Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Speaker 1: Works dot com. Hey wasn't stuff to blow your mind.
Speaker 1: My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Julie Douglas. Julie,
Speaker 1: do you have a knock knock joke? Let's have it.
Speaker 1: Knock knock? Who's there? Interrupting cow? Interrupting cow? Oh, that's
Speaker 1: a that's a that's a good one. That's Do you
Speaker 1: see that how I interrupted you? Because I was the
Speaker 1: cow interrupting. And when the cow interrupts you, its like
Speaker 1: it breaks your brain. Like for a split second, you're like,
Speaker 1: what's happening because you're messing with the flow of the joke,
Speaker 1: and then you're moving and it's just like it's like
Speaker 1: a cognitive weapon. Okay, So what does the interrupting cow
Speaker 1: have to do with what we're talking about today? It
Speaker 1: has everything to do with us multitaskers and the different
Speaker 1: ways that we interrupt ourselves and distract ourselves, and the
Speaker 1: sort of psychic toll that it takes on us. Are
Speaker 1: you a multitasker? Oh? Yeah, sure, ye oh sure. Are
Speaker 1: you good at it? No? I know, you know, of
Speaker 1: course I've thought that I was good at it. I
Speaker 1: think that At some point I thought of myself as
Speaker 1: like being like the Judo master of um of multitasking
Speaker 1: and you know, sort of like moving through space and
Speaker 1: time in the most efficient way. But as we will
Speaker 1: find out, that is a myth. We are not good
Speaker 1: at multitaskers. UM. There are a few people who are good.
Speaker 1: They're supertaskers. People talk that is the one percent we are.
Speaker 1: We will talk about those guys of supertaskers in another podcast. Though.
Speaker 1: Of course, the thing about multitasking is that, okay, you
Speaker 1: you know you're not good at multitasking, you do it
Speaker 1: anyway because it's a necessity in this life that we live.
Speaker 1: And I and I I know I'm not good at
Speaker 1: multitasking either, but I sometimes kind of trick myself into
Speaker 1: thinking I'm doing something other than multitasking. Like I think
Speaker 1: that I can have tweet that going in the background
Speaker 1: for the social media stuff, and have my email open
Speaker 1: and be listening to music and working on something and
Speaker 1: then and then having to jump to another project shortly
Speaker 1: after that, and I think that that's that it's working
Speaker 1: for me. And a lot of people that are actually
Speaker 1: they actually believe that they are good at multitasking at
Speaker 1: least in some instances, like they think that it's totally
Speaker 1: cool to study for an exam while watching Safe by
Speaker 1: the Belt or whatever the kids watch these days, Okay,
Speaker 1: And and there have been some studies into it, particularly
Speaker 1: Zing Wang So, the lead author of a study and
Speaker 1: assistant professor of communications at Ohio State University, and and Uh,
Speaker 1: Zing was very interested in exactly how this plays out
Speaker 1: and why people are so confident in their ability to
Speaker 1: do something that they're not good at. Yeah. I mean
Speaker 1: most everyone thinks that they're a great multitasker. Yeah, even
Speaker 1: if you you may ask somebody in your life, maybe
Speaker 1: you may ask them, hey, are you a great multitasker?
Speaker 1: And they'll say, uh, you know, no, I'm not really,
Speaker 1: but they still think that they can they can do
Speaker 1: some of these things such as the classic uh talk
Speaker 1: on the phone while driving or God help us text
Speaker 1: while doing some driving. Yeah. And again we'll talk more
Speaker 1: about that in the next podcast. But what I think
Speaker 1: that zing Wang was trying to get at is why
Speaker 1: do we do this? What what compels why are yeah,
Speaker 1: why do we think that we're doing a great job here?
Speaker 1: Because really it is an illusion. Um, you know, when
Speaker 1: you're multitasking, you feel really productive. Um. But there was
Speaker 1: this this one great psychiatrist who said his name is
Speaker 1: Edward M. Holloway. He said that we think that we're multitasking,
Speaker 1: but really not. It's like playing tennis with three balls.
Speaker 1: Okay um, And so zing Win got at the bottom
Speaker 1: of this by recording the students media use and other
Speaker 1: activities for twenty eight days, including why they use these
Speaker 1: very various media sources and what they got out of it.
Speaker 1: And he said that they seem to be misperceiving the
Speaker 1: positive feelings they get from their multitasking. They are not
Speaker 1: being more more productive, they just feel more emotionally satisfied
Speaker 1: from their work. So she had said studying for exam
Speaker 1: and watching Saved by the Bell, I guess I mean
Speaker 1: that's I never did that, but I certainly would try
Speaker 1: to combine studying and watching TV. It's kind of a
Speaker 1: you know, the a spoonful of sugar makes the medicine
Speaker 1: go downcome right right, um. And he said that they
Speaker 1: felt satisfied not because they were effective at studying, but
Speaker 1: because the additional or the addition of TV made the
Speaker 1: studying entertaining. So they were entertaining themselves. While they were studying,
Speaker 1: which I think is really interesting. Um, and he's saying
Speaker 1: that this combination of activities accounts for the good feelings
Speaker 1: that were obtained. Okay. The problem here is that when
Speaker 1: you were studying and when you're doing this, when we're
Speaker 1: trying to do a deep dive into something and recall
Speaker 1: the information later, Uh, what you find is that you
Speaker 1: have a very low level of of retaining that information. Yeah.
Speaker 1: All you can picture is screech, and you know, like,
Speaker 1: that's not it. I need the theorem. I was studying
Speaker 1: and all I can picture of screech. And again, this
Speaker 1: is something we'll go into a bit more in terms
Speaker 1: of of what multitasking does to short term and long
Speaker 1: term memory. But for the purposes of the study, zang
Speaker 1: Wang was just saying, I feel like everybody should sing
Speaker 1: Wang tonight. By the way, Yeah, I had to say it. Um.
Speaker 1: Anyone was really just trying to say, look, it's not
Speaker 1: it's not effective. Yeah. The problem is that it is
Speaker 1: emotionally fulfilling. And that's the key here is that when
Speaker 1: you're doing it, when you're when you're cooking and also, um,
Speaker 1: you know, studying for an exam and watching TV and
Speaker 1: maybe you know, doing a little jing on the side.
Speaker 1: You're you're doing all these things, and in the heat
Speaker 1: of the moment, it probably feels pretty awesome. You're like, wow,
Speaker 1: I am just totally ruling here. I'm reaganting like like
Speaker 1: like hardcore, just to succeeding at every task set before me.
Speaker 1: And then afterwards you've wind up to realize that the
Speaker 1: the mix you're working on is horrible, the food is burned,
Speaker 1: you didn't understand what you were studying, and you're really
Speaker 1: confused on the plot for the plot of the show
Speaker 1: you're watching on TV. You end up not doing really
Speaker 1: good at any of the task you where you do
Speaker 1: everything poorly, but emotionally you at least for a few
Speaker 1: seconds there you were. You were floating on air. You
Speaker 1: really felt like you were you were succeeding. You had
Speaker 1: figured it out. Um, you're basking. The glory of multitasking. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it reminds me. There's a bit on The Simpsons where
Speaker 1: Bart goes to the park where all the old men
Speaker 1: are playing chess and there's this little montage of him
Speaker 1: playing three different games of chess at three different tables,
Speaker 1: and you it's setting it up like it's gonna be
Speaker 1: this child prodigy thing where he's he's just totally ruling
Speaker 1: in each of these games, but then he's it's a checkmate,
Speaker 1: like just a turn or two on each one, and
Speaker 1: he ends up losing each one really bad. And that's
Speaker 1: I think a pretty good model for multitasking and the
Speaker 1: illusion of multitasking. So do you think that there are
Speaker 1: any exceptions? Are there? Are there any times that we
Speaker 1: can multitask? You can do it well, yes, I mean
Speaker 1: according to the studies it and you have to define well,
Speaker 1: like there's there, for instance, proficiently proficient like with for instance,
Speaker 1: with driving, Yes, there are things you can do while
Speaker 1: driving and not die but most of the time, but
Speaker 1: it doesn't mean you should do them. But generally it
Speaker 1: comes down to are you combining two visual tasks because
Speaker 1: that's not gonna work, for instance, looking at a tech
Speaker 1: screen while driving, watching a TV while also trying to
Speaker 1: watch the dinner you're cooking, or are you combining an
Speaker 1: auditory in a visual task. Are you cooking while listening
Speaker 1: to the radio, Are you, uh like in my case,
Speaker 1: are you researching a topic while listening to music? Or
Speaker 1: are you doing some sort of And it also it
Speaker 1: comes down to how much cognitive power is involved. Like
Speaker 1: I don't really listen to audio podcasts with words in
Speaker 1: them anymore, But I used to do more of that
Speaker 1: when I had a borning newspaper job and I was
Speaker 1: like building pages on a screen. There's a mind was task.
Speaker 1: So I had the cognitive room to fill up with
Speaker 1: a whole bunch of podcasts and NPR radio shows and stuff. Well, um,
Speaker 1: I'm thinking even more sort of wrote activities like walking
Speaker 1: and chewing gum, because when it comes to that, you know,
Speaker 1: the more simplistic activities that don't take up a lot
Speaker 1: of mental energy. Yeah, we can do them right, especially
Speaker 1: if there are things that we've done over and over again. Um,
Speaker 1: But can we walk and talk at the same time
Speaker 1: and still multitask well? Some would say that perhaps not
Speaker 1: um in a study be him in at all. In
Speaker 1: two thousand nine, people talking on their cell phones while
Speaker 1: walking ran into people more often. That's not a surprise,
Speaker 1: I think, and didn't know didn't notice what was going
Speaker 1: on around them. The researchers this is my favorite part.
Speaker 1: The researchers had someone in a clown suit ride a unicycle.
Speaker 1: The people talking on a cell phone were much less
Speaker 1: likely to notice or remember the clowns. So even something
Speaker 1: as simplistic as that, um, you can see that that
Speaker 1: our attention is bifurcated. We can't necessarily pay attention to
Speaker 1: the degree that we really need to. Your brain, it
Speaker 1: turns out, can only do one thing at a time. Well, yeah,
Speaker 1: so whatever else you're doing right now, stop it. Just
Speaker 1: listen to this podcast unless it's driving, you know, don't
Speaker 1: stop driving. Pull Over, pull over podcast, pull over. Listen
Speaker 1: to the rest of it. Underneath the overpass. Okay, but
Speaker 1: the question becomes, to what degree is this self sabotage?
Speaker 1: What I mean, how much do we interrupt ourselves in
Speaker 1: this multitasking and distract ourselves. We are going to try
Speaker 1: to attempt to answer this question right after this message. Okay,
Speaker 1: we're back. Now, let's think about some typical multitask game,
Speaker 1: particularly at the office, because this is where we we
Speaker 1: tend to multitask a lot. When you're sedentary and your
Speaker 1: brain is buzzing, you tend to try to figure out
Speaker 1: as many ways to accomplish tasks as possible. Right, right, So,
Speaker 1: I've got my cell phone, I've got my email open
Speaker 1: tweet deck may have the Facebook page open separately. I've
Speaker 1: got one or two windows open from my documents. I've
Speaker 1: got my iTunes playing, and like sixteen windows in Firefox. Okay,
Speaker 1: let's also out on that. Maybe you have you're on
Speaker 1: a telephone conference call and you have on mute okay,
Speaker 1: because they come to hear anybody chewing gum while while
Speaker 1: they're conducting a teleconference. Um, chewing gum. Two. There you go. Right.
Speaker 1: So there's a two thousand and five study and it's
Speaker 1: called No Task Left Behind, examining the nature of fragmented work,
Speaker 1: and it found that people were interrupted and moved from
Speaker 1: one project to another about every eleven minutes, and each
Speaker 1: time it took about twenty five minutes to circle back
Speaker 1: to that same project. Now that's pretty amazing, right. They
Speaker 1: were interrupted either by themselves they did something, or maybe
Speaker 1: someone stopped by, or I don't know, maybe um, someone
Speaker 1: was clipping their nails in the office, because that that
Speaker 1: can be interrupting. Sorry about that. They grow really, I
Speaker 1: mean they're just really hard and hard to cut. Well yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, and your hair grows pretty fast. I get it,
Speaker 1: I get it. Um, they need to be maintained. Actually,
Speaker 1: it wasn't outing you, but that seems to be the case.
Speaker 1: But in case, there are tons of interruptions. Um, but
Speaker 1: every eleven minutes, how do we get things done? I mean,
Speaker 1: I guess at a very slow pace. I mean because
Speaker 1: you also have to count in go into the bathroom
Speaker 1: drinking water and coffee, which then ups the amount of
Speaker 1: times you have to go to the bathroom. And on
Speaker 1: the plus side, if you're like me and you can't
Speaker 1: really set still for very long, you do get a
Speaker 1: lot of pacing in, so it's a good exercise. But
Speaker 1: but yeah, I I have found myself, you know, working
Speaker 1: on a project something I needed to get done, and
Speaker 1: then I either I go to check in on social
Speaker 1: media and I'm not talking about private social media, but
Speaker 1: like work social media another work task, and uh, and
Speaker 1: you kind of go down the rabbit hole there and
Speaker 1: then you come back around it's like, oh, well, half
Speaker 1: hours passed, and now I'm finally getting back to the
Speaker 1: task that I am working on today. And now the
Speaker 1: thing though, is that it seems, um, it seems so
Speaker 1: easy to vanquish this problem. If you had only one
Speaker 1: thing you were working on, it wouldn't take you twenty
Speaker 1: five minutes to get back to that, right, because you
Speaker 1: wouldn't go bouncing around the five different things that you
Speaker 1: are working on summy teamlessly. But of course that's just
Speaker 1: I think in this day and age, something that we're
Speaker 1: not going to do because the most part because if
Speaker 1: you know, it's one thing to like say cut, shut
Speaker 1: down tweet deck and say all right, I'm done social
Speaker 1: media for the day, not opening that until I get
Speaker 1: done with this task. But if you close out your
Speaker 1: work email, you're like, it's there's a lot want to
Speaker 1: be a fire drill. I mean not a literal fire drill,
Speaker 1: but there's gonna be somebody to shoot you an important
Speaker 1: email and then they're gonna they're gonna wonder where you went,
Speaker 1: what happened to you? Um, So are our jobs increasingly
Speaker 1: uh and and it's one of these papers pointed out,
Speaker 1: especially when you look at at the businesses that have
Speaker 1: scaled down that have combined positions. Um, everyone's doing six
Speaker 1: or seven different things, so by necessity, they have various
Speaker 1: tasks that have to be completed and they end up overlapping.
Speaker 1: It's true, and you're right, it's just part of the environment. UM.
Speaker 1: Gloria Mark is a professor of informa informatics at the
Speaker 1: University of California, Irvine and co author of the study
Speaker 1: the Cost of interrupted work, more speed and Stress, and
Speaker 1: she says that people were um in this study as
Speaker 1: likely to self interrupt as to be interrupted by someone else.
Speaker 1: So again, I think that it speaks to this behavior.
Speaker 1: It's not just an outside force acting honest, it's something
Speaker 1: internal that doesn't allow us to necessarily concentrate for for
Speaker 1: large chunks of time. She said that observe as observers
Speaker 1: will watch and then after every twelve minutes or so,
Speaker 1: for no apparent reasons, someone working on a document will
Speaker 1: turn and call someone or email. She thinks that the
Speaker 1: increasingly shorter attention span probably has something to do with it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, and you can definitely see internet and gadgets
Speaker 1: of being a part of that. Because used to if
Speaker 1: you're going to be distracted by the book you're reading,
Speaker 1: you're distracted by a book you had with you, or
Speaker 1: maybe you know the two or three books you had
Speaker 1: on you. If you're distracted by music, I mean, how
Speaker 1: much music could you have on hand at your desk
Speaker 1: in any given time, and how much research material could
Speaker 1: you possibly have? But today I mean, we have kindles
Speaker 1: with potentially every book ever on it. When you start
Speaker 1: factoring in the cloud, same deal with your with your music,
Speaker 1: and then the the the internet is just a never
Speaker 1: ending pit of random questions and facts. Well, isn't it
Speaker 1: kind of like a feedback loop too? Right? I mean,
Speaker 1: we're conditioning ourselves to make these twelve eleven twelve minute
Speaker 1: breaks just because we've gotten used to it, and so
Speaker 1: for you know, it was it was very hard to
Speaker 1: do the research actually on this podcast and the next
Speaker 1: one that we're about to do, because I really became
Speaker 1: hyper aware of my own behavior. I don't know if
Speaker 1: you felt that way when you were doing research. In
Speaker 1: the various ways that we self interrupt or um or
Speaker 1: go about things. It was it was kind of odd
Speaker 1: to have all of this in mind as I was
Speaker 1: doing the research and then watch my movements. Um. Alright,
Speaker 1: So what Mark says and what other cognitive psychologists say,
Speaker 1: is that what we're seeing is this attentional residue occur.
Speaker 1: So it's not just the cognitive cost of associated with
Speaker 1: context switching, something called resumption lag, or the potential for
Speaker 1: errors something again we'll talk about the next podcast. UM
Speaker 1: that the actual residue of the interruption of event working
Speaker 1: memory impairment. That's we're talking about on a subsequent task.
Speaker 1: When tasks are left unfinished and as we know task
Speaker 1: that we haven't closed the loop on, we have become
Speaker 1: problematic because we talked about holes in our head basically
Speaker 1: in our in our in our minds, and our in
Speaker 1: our perception of the world around us and our willpower right,
Speaker 1: because we're spending a lot of mental energy on trying
Speaker 1: to uh check off these boxes in our minds, and
Speaker 1: we keep returning to the same open loops and if
Speaker 1: we don't close them, then we're gonna sit there and
Speaker 1: figure out, Okay, well how do I get to do
Speaker 1: that when I also have five different things open on
Speaker 1: my screen right now and I have to do these things.
Speaker 1: And I think that comes back around to why multitasking
Speaker 1: is emotionally pleasing while we're doing it, because we have
Speaker 1: that feeling that we're closing like three or four loops
Speaker 1: at once, even if we're barely closing those loops or
Speaker 1: closing them really poorly, or closing them by just failing them,
Speaker 1: you know, because because like, let's see, what do I
Speaker 1: have to do today? I have to have to cook dinner,
Speaker 1: finish that mix, watch that TV show that's kind of
Speaker 1: the thing I want to do, and then I need
Speaker 1: to study for that test. But look at me, I'm
Speaker 1: doing all four at once. Super loop closer right, I
Speaker 1: feel like the Judo master. Um So, time of day
Speaker 1: is also a factor. It turns out that this is
Speaker 1: the same study that Gloria Mark did that the time
Speaker 1: of day is really important because the earlier it is,
Speaker 1: the more someone is distracted. Really, and as as time
Speaker 1: creeps on, the less that they will self distract or
Speaker 1: engage in other distractions. Uh. And she's saying this is uh,
Speaker 1: possibly because we're more likely to get into the flow
Speaker 1: of activity later in the day. Or you might say, hey,
Speaker 1: only have X amount of hours last Oh yeah, that's true.
Speaker 1: You get you get down to the deadline, you're gonna
Speaker 1: be extremely motivated. Yeah, that's true. I have a little
Speaker 1: uh sign in my in my cubicle list says and
Speaker 1: I cannot say what that means in English, but it
Speaker 1: basically says like, don't mess around, okay, focus. Yeah, And
Speaker 1: for our Italian listeners, I do apologize for whatever Julie
Speaker 1: just said. Yeah, And I apologize for the way that
Speaker 1: I just pronounced it. All right, Well, there you go.
Speaker 1: We uh dipped our toe into the world of multitasking,
Speaker 1: and we'll be back to talk about that in a
Speaker 1: future episode. Yeah, and we'll take a much deeper dive
Speaker 1: into that. All right, Well, let's call the robe it
Speaker 1: over to some quick listener mail. Alright, we heard from Tara.
Speaker 1: Tara right soon and says, Hi, Robert and Julie, I
Speaker 1: was listening to your Labyrinth episode and you mentioned, uh,
Speaker 1: the Goofy, uh, the Goofy cartoons, the how Two cartoons,
Speaker 1: And I just want to let you know that this
Speaker 1: series of cartoons were made because at the time they
Speaker 1: did not have a voice actor for Goofy, as the
Speaker 1: man who was doing it had quit. I believe last
Speaker 1: year I had the privilege to speak to the current
Speaker 1: voice of Goofy, and these cartoons came up, uh, and
Speaker 1: this was a way to keep Goofy's cartoons going without
Speaker 1: having to worry about his voice. Keep up the great work,
Speaker 1: smiley face. And we also heard heard from Josh Harding
Speaker 1: who wrote in and Josh Harding says, Dear Robert and Julie,
Speaker 1: I just listened to your Labyrinth episode and it reminded
Speaker 1: me of a personal experience of mine. Last summer, I
Speaker 1: spent some time volunteering with the nonprofit group Earthwatch, which
Speaker 1: landed me in the Cloud Forest of Ecuador. The hike
Speaker 1: up to the top was excruciating, even for someone who
Speaker 1: is in fairly decent physical condition. Something like a two
Speaker 1: thousand meter long trail with an eight hundred meter climb
Speaker 1: and vira crawl. Correctly, that's about one and a fourth
Speaker 1: mile long and a in a one half mile climb.
Speaker 1: That may not seem like much, but consider that I
Speaker 1: live at sea level then he met humidity was one
Speaker 1: of percent, and the climb started at about one mile
Speaker 1: in elevation. Needless to say, I was out of breath
Speaker 1: for a majority of the hike. When the group reached
Speaker 1: the top, we were allowed to drop our gear and
Speaker 1: explore the surrounding trails, which I did. I quickly found
Speaker 1: myself on a winding path that was naturally carved away
Speaker 1: by rainwater. There were no forks and it was a
Speaker 1: gradual slope. The trail had walls of mud between one
Speaker 1: and two ms tall that were covered in moss, ferns,
Speaker 1: and orchids. Also, there was the occasional fallen tree overhanging
Speaker 1: the path. As soon as I began walking down the path,
Speaker 1: I felt a noticeable dipth in timvature. My heart rate
Speaker 1: dropped considerably, and the cramping and my legs disappeared. Now,
Speaker 1: thanks to your podcast, I can shed a little light
Speaker 1: on what was happening to me. I walked that path
Speaker 1: every afternoon, right after our work and before dinner. It
Speaker 1: had the same effect every time. It is now my
Speaker 1: go to place that I escaped to in my head
Speaker 1: when I get stressed out at work. Thanks you guys
Speaker 1: for an awesome podcast. Josh And included a really cool
Speaker 1: picture to show that path through the cloud forest. I
Speaker 1: like how that's something that he that experience of walking
Speaker 1: that path is something that he invoked in his mind,
Speaker 1: and then that that's an experience that he can revisit
Speaker 1: again and again. Yeah, and it does remind me that
Speaker 1: the nature walks um when you have a path, I mean,
Speaker 1: it's essentially elabyrinth. You're guided on this path. You don't
Speaker 1: have to worry about how I'm going to cut through
Speaker 1: the forest because this is the pathway through the forest,
Speaker 1: you know, and you're communing with nature in the whole process.
Speaker 1: So there you go. If you don't have a true labyrinth,
Speaker 1: you can always see to point out and apart like
Speaker 1: setting cloud for us. All right, So, if you guys
Speaker 1: would like to reach out to us see what we're
Speaker 1: up to find out about upcoming podcast episodes, you can
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