity.
This makes the end result much worse than if we focus on one thing at a time.
Dr Iiro Jääskeläinen, a neuroscientist and one of the study’s authors, said:
“We used functional magnetic resonance imaging to measure different brain areas of our research subjects while they watched short segments of the Star Wars, Indiana Jones and James Bond movies.”
Sometimes the films were cut into 50 second fragments, other times they watched full 6.5 minute segments.
Obviously, in reality, we would hope to focus on one task for more than 6.5 minutes — but this is just to simulate the effects of task switching.
The scans tracked the areas of the brain that are important in understanding narratives.
The results showed that the brain works more efficiently when only tracking one task at a time.
Dr Jääskeläinen said that completing one task a day beats trying to do a dozen things at once.
The problem is that multitasking can feel good, despite being less efficient:
“It’s easy to fall into the trap of multitasking.
In that case, it seems like there is little real progress and this leads to a feeling of inadequacy.
Concentration decreases, which causes stress.
Prolonged stress hinders thinking and memory.”
Social media, Dr Jääskeläinen said, is a particularly challenging problem:
“Social media is really nothing but multitasking, with several parallel plots and issues.
You might end up reading the news or playing a game recommended by a friend.
From the brain’s perspective, social media only increases the load.”
Perhaps worse, multitasking could even be causing changes to the structure of the brain, a 2014 study found:
“Using laptops, phones and other media devices at the same time could be shrinking important structures in our brains, a new study may indicate.
For the first time, neuroscientists have found that people who use multiple devices simultaneously have lower gray-matter density in an area of the brain associated with cognitive and emotional control.”
The study was published in the journal Human Brain Mapping (Lahnakoski et al., 2017).
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Selective attention in psychology refers to how we focus our attention on some things and ignore others — one example is the attentional spotlight.
Selective attention in psychology refers to how we focus our attention on some things and ignore others — one example is the attentional spotlight.
The definition of selective attention in psychology is focusing on one object or stimuli to the exclusion of all others.
Since attention is a limited resource and there is so much information coming into our brains at any one time from our senses, we have to choose what we pay attention to.
Selective attention is most often studied in psychology in our vision and hearing.
For example, the cocktail party effect is a great example of the power of auditory selective attention.
The cocktail party effect in psychology is our impressive and under-appreciated ability to tune our attention to just one voice from a multitude.
However, vision has proved an incredibly rich area for psychology research on selective attention.
To understand how selective attention in psychology works take the example of visual selective attention.
Much of the time our attention is focused in the same way we are looking, but not always.
In fact, we probably spend a lot more of our time than we might imagine with our ‘mind’s eye’ looking in a different direction to our eyeballs.
Eye direction normally coincides with where attention is directed but it is such an important social signal that disguise is sometimes necessary.
Take these examples of selective attention:
Although this phenomenon of selective attention is a common everyday experience, the way attention moves around the visual field has been a tricky one for scientists to examine.
Up until the 1970s psychologists found it very difficult to prove experimentally that attention could move without the eyes.
Then an explosion of experiments in the 70s provided just the evidence scientists had been waiting for.
These led to one of the most famous metaphors for visual attention: the attentional spotlight.
This is the idea that our selective attention moves around our field of vision so that the things falling within its beam are processed preferentially.
Selective attention can be both consciously directed and hijacked by unconscious processes so that, for example, we can avoid getting hit by buses.
One classic experiment that finds the ‘attentional spotlight’ zipping away from eye direction was carried out by Professor Michael Posner and colleagues at the University of Oregon (Posner, Snyder & Davidson, 1980).
Across a series of different conditions testing selective attention they had participants press a button as quickly as possible when they saw a light appear.
In some conditions participants were given a little hint about where the light was going to appear, either they saw:
These hints were provided just a fraction of a second before the flash of light so people didn’t have time to move their eyes (this was checked using electrooculography) but had to flex their selective attention.
The question researchers were interested in was whether people were faster to respond to the light when given a clue about its position, compared with no clue.
What they found was that people were about 50 milliseconds (one-half of a tenth of a second) faster to detect the light when given a clue than not — a significant advantage.
What this suggests is that something other than the eyes such as selective attention, which don’t have time to shift, has moved to the area where the light was expected.
From experiments like this Posner and others argued that it is our selective attention moving around the visual field, often remarkably independent of our actual gaze direction.
Indeed, even if we’re looking directly at something, and when we don’t expect to see it, we’re no more likely to notice it than if it appears on the edge of our vision (Posner, 1980).
Selective attention is a fact oft-used by magicians (see the psychology of magic, especially part 2 cognitive illusions).
So, what is selective attention in this context?
It appears that selective attention can be likened to a spotlight roving across our vision like a virtual eye, just picking out the things in which it is interested; it’s not as attached to where we point our eyes as we might imagine.
Just how important the attentional spotlight is to selective attention in our everyday functioning is made all the more obvious by patients who seem to ‘ignore’ one half of their visual fields.
After suffering brain damage, usually to the right hemisphere, they start ignoring or neglecting everything on the left (because of the way the right hemisphere processes information from the left visual field, and the left hemisphere from the right visual field).
Despite both eyes being physically functional, because of the damage to the visual processing centres, it’s as though the attentional spotlight can’t travel over to the left hand side.
Technically, they can see to the left but crucially they don’t notice anything.
People with this problem might shave only one side of their face or only eat half of the food on their plate.
The attentional spotlight theory isn’t the only metaphor to be used to describe the way selective attention moves across the visual field.
One popular cousin of the spotlight theory is the zoom-lens metaphor.
Rather than a beam of attention of a set size, Eriksen and St. James (1986) argue that we zoom in and out depending on the task.
There is also evidence, such as LaBerge (1983), which supports this model.
Like many metaphors, though, it’s not wise to take the attentional spotlight or the zoom-lens too literally.
Subsequent findings examining the details have questioned several aspects of these theories, but there are two main objections to both:
Although there are problems with the attentional spotlight and zoom-lens as metaphors, they still provide a useful insight into how our selective attention can move independently of the eyes.
The evidence also scientifically confirms the everyday experience of fixing the gaze and still being able to ‘look around’.
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Multitasking means working on two or more tasks at the same time, which psychological research finds is bad for productivity, mostly.
Multitasking means working on two or more tasks at the same time, which psychological research finds is bad for productivity, mostly.
Multitasking, doing two or more tasks at once, mostly gets a bad rap from psychological research.
Examples of multitasking include:
Multitasking is something that’s best avoided for any task that needs concentration.
Humans don’t multitask well, unless one of the activities is automatic and doesn’t require much conscious processing.
Multitasking is distracting and once it becomes a habit may make people more distractible.
Multitasking tends to slow people down because switching between tasks has a cost.
People generally work quicker when they focus on one task at a time and do it properly.
Multi-taskers tend to make more mistakes: think about the modern trend for using a mobile phone while driving.
For all these reasons and more it is no surprise that multitasking probably reduces productivity by up to 40 percent, and even shrinks important structures in our brains.
Changing from one activity to another interferes with brain activity.
This makes the end result much worse than if we focus on one thing at a time.
Some research even suggests that media multitasking is associated with emotional problems, like anxiety and depression, as well as cognitive problems, like poor attention.
Certainly, multitasking mostly makes people feel sad and fearful (Blank et al., 2020).
Sometimes, though, multitasking cannot be avoided.
And psychologists have found simple ways to improve multitasking for those multitaskers among us.
Physical fitness increases multitasking skills by increasing the size of crucial areas of the brain, research finds (Wong et al., 2015).
Neuroscientists found larger gray matter volume in several brain areas of those who had higher cardiorespiratory fitness.
These brain areas help boost both reasoning and problem-solving.
A short breathing exercise is enough to refocus the minds of highly distracted people (Gorman & Green, 2016).
The mindfulness task simply involves counting groups of nine breaths: nine inhales and nine exhales.
Heavy media multitaskers benefit most from simply counting their breaths, psychologists have found.
Despite all the disadvantages of multitasking, the fact that people frequently attempt to multitask means we have a capability that can be explored.
What levels of multitasking might we be capable of with effort?
A classic 1976 study which taught two people to read and write at the same time hints at our considerable potential to multitask (Spelke, Hirst & Neisser, 1976).
Professor Elizabeth Spelke and colleagues at Cornell University wanted to know whether we can really divide our conscious attention between two demanding tasks, like reading and writing.
To find out they recruited two participants willing to put in 29 hours of practice over a 6 week period: Diane and John were their volunteers.
Before the training Diane and John’s normal reading and comprehension rates were measured, so it could be compared with post-training.
Then Spelke and colleagues set about their three-phase training regime.
The first step to multitasking was to get Diane and John reading and writing at the same time.
To do this they read short stories by authors like Katherine Mansfield at the same time as writing down a list of words being dictated to them.
Afterwards the experimenters checked their story comprehension and memory for the list of words.
This procedure was continued throughout all three phases of the study.
Naturally, when Diane and John first tried multitasking their reading speed, comprehension and memory all deteriorated.
But surprisingly, after six weeks, they could read just as fast and with the same level of comprehension whether or not they were also taking dictation at the same time.
They also often recognised more than two-thirds of the dictated words.
There is a problem with this study so far though: it’s possible that Diane and John weren’t really multitasking but had just leant to take dictation automatically and unconsciously.
Spelke and colleagues knew they had to push Diane and John harder.
Over the next few weeks Spelke and colleagues tested Diane and John’s higher-level awareness of the dictated lists.
Instead of dictating relatively unrelated words, patterns were now surreptitiously inserted into the lists, sometimes whole sentences.
Without forewarning Diane and John found these difficult to spot, but once told to search for the patterns they started noticing rhymes, categories of words and even sentences.
Although still missing a few, they did spot many of the patterns the experimenters hid in the sub-lists while they were multitasking.
Remember that this is all at the same time as reading an unrelated story at their normal speed and level of comprehension.
In this second phase the participants’ multitasking is even more impressive and it’s harder to argue that the dictation has become automatic and unconscious because Diane and John could spot many of the patterns.
After the 16 weeks of the study it seemed that both Diane and John could categorise lists of words and write down the name of the category at the same time as reading, and understanding, a sophisticated and completely unrelated short story.
In the third and final phase Diane and John were asked to just write down the category to which the words belonged rather than the words themselves.
Again, their reading speed initially dropped when they were given this new task, but soon, with practice, it was back up to its original level.
Not only that but their reading speed and comprehension of the short story was unaffected compared with their pre-training tests.
Quite an impressive feat of attention.
Not everyone accepts that what Diane and John were doing was really multitasking.
Here are some of the objections:
These are all good points, but ultimately there’s still an impressive human performance here that requires explanation.
Whether or not Diane and John were really multitasking, the research certainly implies that we can train our attention to carry out two sophisticated tasks which require conscious deliberation at the same time.
This is more than just simultaneously talking and driving, or patting the head while rubbing the stomach: both reading and writing involve relatively deep processing of similar types of linguistic information.
Spelke and colleagues were clearly very impressed with Diane and John’s new abilities and they suggest there may be no limits to training human attention, perhaps even no limits to our general cognitive capacity.
All we need is some creativity along with plenty of time and practice.
Truly efficient multitasking may be within people’s grasp — with a lot of practice.
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