Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how Stuff
Speaker 1: Works dot Com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
Speaker 1: My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Julie Douglas. Last
Speaker 1: time we talked, we talked a little bit about multitasking,
Speaker 1: a little bit about multitasking as it relates to distraction,
Speaker 1: the inner distractions, it's to a certain extant outer distractions.
Speaker 1: But in this episode we're going to really get down
Speaker 1: to brass tacks about multitasking in the human mind and
Speaker 1: if ultimately it is even possible, that's right, because you know,
Speaker 1: we all do it at all times. In fact, I
Speaker 1: bet a lot of you out there right now are
Speaker 1: listening to us and doing something else. And of course
Speaker 1: we do that, right. I mean, when I'm working on something,
Speaker 1: I'll tend to listen to music or podcast. Um. So,
Speaker 1: in one way, you could say that as a society
Speaker 1: we can't uh not multitask just because of of where
Speaker 1: we are. Yeah, it is a busy, busy world. We
Speaker 1: we inevitably complicate our lives with this endeavor and that
Speaker 1: endeavor we have. You know, we have family and home
Speaker 1: and relationships, stuff we need to take care of. We
Speaker 1: have bills, we need to take care of their stuff
Speaker 1: around the house. There are pets who are pooping in
Speaker 1: boxes and those boxes need to be cleaned out. We
Speaker 1: have jobs, we have we have transportation, we have to
Speaker 1: take their their varying levels of news that we ideally
Speaker 1: want to keep an eye on. And then we have
Speaker 1: recreations and we have passions that we wish to pursue
Speaker 1: as well. And if you're lucky, you have a few
Speaker 1: of those things that are so satisfying that when you
Speaker 1: engage in them, everything else can fade away for a
Speaker 1: little bit and you can sort of turn off the chatter,
Speaker 1: turn off the multitasking noise. Like like, in researching this,
Speaker 1: I couldn't help but think about the default network that
Speaker 1: we talked about a little bit, about the the the
Speaker 1: endless chatter, and about um loops that have not been closed,
Speaker 1: these little things in our lives that we haven't checked
Speaker 1: off yet, so they're always resonating when we see that
Speaker 1: person or dry by that building, or whatever the case
Speaker 1: may be. We have we have all of this stuff
Speaker 1: just chattering in the background. And as you had alluded to,
Speaker 1: when we get in that flow state, when we un
Speaker 1: task um that is when we can experience, the chattering
Speaker 1: just kind of going away, right, because you get into
Speaker 1: that lovely state where you're only doing one thing and
Speaker 1: you're really enjoying it. But most of the time we
Speaker 1: are dipping our fingers and our thoughts in multitude of things,
Speaker 1: and we think we're good at it that we are not.
Speaker 1: We're going to discuss more about that today. And I
Speaker 1: love that you said you mentioned unitasking because it instantly
Speaker 1: brings my mind to to cooking and the idea, of
Speaker 1: course that a unitasker is a kitchen object that has
Speaker 1: only one purpose, and certain food people tend to frown
Speaker 1: on the idea of a unitasker because it's like it's
Speaker 1: a wasted gadget, like why do you have a melon baller?
Speaker 1: It can only be used for melon balling when you
Speaker 1: could use, you know, something else that can have multiple functions.
Speaker 1: Because it's actually turned out in some of the experiments
Speaker 1: we we looked at were so I guess more in
Speaker 1: the commentary on some of the experiments we looked at,
Speaker 1: um cooking like a really busy professional restaurant. UH kitchen
Speaker 1: is often considered an environment where multitasking shines, where if
Speaker 1: you if multitasking is possible, and people can do it,
Speaker 1: or at least try to do it. That's one of
Speaker 1: the places you want to because there's so many different tasks,
Speaker 1: so many different meals being prepared in varying arrangements for
Speaker 1: different tables, and only so many instruments and ingredients with
Speaker 1: which to create it all. Well. Now, some people might
Speaker 1: argue that those people are super taskers, and we talked
Speaker 1: about that in the last podcast, But some other people
Speaker 1: might say it's pretty wrote because you're doing the same ingredients,
Speaker 1: the same recipes over and over again and things. If
Speaker 1: you've ever been inside a professional kitchen or you work
Speaker 1: in one, you already know that things already set forth
Speaker 1: pretty clearly. The missing scene is already set up for
Speaker 1: each station. In other words, everything is where it needs
Speaker 1: to be. So it becomes a lot more a lot
Speaker 1: more intuitive to to do that work. But the rest
Speaker 1: of us, of us, right, who are not supertaskers, who
Speaker 1: tend to go about our day in a haphazard way.
Speaker 1: Sometimes we think we're good at this multitasking. But just
Speaker 1: as an example of of how we are not, I
Speaker 1: wanted to bring up email voice. This is like the
Speaker 1: serie thing, right, So what thing no, no, this is
Speaker 1: Have you ever been on the phone with someone, You're
Speaker 1: having engaging conversation, You're pouring your heart out, okay, there
Speaker 1: with you, there with you, and all of a sudden, uh,
Speaker 1: someone seems suddenly disconnected and they start to go, well,
Speaker 1: what huh that? And then you hear tapping in the
Speaker 1: background and you realize, oh my god, you're emailing as
Speaker 1: I am pouring out that this this darkest secret of
Speaker 1: my life to you. You know, I don't know that
Speaker 1: I've encountered it personally, but maybe they're just clacking really quietly.
Speaker 1: I have to say that there are a number of
Speaker 1: people in my life who are multiteskers, particularly when it
Speaker 1: comes to the phone. So I have, I have noticed this,
Speaker 1: but I think all of you out there probably have
Speaker 1: experienced this at one point or another. So it comes
Speaker 1: back to this idea that you really can only do
Speaker 1: one task well at a time. Um, even something is wrote,
Speaker 1: is talking on the phone can be impaired if you're
Speaker 1: trying to do something like emailing or reading or something. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I have. I do have to say that there have
Speaker 1: been some individuals that I've I've interviewed, either for this
Speaker 1: podcast or for news stories, and there'll be a point
Speaker 1: where I'm like, oh my goodness, they're driving a car. There,
Speaker 1: there's no way I'm gonna get some good copy out
Speaker 1: of them, Like um, a recent one I did. I'm
Speaker 1: not going to out them as having driven for the
Speaker 1: first portion of the interview, and I ended up not
Speaker 1: using that that part because unsurprisingly, he was much better
Speaker 1: once he stopped driving his car. But there was this
Speaker 1: one virtual reality dude who was kind of like the
Speaker 1: hot shot, like a he's older now, but like especially
Speaker 1: back in the early days of virtual reality, he was
Speaker 1: a real, uh superstar. You know. He was doing some
Speaker 1: photo shoots for for the different tech magazines at all,
Speaker 1: and I remember interviewing and I'm like, oh my goodness,
Speaker 1: he is in a convertible. He's driving down and I'm imagining, like,
Speaker 1: you know, like a highway out of fear and loathing,
Speaker 1: and he's chatting with me about virtual reality and gave
Speaker 1: me some great copy. But he was driving a convertible
Speaker 1: at at god knows what speed, so better I think
Speaker 1: it inconvertible than in the bathroom. Have you read has
Speaker 1: someone ever taking you to the bathroom where they've been
Speaker 1: on the phone. No, I mean, I've heard people doing
Speaker 1: it here at work, but but luckily nobody has has
Speaker 1: has revealed themselves as doing that during an interview. It's
Speaker 1: amazing to me. It's a sanctuary. You probably shouldn't bring
Speaker 1: other people in with you, even if they're disconnected in
Speaker 1: a way. You know. I had another guy who was
Speaker 1: making coffee while talking to me about I think about
Speaker 1: global warming uh and and climate change uh and just
Speaker 1: in the background suddenly he's grinding beans. But but anyway,
Speaker 1: I digress. Um, Okay, so obviously, yeah, we're not great
Speaker 1: at multitasking. Um. If you need another example. Another classic
Speaker 1: example is texting and driving. The R a c Foundation,
Speaker 1: which is a British nonprofit organization that focuses on driving issues,
Speaker 1: asked seventeen drivers h four to use a dry think
Speaker 1: simulator to see how texting affected their driving. The reaction
Speaker 1: time was around thirty slower when writing a text message,
Speaker 1: slower than driving drunk or stoned. And we had mentioned
Speaker 1: this in the last podcast. This is due to doing
Speaker 1: two visual tasks at the same time, because apparently, if
Speaker 1: you're going to a multitask, you should not do two
Speaker 1: of the same types of tasks at the same time, Yeah,
Speaker 1: because talking on the phone is certainly certainly distracts you're
Speaker 1: still quote unquote multitasking to a certain extent, but but
Speaker 1: you're combining um, you know, speaking auditory with visual Uh.
Speaker 1: But when you are you know, like you said, when
Speaker 1: you're when you're driving and you're trying to text, you're
Speaker 1: combining two visual things. So both of those things, uh,
Speaker 1: the performance rate drops impressively. That's right. So if you're
Speaker 1: in a multitask, multitasking and that the smartest way you
Speaker 1: can um and obviously texting and driving is not smart
Speaker 1: at all, but there's a good reason for that. Again visually,
Speaker 1: you know, if you're taxing yourself in that way, there's
Speaker 1: no way that you can really give the ultimate attention
Speaker 1: to what you're doing. Yeah, because both of these especially
Speaker 1: the driving, there's so many variables. Well even though we
Speaker 1: do it enough to where it kind of becomes automatic,
Speaker 1: but there are so many variables and driving there's so
Speaker 1: many things you have to control that that the the
Speaker 1: impact of multitasking really uh takes a toll in your performance.
Speaker 1: As we mentioned in the other podcast, if you're chewing
Speaker 1: gum while walking, you're technically doing two things at the
Speaker 1: same time, but the the required skill in both of
Speaker 1: those tasks, so low you're you're you're probably not going
Speaker 1: to see any change in your ability. But if you're
Speaker 1: talking and you're walking, you are sure to miss the
Speaker 1: clown that rives past you, because we saw in another
Speaker 1: study exactly right. So let's come back to the supertasker.
Speaker 1: And we touched on this a little bit in the
Speaker 1: previous episode, but now we're gonna we're gonna dive a
Speaker 1: little deeper into what this is and who these people are.
Speaker 1: I mean, in a in a way, they're kind of
Speaker 1: the the quiz dots Hotter act of the um of
Speaker 1: of of of the tasking world. Um, the Dune fans
Speaker 1: will remember, that's the idea. They're just like the perfect
Speaker 1: godlike being that will deliver the planet. I was just
Speaker 1: gonna say, bless you. What was the name of it
Speaker 1: against Okay, yeah, well thank you. Uh but yeah, so
Speaker 1: the idea of the supertask like I said, they're they're
Speaker 1: one one in a d um very rare. Most of
Speaker 1: us cannot multitask, but as a one experiment revealed, you
Speaker 1: can find individuals whose brains seem uniquely capable of handling
Speaker 1: multiple things at once. It's true. University of Utah professors
Speaker 1: David Strayer and John Watson put student subjects into a
Speaker 1: driving similar and at the simulator, and then at the
Speaker 1: same time, they received a call on a hands free
Speaker 1: cell phone, and Strayer says that they engaged in a
Speaker 1: conversation that involved memorizing strings of words that were presented
Speaker 1: as well as solving math problems. So they're driving along,
Speaker 1: they give this call, and first they're asked, uh, math,
Speaker 1: these math problems are correct? They given these examples, and
Speaker 1: then they're asked to list words in order, all right,
Speaker 1: and they're up to five math problems in words that
Speaker 1: could be included in a single conversation. Finally, the drivers
Speaker 1: were asked to follow another car at a specific distance,
Speaker 1: you know, keep the keep a reasonable distance between themselves
Speaker 1: in that car, right, not crashing into them. And that's
Speaker 1: what they study was the distance between that car to
Speaker 1: see how the conversation affected that distancing. All right. So
Speaker 1: most did far worse when doing both tasks than when
Speaker 1: they did only a single task. Uh. Their break reaction
Speaker 1: time was much longer, and they tended to follow the
Speaker 1: lead vehicle to greater distance. In addition, their memory and
Speaker 1: math performance has suffered as well. But in in the
Speaker 1: course of all these studies, out of about a thousand students,
Speaker 1: they found around twelve who didn't have worst driving performance
Speaker 1: and on average performed better on the memory and math
Speaker 1: tasks while they were driving. And so here we have
Speaker 1: the quitsas hat Iraq, the Messiah of multitasking, the quote
Speaker 1: unquote supertaskers it. That's amazing to me because nine and nine,
Speaker 1: eight of them excuse me, n them tanked, right, But
Speaker 1: these twelve, these special twelve, something is going on obviously
Speaker 1: with them to allow them to have such recall. Now
Speaker 1: they want to do follow up studies about this, obviously,
Speaker 1: and do a little bit more mr I and get
Speaker 1: into the brain because obviously that's where they're going to
Speaker 1: find some answer to their questions about what's going on
Speaker 1: um And we should probably dip into the brain as
Speaker 1: well and figure out what parts are active here when
Speaker 1: we're multitasking. Yes, let's dip in with with a melancholer
Speaker 1: it were okay, let me take out a little bit
Speaker 1: of the pre frontal cortex because apparently this is very
Speaker 1: important because as part of the brain plans and coordinate actions.
Speaker 1: And here's a really cool thing. And humans, the prefrontal
Speaker 1: cortex is about one third of the entire cortex, while
Speaker 1: in dogs and cats it's about four or five percent,
Speaker 1: monkeys about So this means the bigger the prefrontal cortex,
Speaker 1: the more flexible our behavior can be, and the more
Speaker 1: we can multitask. So um, some people would actually argue
Speaker 1: that our early hominid ancestors had to multitask. This didn't start, um,
Speaker 1: you know, in the twentieth century. This this rapid multitasking,
Speaker 1: although of course it's gotten much more aggressive, but you know,
Speaker 1: as soon as as early man had to deal with
Speaker 1: multiple things going on. Um, you know, maybe it's stoking
Speaker 1: a fire. And yeah, I mean certainly, when you get
Speaker 1: into tool use and the use of cooking and basically
Speaker 1: external digestion, you're beginning to the human as a as
Speaker 1: a as an organism is beginning to expand and all
Speaker 1: these varying occupations. And then once we this culture builds up,
Speaker 1: and certainly once you reach the point where individuals can
Speaker 1: specialize in a given task, all the more. Right, So
Speaker 1: there's an idea that it's hardwired in us where we
Speaker 1: need to do it we're supposed to do it. But
Speaker 1: to what degree, I guess is the question. And to
Speaker 1: what degree have we evolved alongside what we're actually capable
Speaker 1: of doing now or sort of capable of doing. Um.
Speaker 1: What we find out is that when we are doing
Speaker 1: a couple of things at once, yes, we've got the
Speaker 1: prefrontal cortex to do it, but we're demanding much more
Speaker 1: of the cognitive process. You and I have talked about
Speaker 1: this before, this idea that we have a finite amount
Speaker 1: of mental energy that we can sometimes bolster with food
Speaker 1: and whatnot. UM. But like a video game, you have
Speaker 1: a power meter, and everything that happens to you in
Speaker 1: the course of the day is going to influence that
Speaker 1: power meter. In the occasional power up may give you
Speaker 1: a little boost, but at the end of the day
Speaker 1: it's gonna wear. Yeah. But let's say that you are depleted.
Speaker 1: You you don't have you know, a good, um glycost
Speaker 1: bump there with a piece of food or an apple
Speaker 1: or something like that, and you're just tired, and you're multitasking,
Speaker 1: you're demanding a lot. You've got a big cognitive load
Speaker 1: going on. And this is when you see the brain
Speaker 1: um entering into what we call bottlenecking, and that's just
Speaker 1: what it sounds like, right, nothing's really getting through because
Speaker 1: you're trying to do a bunch of tasks at once.
Speaker 1: And this is because you're doing something called task switching.
Speaker 1: Right now. This is Yeah, this is really interesting because
Speaker 1: it gets into the idea that there really isn't such
Speaker 1: any such thing as multitasking, the idea that well, not
Speaker 1: in the sense that we're doing two things at once. Instead,
Speaker 1: we're more like an individual who who instead of doing
Speaker 1: one thing with one hand and one thing with the other,
Speaker 1: is switching back and forth between two tasks with both hands,
Speaker 1: if that makes any sense. Yeah, I kind of think
Speaker 1: of it as a train conductor to right, like you're
Speaker 1: you're switching tracks. Yeah, I mean, well, there's since the
Speaker 1: title of the podcast, a one track mind, um, which
Speaker 1: is generally kind of used as a put down. Oh
Speaker 1: they've got a one track mind. They're only thinking about
Speaker 1: one thing. But at any given moment, we can only
Speaker 1: have a one track mind. Uh, that's just the the
Speaker 1: extent of our cognitive capabilities. And uh, I can also
Speaker 1: think of it like a two deck tape player. You know,
Speaker 1: you got two decks there, You've got two different tapes
Speaker 1: in there. Maybe one's Queen's Greatest hits and maybe the
Speaker 1: other one is Bob Speaker's greatest hits. But you're only
Speaker 1: gonna play Bob Sneaker or Queen. You're not gonna play
Speaker 1: them both at the same time unless you do a
Speaker 1: little mash up thing, which is going to require some
Speaker 1: pre planning. And it's still just one track, right exactly.
Speaker 1: Um yeah. Brain scans during task switching show activity in
Speaker 1: four major areas. The prefrontal cortex, of course, which is
Speaker 1: involved in shifting and focusing your attention and selecting which
Speaker 1: task to do one. And then you've got the posterior
Speaker 1: parietal lobe, which activates rules for each task you switch to.
Speaker 1: The anterior singulate gyrus monitors errors errors again very important.
Speaker 1: We'll talk more about that and the pre mot motor
Speaker 1: car text. It's one of those morning's pre motor cortex
Speaker 1: is preparing you to move in some way, right, that's
Speaker 1: the part that makes your hands, in your legs and
Speaker 1: your feet all moved together. So, according to Psychology Today's
Speaker 1: article the true cost of multitasking, each task switch might
Speaker 1: waste only one tenth of a second. But if you
Speaker 1: do a lot of switching throughout the day. This can
Speaker 1: add up to a loss oft of your productivity. Yeah,
Speaker 1: It's like, if you're doing two different things in two
Speaker 1: different rooms of your house, you're gonna have to move
Speaker 1: back and forth between the two and it may not
Speaker 1: be much of a distance, but the more you go
Speaker 1: back and forth, the more you're pacing around the house. Um.
Speaker 1: It's it's also interesting thinking and looking at this multitasking
Speaker 1: to to think of it as kind of juggling as well,
Speaker 1: the idea that you have three balls and you're trying
Speaker 1: to keep at least one of them in the air
Speaker 1: at any given moment. But but that that tends to
Speaker 1: serve as a slightly better way of thinking about it.
Speaker 1: There's a study in the July sixteenth episode of neuron
Speaker 1: Um that suggested that our brains aren't really built to
Speaker 1: handle parallel processing like we've been talking about. But the
Speaker 1: good news is that studies have shown that extensive training
Speaker 1: can make us better at doing two things at once
Speaker 1: or more, you know, juggling back and forth between these
Speaker 1: two different things. And there are various theories and why
Speaker 1: this is the case, but one of the strong ones
Speaker 1: is that with a lot of practice, certain routines become
Speaker 1: kind of automatic. UM. An example of this that came
Speaker 1: to mind actually has to do with I was reading
Speaker 1: some Roger Ebert reviews the other day because he tends
Speaker 1: to be my go to guy, like with a lot
Speaker 1: of people, he's kind of my go to guy for
Speaker 1: movie reviews, and I ran across a thread where he
Speaker 1: was responding to uh, some listener feedback on his review
Speaker 1: for Silent Hill. Uh. The movie based on a video
Speaker 1: game that came out a few years back from Christoph Ghans,
Speaker 1: wonderful imaginative French director who did Brotherhood the Wolf and UM,
Speaker 1: and Ebert was just kind of perplexed by the movie.
Speaker 1: He was just like, that didn't really make sense to me,
Speaker 1: and um, and somebody ask him a few questions about
Speaker 1: an Ebert to drew some parallels to the study. UH.
Speaker 1: It analyze people's brain activity during video games, and when
Speaker 1: they first start playing a video game, a whole lot
Speaker 1: of the brain area lights up because they're they're having
Speaker 1: to deal with new controls and new environment and new activities.
Speaker 1: But as they become better and better at the at
Speaker 1: the game, that that neural activity shrinks down to like
Speaker 1: just a very small area. And then and then in
Speaker 1: this we get into the whole idea of video games
Speaker 1: as a as a release, Like I don't want to
Speaker 1: use my whole brain. I just want to use a
Speaker 1: very little portion of it and give give my my
Speaker 1: thinking arrest. So which kind of goes into the flow
Speaker 1: state in a weird way, right, Yeah. And so the
Speaker 1: better you become at a task, the more of a
Speaker 1: flow state it is, or the more familiar you are
Speaker 1: with the various things that go into it. Like I
Speaker 1: think of activities we do on the computer, like like
Speaker 1: um goodness, I used to when I worked in newspapers,
Speaker 1: had he's in design all the time to build these pages,
Speaker 1: and they're all these hot keys, you know, different combinations
Speaker 1: that then make that just save you enormous amounts of time. Uh,
Speaker 1: and you end up just committing those two memory and
Speaker 1: then inevitably you reach that point we're having to train
Speaker 1: someone else and how to use it and cannot you know,
Speaker 1: and there's like no actual memory of what any of
Speaker 1: those hot keys are, Like I can only form up
Speaker 1: by game memory, just like pure muscle memory. So I
Speaker 1: had my brain had refined it down to just the
Speaker 1: bare minimum amount of thought required to carry it out,
Speaker 1: which enabled me to do things like build pages and
Speaker 1: listen to science podcast at the same time. That's interesting
Speaker 1: because I used to do a lot of database work
Speaker 1: and it's sort of the same thing. And sometimes I
Speaker 1: felt like, you know, sort of like I was in
Speaker 1: the matrix and I was just like moving through space
Speaker 1: and time and yeah, and fulfilling because you're doing all
Speaker 1: these things at once. Yeah, you're right, because I felt
Speaker 1: like I was being really productive. Put that hatteract making
Speaker 1: a spreadsheet in that in that moment, I might have
Speaker 1: just because it depended on the task. Again, it could
Speaker 1: have been wrote at that point, but if I had
Speaker 1: to engage a little bit more cognitive muscle, not so much.
Speaker 1: Now here's the question men women do we have a
Speaker 1: different share and multitasking is the jury out. Is it
Speaker 1: true that women are great multitaskers or is it just
Speaker 1: sort of cultural baggage. I've been thinking about this one
Speaker 1: because in terms of cultural baggage, I mean, I can
Speaker 1: definitely see where individuals would and I'm not not without
Speaker 1: even dry any science into it, yet, I can see
Speaker 1: where the cultural idea that women are multitaskers and men
Speaker 1: are not they both men and women could really get
Speaker 1: behind that idea. Because for women, Uh, if someone says, oh, well,
Speaker 1: you're a natural multitasker, it's well, it's like, thank you,
Speaker 1: that's great, because that means I'm capable of doing I
Speaker 1: am the hits that cataract of spreadsheets, Thank you very much.
Speaker 1: And then for men, if someone says, don't you know,
Speaker 1: don't worry, You're just not your your gender is not
Speaker 1: about multitasking, then it's kind of like, well, WHOA, Thank goodness,
Speaker 1: that's a load off my shoulders. I can only be
Speaker 1: expected to do one task well at any given time,
Speaker 1: so I've kind of got an out for all the
Speaker 1: other things I screw up in my life. All Right, Well,
Speaker 1: so I'm about to mention this study, but before I
Speaker 1: do so, I will listen that. And I'd like to
Speaker 1: hear from the women out there too. Maybe you don't
Speaker 1: want to be known as a multitask or maybe you
Speaker 1: feel the cultural baggage of that. And I say that
Speaker 1: because there's a two thousand eleven study at the Department
Speaker 1: of Sociology Anthropology at Bar Lawn University in Israel, and
Speaker 1: this found that working mothers came This is a family
Speaker 1: of working mothers and fathers, they spend about ten more
Speaker 1: hours per week multitasking than do working fathers. So we're
Speaker 1: talking about forty eight point three hours as UH compared
Speaker 1: to thirty eight point nine for dad's okay. The lead
Speaker 1: author of the studies share Offer said when they multitask
Speaker 1: at home, for example, mothers are more likely than fathers
Speaker 1: to engage in housework or childcare activities, which are usually
Speaker 1: labor intensive efforts. Fathers, by contrast, tend to engage in
Speaker 1: other types of activities when they multitask at home, such
Speaker 1: as talking to a third person who are engaging in
Speaker 1: self care. These are less burden sum experiences. So this
Speaker 1: is very interesting to me because I do think that
Speaker 1: the cultural norm has informed the behavior. And as someone
Speaker 1: who is a working mom and a multitasker, I guess
Speaker 1: with the capital M, you do kind of feel that
Speaker 1: sense of it. I don't feel that I'm good at it,
Speaker 1: but some of these things are very wrote and they're
Speaker 1: very physical when they're easy to do, but it still
Speaker 1: takes a lot of energy out of you. Yeah, that
Speaker 1: makes sense. I found it interesting with some of the
Speaker 1: older anthropology kind of arguments about this were that if
Speaker 1: you go back to um Our, most ancient days, you
Speaker 1: had men who had to go out and do one thing.
Speaker 1: Supposedly they like, we were hunter gatherers, So the men
Speaker 1: went out to hunt down and kill particular animals, and
Speaker 1: then the women gathered things and looked after the children
Speaker 1: and kept the fire going and all that, which I
Speaker 1: guess kind of as an idea, it's kind of interesting,
Speaker 1: but but but apparently holds no real real sway over there.
Speaker 1: And see, the thing about that too, is that not
Speaker 1: only are they keeping their tending the children the fire,
Speaker 1: but they're also foraging because most of the diet is
Speaker 1: predicated on their ability to go out and find foods
Speaker 1: there that are non meat, right, and then also the
Speaker 1: men like and where again going with sort of a
Speaker 1: non historical, vague idea of the past when we're discussing this.
Speaker 1: But but yeah, if you're going out to hunt an animal,
Speaker 1: it's not quite as simple as just one single task.
Speaker 1: You're having to deal with with weapon crafting up, weapon upkeep.
Speaker 1: Even if that weapon is just like a sharpened stone
Speaker 1: or a bone, you know, still you've gotta keep it
Speaker 1: in good repair. You're having to possibly track animals and
Speaker 1: and if you're doing it on foot, you're talking about
Speaker 1: a rather labor intensive hunt there. So I don't even
Speaker 1: buy that the hunting for food in in the in
Speaker 1: our ancient in the ancient times would have been a single,
Speaker 1: one track mind kind of a deal, right, right, So
Speaker 1: what I'm proposing is I think that man canal task
Speaker 1: just as well as women, but perhaps there's some cultural
Speaker 1: stuff going on there. However, we have to talk about
Speaker 1: the corpus colusum, because apparently in women are not Apparently,
Speaker 1: we know for sure that this part of the brain,
Speaker 1: which handles communication between the two hemispheres, is actually wider
Speaker 1: than in men's brains, which has made some people wonder
Speaker 1: whether or not um this helps to synthesize information better
Speaker 1: in women, to communicate better in both sides of the hemispheres,
Speaker 1: But we don't have any really big conclusive evidence that
Speaker 1: says this allows women to multitask better. Along the same lines,
Speaker 1: there was a French National Institute of Health and Medical
Speaker 1: Research study and they took thirty two right handed people
Speaker 1: and they were asked to match some letters. And of course,
Speaker 1: given this the study, the brain, of course we had
Speaker 1: fr fm R eyes loaded up as well. Scanning the brains,
Speaker 1: seeing what's flowing around, what kind of activity has taken place.
Speaker 1: And it's also important that there was money on the line.
Speaker 1: There's a financial reward for the participants in this study
Speaker 1: to match things up correctly. All right, So during this task,
Speaker 1: both him hemispheres of the brains medial frontal cortex, which
Speaker 1: is involved in motivation, lights up. All right. Then the
Speaker 1: researchers shook it up. They introduced a second task where
Speaker 1: the subjects had to match like upper case letters in
Speaker 1: addition to matching like lower case letters with separately occuring
Speaker 1: reward tallies. So, uh, what they found was the subjects
Speaker 1: brains divided the two reward bay skulls between the two
Speaker 1: sides of the region of the brain. So what what
Speaker 1: they ended up finding here was that, okay, the area
Speaker 1: of the brain that was highly active and the observed
Speaker 1: multitasking behavior was the was the front o polar cortex,
Speaker 1: which organizes pending goals while the brain completes another task,
Speaker 1: and this is especially well developed in humans. But they
Speaker 1: also the the the scientists also argued that humans have
Speaker 1: this problem though, of deciding between more than two alternatives,
Speaker 1: and a possible explanation so they cannot keep in mind
Speaker 1: and switch back and forth between three or more alternatives.
Speaker 1: So we're basically A or D. If you certainly A,
Speaker 1: B and C, then then the cognitive load increases dramatically. Okay,
Speaker 1: so again there's like that switch on the track, right, yeah,
Speaker 1: either or Yeah. This was particularly interesting when I think two.
Speaker 1: One of my favorite authors are Scott Baker has a
Speaker 1: series of fantasy books. I mentioned them before. The first
Speaker 1: one in the series is The Darkness That Comes Before
Speaker 1: and It. He has this whole He himself is uh
Speaker 1: heavy into psychology and neuroscience and weaves all that through
Speaker 1: this book. Even though the book deals with with magic
Speaker 1: and and and the like and their sorcerers, he's very
Speaker 1: into the neuroscience of how that works, and particularly there's
Speaker 1: a there's a type of magic in the books called
Speaker 1: the nosis, and it's revealed eventually in the books that
Speaker 1: it works by holding two different interpretations of the same
Speaker 1: spell chant in your mind at the same time. So
Speaker 1: so being able to to work these acts of magic
Speaker 1: involves the cognitive process of holding two things in your mind,
Speaker 1: two meanings that are parallel, at the same time. And
Speaker 1: in the books there's a there's a special character. H
Speaker 1: got a superhuman that emerges who's able to work even
Speaker 1: greater works of magic because he can hold three different
Speaker 1: ideas in his mind at the same time. So I
Speaker 1: find that that could be a really interesting take on
Speaker 1: magic by combining it with sort of what we know
Speaker 1: through neuroscience about our ability to multitask. Is like mental
Speaker 1: scrolls of of magic in our minds that we're trying
Speaker 1: to Yeah, yeah, multitasking is a kind of magic for that.
Speaker 1: All right, um, we're gonna take a quick break, and
Speaker 1: when we get back, we're going to talk about the
Speaker 1: cognitive and physiological costs of multitasking, like a short term
Speaker 1: memory for instance. All Right, we're back, and we're gonna
Speaker 1: look a little bit more at multitasking and what all
Speaker 1: of this multitasking at least these attempts at multitasking due
Speaker 1: to our minds. Okay, So we talked about bottlenecking, we
Speaker 1: we talked about this ability to keep some things in
Speaker 1: our minds. Well, it turns out that, of course it's
Speaker 1: all has to do with short term memory and committing
Speaker 1: short term memory into long term memory if you can. Um, so,
Speaker 1: of course, if you're multitasking, if you're um, let's say
Speaker 1: you're studying for an exam, but you're listening to music
Speaker 1: or you're watching TV. Turns out these short term memory
Speaker 1: is going to be taxed and you're probably not going
Speaker 1: to get a lot of recall out of that experience.
Speaker 1: Um Our short term memories can only store between five
Speaker 1: and nine things at once, so when information doesn't make
Speaker 1: it into short term memory, it can't be transferred into
Speaker 1: long term memory for recall later. Okay, that's why if
Speaker 1: you're watching TV while you're studying, it's not going to
Speaker 1: be as effective. So if you can't recall it, you
Speaker 1: can't use it now. I did also find them one
Speaker 1: of our our studies we're looking at. They did argue that,
Speaker 1: you know, it depends on what you're doing. Because I
Speaker 1: was very concerned about the music thing because I listen
Speaker 1: to music all the time. When it works, I was
Speaker 1: started thinking, well, maybe I'm doing all this wrong and
Speaker 1: then I need to cut out the music. But they
Speaker 1: did say that for some people, listening to music while
Speaker 1: working actually makes them more creative because they're using different
Speaker 1: car that it functions, which I think lines up well
Speaker 1: with what I've sort of observed before. And if I'm
Speaker 1: doing something that really requires me to think that I
Speaker 1: can't listen to anything the lyrics in it. Right. We
Speaker 1: talked about that before that lyrics sometimes can mess with
Speaker 1: what you're trying to do, right, because you hear those
Speaker 1: messages and trying to do language, and then I'm also
Speaker 1: I'm also absorbing language. Then then that's going to hit
Speaker 1: both of those, uh, those categories. Right. But you know,
Speaker 1: so if you're listening to something instrumental in your researching
Speaker 1: or trying to learn something or studying, then that should
Speaker 1: be fined. Research shows that people use different areas of
Speaker 1: the brain for learning and storing new information when they
Speaker 1: are distracted. So brain scans of people who are distracted
Speaker 1: or multitasking show activity in the stray item, and this
Speaker 1: is a region of the brain involved in learning new skills.
Speaker 1: Brain scans of people who are not distracted show activity
Speaker 1: in the hippocampus, and this is a region involved in
Speaker 1: storing and recalling information. So again it points to this
Speaker 1: idea that if you are unit asking, if you're studying,
Speaker 1: if you're researching, your doing this one thing and then
Speaker 1: you're engaging your hippocampus more. And that's good because then
Speaker 1: you're storing those memories and your recall for that material
Speaker 1: is going to be better later. Now, another thing that
Speaker 1: multitasking effects is stress and stress levels. And UH professor
Speaker 1: Gloria Marks April study and we talked about this in
Speaker 1: the last podcast. UM. This this Landmark study. She found
Speaker 1: that after only twenty minutes of interrupted performance, people reported
Speaker 1: significantly higher stress, frustration, workload, effort, and pressure. So it's
Speaker 1: like this low lying level of stress that people put
Speaker 1: upon themselves when they are multitasking. And UH psychologist David
Speaker 1: Meyer at the University of Michigan found that multitasking contributes
Speaker 1: to the release of stress hormones and adrenaline, which can
Speaker 1: cause of course, we know that long term health problems
Speaker 1: if not controlled, and it also contributes to the loss
Speaker 1: of short term memory. So what's you're the The sort
Speaker 1: of story that comes out here is that if you're
Speaker 1: multitasking throughout the day and you're doing a lot, what
Speaker 1: you find is that you've got that low level of
Speaker 1: anxiety building because it always feels like those loops or
Speaker 1: open those loops that we talked about, the tasks that
Speaker 1: we need to complete, and that also kind of falls
Speaker 1: back into some of the stereotypes about say busy moms,
Speaker 1: you know, being kind of frazzled, or anybody that's really
Speaker 1: got a lot on their plate being a bit frazzled
Speaker 1: because they are doing so many things and there's so
Speaker 1: many loops open that it's having it's take an impact
Speaker 1: on their short term memory and their ability to perform.
Speaker 1: And um, you know, in the in the case of
Speaker 1: say studying for an exam or researching, if you are multitesting,
Speaker 1: you're trying to do a deep dive into a topic,
Speaker 1: and you're switching between tasks and you know in an
Speaker 1: hour you've maybe gleaned only ten minutes of that research.
Speaker 1: That's not a deep dive. That's not a lot of
Speaker 1: time to think in depth about any one thing. So
Speaker 1: of course it behooves you to try to unitask in
Speaker 1: those instances where it's really important to commit that to
Speaker 1: memory or you really need to come to trade on something. Yeah.
Speaker 1: This also leads us into this area UM referred to
Speaker 1: as a tension deficit traite, which I found really interesting. Now,
Speaker 1: this is not attention deficit, uh disorder disorder. This is
Speaker 1: attention deficit. There's a trait that emerges due to the
Speaker 1: environment that you've put yourself in. So you're putting yourself
Speaker 1: in this environment where there's all the stimuli coming at you.
Speaker 1: There's all there, all these different tasks that you've you've
Speaker 1: put before yourself. You're multitasking or trying to and it
Speaker 1: generates basically the symptoms of attention deficit disorder. I think
Speaker 1: what's interesting about this is that again it's um, it's
Speaker 1: something in our environment, and it's something that we condition
Speaker 1: ourselves into. Now it's a pretty new idea. We've been
Speaker 1: studying attention deficit disorder for for years and years, but
Speaker 1: this idea of attention deficit traite really comes out of
Speaker 1: a two thousand five Harvard Business Review article Overloaded Circuits,
Speaker 1: Why smart people under Perform? And this was by Glenn Wilson,
Speaker 1: the guy who who wrote the study and UH and
Speaker 1: and and most of these ideas really hinge back to
Speaker 1: his UH, his his UH studies regarding attention deficit as
Speaker 1: it emerges again as a as as a symptom of
Speaker 1: environmental stimuli. Yeah, and he did the study for Hewlett
Speaker 1: Packard um to look at this productivity of multitasking. What
Speaker 1: I think is cool that he just not so cool
Speaker 1: But interesting is that he discovered is that the average
Speaker 1: workers functioning i Q um a temporary qualitative of state here,
Speaker 1: and we're talking about drops ten points when multitasking, and
Speaker 1: that is more than double the four point drop it
Speaker 1: occurs when someone smokes marijuana. Wow. So I mean that really,
Speaker 1: especially for anyone out there in in a management position,
Speaker 1: I mean it really should make you think twice about
Speaker 1: putting new responsibilities on an employer because you're basically taking
Speaker 1: a notch out of their i Q with with each task,
Speaker 1: until you just reduced them to a a just a
Speaker 1: mumbling ball of goog with a whole just spreadsheets to
Speaker 1: fill up. Yes, just you can hear the stress and
Speaker 1: buzzing off of that person. Yeah um. But you know,
Speaker 1: of course that leads to this idea of how can
Speaker 1: you best rein this in and manage it? And there's
Speaker 1: something called the rule Uh. This says that the work
Speaker 1: you do gives eight of the impact and effectiveness. So
Speaker 1: you focus on identifying the of your task that are
Speaker 1: really effective and then you do them one at a time.
Speaker 1: I tend to, I guess I tend to sort of
Speaker 1: do maybe a take on that where since I'm better
Speaker 1: in the morning, and I guess it makes sense because
Speaker 1: I haven't had much time to deplete my cognitive abilities. Uh.
Speaker 1: Pick the things that are most important and require the
Speaker 1: the most amount of thought and creativity to do those first,
Speaker 1: and then do the other things later. That's the smart
Speaker 1: way to approach it. But of course, as we found
Speaker 1: in the last podcast that people usually do the the inverse.
Speaker 1: They typically um kind of distract themselves and multitask earlier
Speaker 1: in the day and then they battened down the hatches
Speaker 1: and concentrate later in the day. But you're right, that's
Speaker 1: the way to do it is in the morning, is
Speaker 1: to unit task and then multitask later in the day
Speaker 1: because you have more energy in the morning and you're
Speaker 1: fresh and you haven't become ego depleted by all the
Speaker 1: choices of that day. So there you have it. Multitasking, Um,
Speaker 1: the single track mind. Multitasking is magic. All of these
Speaker 1: various ways of looking at it, which it really did
Speaker 1: force me to to reevaluate the way I approach all
Speaker 1: the things I have to do in my life and uh,
Speaker 1: and the and and really how we function as human beings. UM.
Speaker 1: But of course none of this is necessarily new because
Speaker 1: we've got people have been figuring this out for for ages. Uh.
Speaker 1: In fact, back in seven in the seventeen forties, Lord
Speaker 1: Chesterfield offered the following advice. He said, quote, there is
Speaker 1: time enough for everything in the course of the day
Speaker 1: if you do but one thing at a time, But
Speaker 1: there is not time enough in the year if you
Speaker 1: will do two things at a time. So Lord Chesterfield
Speaker 1: knew the the importance of really focusing in on a
Speaker 1: single task, and he knew that you'd have to be
Speaker 1: a wizard to do two things at once. You know. Purportedly,
Speaker 1: even Albert Einstein weighed in on this, and this is
Speaker 1: from a Scientific American article about multitesting. He is purported
Speaker 1: to have said, any man who can drive safely while
Speaker 1: kissing a pretty girl is simply not giving the kiss
Speaker 1: the attention it deserves. Yeah, that rogue, That makes sense.
Speaker 1: I mean, yeah, I mean it just gets down to
Speaker 1: if you do try and do two things at once,
Speaker 1: you're not gonna do either thing. Well, all right, well
Speaker 1: let's uh, let's call over the road but now and
Speaker 1: get a little listener and mail. First off, we heard
Speaker 1: from Gregory who's responding to um some stuff I recently
Speaker 1: said about pugs the dog breed, because I used to
Speaker 1: think of the pug is just kind of this um
Speaker 1: amusing but are ultimately kind of worthless breed. That it
Speaker 1: was just kind of bread into a corner physiologically just
Speaker 1: wasn't capable of much. But then I saw a helper
Speaker 1: dog that was a pug at the train station. So
Speaker 1: Gregory writes in and says, Robert, Robert, Robert about pugs.
Speaker 1: My father in law had a beef farm and his
Speaker 1: dog a pug. It became one of his farm helpers. Terminator,
Speaker 1: that's the dog's name. May have been tiny, but he
Speaker 1: was one of the best dogs I've ever seen to
Speaker 1: help direct the cows. Since Terminator was so small, Uh,
Speaker 1: he never got stepped on or kicked, and he was
Speaker 1: never made to help, but he liked to do it.
Speaker 1: As soon as he saw Tom get get the barn closed,
Speaker 1: term was at the door, jumping and turning circles waiting
Speaker 1: for the door to open. I think we were all
Speaker 1: shocked the first time we saw him in action, but
Speaker 1: he was tiny but impressive. So that little sip it
Speaker 1: comes to us from from Gregory, that was very interesting.
Speaker 1: And then we also heard from our listener Marta Um
Speaker 1: and she writes it and says, uh me again from Portugal,
Speaker 1: just to quit comment on Your Walls podcast. I am
Speaker 1: a big fan of Murakami, the Japanese writer h but
Speaker 1: he has a book that was quite hard for me
Speaker 1: to get into, Hard Boiled Wonderland for the End of
Speaker 1: the World. It's quite fantastic about a guy whose brain
Speaker 1: is being experimented on, and it describes two parallel realities,
Speaker 1: one of his actual life developing and one of what
Speaker 1: is going on inside his brain at the same time,
Speaker 1: the inner world. But this is a very real world
Speaker 1: comprised within a long wall. The character arrives at this
Speaker 1: city and as he walks past the gates, he is
Speaker 1: forced to leave his shadow there, for it is that
Speaker 1: it is the link to his real life and his
Speaker 1: memories of that life. The story then develops inside the city,
Speaker 1: and the presence of the wall is quite amazing. Um omnipotent, unbreached, unbreakable,
Speaker 1: and actual limit between the two worlds. He has confronted
Speaker 1: with the fact that there is no way to go
Speaker 1: back through the wall or the gates, so he needs
Speaker 1: to find another way. No spoilers, I'll just drop here Anyway,
Speaker 1: this is the strangest wall I could remember. Thanks again, Marta. Well,
Speaker 1: I like that dropping the shadow as a narrative technique,
Speaker 1: you know, because then then that's sort of like a
Speaker 1: was the movie um about Dreaming with Leo DiCaprio, Leo
Speaker 1: like I know him. Oh you're talking about the Christopher
Speaker 1: Nolan film Inception. Yeah, you know how they knew when
Speaker 1: they were dreaming and they're in reality not in reality
Speaker 1: they had the turning Top. But I like this idea
Speaker 1: of not seeing your shadow and realizing that you're in
Speaker 1: this altar universe. Yeah, that sounds really. It also reminds
Speaker 1: me of a book I've not read. You, I really
Speaker 1: want to See the City read The City in the
Speaker 1: City by China Melville. But and I think it maybe
Speaker 1: falls along similar lines. But Murracami is great. I haven't
Speaker 1: read this particular book. Um have you? If you read
Speaker 1: any more comments, I haven't. Um Cough on the Shore
Speaker 1: was a big one. That one, the wind Up Bird
Speaker 1: Chronicle both along but very much in a I think
Speaker 1: maybe the And I'm not no expert by any means
Speaker 1: in Japanese literature, uh, certainly, but certainly there there seems
Speaker 1: to be sort of a long form aspect of his
Speaker 1: work that maybe doesn't doesn't job immediately with with a
Speaker 1: Western reader, but but it's but he's a great writer.
Speaker 1: It's it's very satisfying, very imaginative. One of the books
Speaker 1: had talking cats in it, and uh, but then also
Speaker 1: one of the books had a man being skinned alive,
Speaker 1: so he kind of it gives you various aspects of
Speaker 1: like every day minosa plus some imaginative almost kind of
Speaker 1: cute stuff. And then also there's a there's there's room
Speaker 1: for wacky and or horrible happenings as well. So glad
Speaker 1: guts in Kawai. Yeah, yeah, kind of nice. So hey,
Speaker 1: if you would like to reach out to us and
Speaker 1: chat with us a little bit about Murakami, about walls,
Speaker 1: about uh, multitasking. Are you a multitasker? Do you think
Speaker 1: you're a multitasker? What happens when you try and multitask? Uh?
Speaker 1: And then what happens when you were able to set
Speaker 1: everything aside and focus on that one thing in your
Speaker 1: life or you know, you can have multiple things in
Speaker 1: your life that you can really get into a flow
Speaker 1: state with. Let us know, we'd love to hear from you.
Speaker 1: You can find us on Facebook, you can find us
Speaker 1: on Tumbler. On both of those, we go by the
Speaker 1: handles stuff to Blow your Mind, and if you go
Speaker 1: to Twitter, you'll find us with the handle blow the Mind.
Speaker 1: And you can always drop us a line at blow
Speaker 1: the Mind at discovery dot com. For more on this
Speaker 1: and thousands of other topics, Is it How Stuff Works
Speaker 1: dot com