Category: Attention

Scientists think it could be down to body posture or even smell.

Concentration is contagious, according to a study.

Being around other people who are working hard automatically helps us work harder as well, researchers have found.

Scientists think it could be down to body posture.

The nonverbal signs of mental effort from those around may be enough to help us concentrate.

Or, maybe you can actually smell mental effort, the study’s authors write:

“Effort exertion is linked to a more tense body posture and the adoption of such a posture also leads to an increased level of effort exertion.

However, expanding the limits, more radical hypotheses should also be considered, such as the possibility that effort exertion is influenced by a difference in scent of someone else exerting high or low effort.”

In the study, people were sat side-by-side while performing a series of tasks.

Sometimes the task would suddenly become very difficult for one of the pair.

Even though the task was no more difficult for the other person, the mental effort was contagious.

The study’s authors write:

“In the current study, we showed for the first time that the exertion of mental effort is contagious.

Simply performing a task next to a person who exerts a lot of effort in a task will make you do the same.”

Why do we do this?

It could be nothing more than an automatic response, the authors write:

“…it could be that this does not reflect a truly deliberate decision, but instead a more automatic tendency to imitate people, as is the case with yawning, rubbing your face, or shaking your foot, and facial expressions.”

Concentration is just one of many psychological properties found to be contagious between people.

Others include:

• happiness,
• anxiety,
• rudeness,
• laughter,
• and risk-taking.

For the full list, see: 8 Behaviours That Really Are Contagious.

The study was published in the journal Psychonomic Bulletin & Review (Desender et al., 2016).

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).