Category: Attention

What multitasking does to your brain and the emotions.

Multitasking mostly makes people feel sad and fearful, new research finds.

Juggling emails, reports and other activities creates a tense working environment.

In contrast, people who have a relatively uninterrupted period to work find it easier to maintain a neutral emotional state.

The study suggests that allowing emails to continually interrupt is linked to negative emotions, even anger.

A previous study has shown that changing from one activity to another interferes with brain activity and may reduce productivity by up to 40%,

Multitasking could even shrink the brain.

Dr Ioannis Pavlidis, study co-author, said:

“Not only do people experience stress with multitasking, but their faces may also express unpleasant emotions and that can have negative consequences for the entire office culture.”

The study analysed the facial expressions of 26 knowledge workers as they tried to write an essay.

Half received interrupting emails they had to respond to during the task.

The other half received all the emails in one batch so they were not interrupted while writing the essay.

The results showed that those who were continually interrupted displayed facial expression of sadness and fear.

Those who remained mostly uninterrupted maintained a neutral expression throughout.

Dr Pavlidis said:

“Individuals who engaged in multitasking appeared significantly sadder than those who did not.

Interestingly, sadness tended to mix with a touch of fear in the multitasking cohort.

Multitasking imposes an onerous mental load and is associated with elevated stress, which appears to trigger the displayed sadness.

The simultaneous onset of fear is intriguing and is likely rooted to subconscious anticipation of the next disruption.”

In the office, where a room full of people are all suffering (and causing) the same interruptions, the sadness and fear can spread like wildfire.

Dr Pavlidis said:

“Emotional contagion can spread in a group or workplace through the influence of conscious or unconscious processes involving emotional states or physiological responses.”

Many people are working from home during the pandemic, noted Dr Pavlidis:

“Currently, an intriguing question is what the emotional effect of multitasking at home would be, where knowledge workers moved their operation during the COVID 19 pandemic.”

The study was published in the Proceedings of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Blank et al., 2020).

Multitasking may affect crucial areas of the brain’s emotional and cognitive centres.

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 (Loh & Kanai, 2014).

Multitasking might include listening to music while playing a video game or watching TV while making a phone call or even reading the newspaper with the TV on.

Kep Kee Loh, the study’s lead author, said:

“Media multitasking is becoming more prevalent in our lives today and there is increasing concern about its impacts on our cognition and social-emotional well-being.

Our study was the first to reveal links between media multitasking and brain structure.”

The study used scans of people’s brains along with a questionnaire about their use of media devices, newspapers and television.

People who multitasked more across different media had lower gray-matter density in the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC: indicated by white dots in the image above).

This part of the brain, which lies towards the front, is mostly involved in aspects of cognitive and emotional control: things like empathy, decision-making and how we process rewards.

The study fits in with previous research suggesting that media multitasking is associated with emotional problems, like anxiety and depression, as well as cognitive problems, like poor attention.

The researchers found that this association had nothing to do with personality.

Both the study’s authors were quick to point out that this is a preliminary study which only finds a connection; it does not tell us what is causing what.

For example, it could be that those with a smaller ACC are more prone to media multitasking, not that multitasking is causing these changes in the brain.

However, Loh said:

“The exact mechanisms of these changes are still unclear.

Although it is conceivable that individuals with small ACC are more susceptible to multitasking situations due to weaker ability in cognitive control or socio-emotional regulation, it is equally plausible that higher levels of exposure to multitasking situations leads to structural changes in the ACC.”

We will have to wait for a future study which follows people over time.

This can examine how multitasking and brain structures change, and can give us another clue to this intriguing puzzle.

Image credit: Loh & Kanai (2014)

Attention is only partly about what we focus on, but also about what we manage to ignore.

Neuroscientists have pinpointed the neural activity involved in avoiding distraction, a new study reports.

This is the first study showing that our brains rely on an active suppression system to help us focus on the task at hand (Gaspar & McDonald, 2014).

The study’s lead author, John Gaspar, explained the traditional view of attentional control:

“This is an important discovery for neuroscientists and psychologists because most contemporary ideas of attention highlight brain processes that are involved in picking out relevant objects from the visual field.

It’s like finding Waldo in a Where’s Waldo illustration.”

While this process is important, it doesn’t tell the whole story of how attention works.

Gaspar continued:

“Our results show clearly that this is only one part of the equation and that active suppression of the irrelevant objects is another important part.”

The study, published in the Journal of Neuroscience, involved 47 students carrying out a visual search task while their brain signals were monitored.

The finding may have important implications for psychological disorders which involve problems with attention.

The study’s senior author, John McDonald, said:

“…disorders associated with attention deficits, such as ADHD and schizophrenia, may turn out to be due to difficulties in suppressing irrelevant objects rather than difficulty selecting relevant ones.”

Image credit: Bruno Butot

“Anything you may hold firmly in your imagination can be yours.” ― William James

William James, the American philosopher and psychologist, wrote over 100 years ago that:

“One of the most extraordinary facts about our life is that, although we are besieged at every moment by impressions from our whole sensory surface, we notice so very small a part of them. […] Yet the physical impressions which do not count are there as much as those that do, and affect our sense-organs just as energetically. Why they fail to pierce the mind is a mystery…” (William James : Writings 1878-1899)

What William James was talking about was our incredible ability to focus selectively on one thing, while blocking out almost everything else.

It’s something we often do so easily that it’s surprising to find out just how good we are at it–much better than many might imagine.

That’s one of the reasons that one particular research paper, called Gorillas in our midst: Sustained inattentional blindness for dynamic events, published in 1999, has become so well-known.

Here’s a video, called ‘The Monkey Business Illusion‘ that explains the study:

Watching this again it still seems incredible to me that this ‘works’ on so many people, myself included.

We might feel like fools for getting ‘caught’ by the monkey business illusion, but we should take comfort in the fact that it demonstrates the ability to focus attention.

This, according to William James, is the road to mastery:

“…whether the attention come by grace of genius or dint of will, the longer one does attend to a topic the more mastery of it one has. And the faculty of voluntarily bringing back a wandering attention over and over again is the very root of judgment, character, and will. […] And education which should improve this faculty would be the education par excellence.” (William James : Writings 1878-1899)

Every day we we are bombarded with perceptions, ideas and emotions and what we choose to pay attention to shapes our lives, it makes us who we are.

Continue reading “The Psychology of Attention”