March 5, 2024 • 46 mins
Multitasking isn't really possible, because of the way the human brain works. We know you think you're getting more done, but you're really working slower and with worse results than working sequentially. We promise.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, there's Chuck,
and we're doing this on our own, flying high like
an eagle to the seat. No, no, no, and this
is stuff you should know. No, no, no.
Speaker 1 (00:26):
I'm so annoyed at this.
Speaker 2 (00:28):
The episode from twenty eleven that we somehow recorded in
twenty twenty four.
Speaker 1 (00:34):
It feels that way a little bit, doesn't it.
Speaker 2 (00:36):
Yes, it does, it really does.
Speaker 1 (00:38):
I think I was annoyed because and I put this
one together, so it's my fault, but like I feel
like it was just like, well, this study says this
about multitasking, and this study says this, and this study
says this.
Speaker 2 (00:48):
I think you feel that way because that's exactly what
it does.
Speaker 1 (00:52):
There's just no good story here. I think that's my problem.
Speaker 2 (00:54):
There is there is. I think the story is is
that we're going to like flip everybody's wig because it
turns out that multitasking is a myth, a fraud. You
shouldn't even try to do it because not only is
multitasking impossible for you to do puny human, it actually
makes you worse at what you are doing.
Speaker 1 (01:15):
Yeah, I think there are people plenty of people who
think they're great multitaskers. Yeah, they may be among the
very small small percentage of people who are super taskers,
which we'll talk about, but more than likely they probably
just think they're getting a lot more done by switching
(01:35):
back and forth between a bunch of different things. Yeah,
when they're really really not. And that's really what we're
talking about. Multitasking isn't even really multitasking, it's just it's
task switching very fast.
Speaker 2 (01:48):
That's a much much better description of a task switching,
because when you're trying to do multiple things at once,
even something as simple as say like baking a cake,
like stirring like the batter while you're talking on the phone,
you're not actually doing those two things at the same
time as far as your brain is concerned. It's basically
(02:09):
flipping back and forth to make sure you're doing them
both adequately. And we actually can do something as simple
as that fairly well. But the more complex the tasks get,
and the more numerous the tasks get, everything just starts
the short circuit and you sit there and wake up
every morning and wonder why you're still so tired and
(02:30):
stressed out all the time. It's multitasking.
Speaker 1 (02:33):
Yeah, since you said short circuit, we should mention the
origin of the term is from a computer ad in
nineteen sixty five IBM report basically talking about their new
IBM system three sixty and talking about a computer's ability
to multitask or process tasks at the same time. And
(02:54):
since then, since the nineteen sixties, that really took hold
as far as a catchphrase, and psychologists have gone wild
with doing studies and experiments to see what are the
limits of the human brain as far as taking on
multiple things at once, which again, is it exactly at once,
Like you can do things like at the same time,
(03:18):
like bake air, stirring batter and talking on the phone.
But I think generally when people are talking about multitasking today,
they think more about I'm sitting at my computer and
I've got like five different tabs that are sort of
doing different things, and I'm also emailing and I'm researching this,
and I'm doing that at the same time.
Speaker 2 (03:36):
And somebody's texting me and I'm getting push notifications. Yeah,
it's a thing for sure. That's one reason why it's
worth talking about, because if it's not actually effective and productive.
People should know that because it's becoming such a huge
part of our modern world.
Speaker 1 (03:55):
Yeah, for sure, So let's talk about it today.
Speaker 2 (03:58):
Okay, So, sadly you already hit on the fact of
the podcast that multitasking comes from an IBM AD, but
you said that psychologists had gone I thought that joke
would have gone over better. You said that psychologists had
gone wild like trying to figure out the computational processing
power of humans, And I think that's actually one of
(04:21):
the first problems that IBM AD kind of set it
up for us to view the human brain as a computer,
and that's not an exact analogy, which is why I
think we thought we could multitask for a while, because
we even thought computers could. But it wasn't until the
advent of multi core processors that computers themselves could actually
(04:42):
process more than one thing at the same time. At
the outset, including for the IBM System three sixty, the
computer with a single CPU was not actually multitasking. It
was doing the same thing that our brains do. It
was jumping back and forth between tasks really fast to
make sure it was doing them both adequately. So when
(05:05):
we kind of figured out that there was a problem
with processing, that there were limits to it. We established
very quickly something called a processing bottleneck. That, yeah, there is.
It's documented humans do not multitask to begin with, and
when we try to multitask, the results are terrible. And
(05:26):
it seems to be because there's like too much stuff
is trying to get through too narrow a passageway.
Speaker 1 (05:32):
Yeah, and some people think that, you know, this bottleneck
happens most severely when you're trying to plan like an
action that you're going to do at the same time
as you're trying to retrieve something from your memory bank.
Memory plays a big part in all of this. And
what we're doing, like we said, we're task switching. We're
(05:55):
performing things in sequence. So you're switching back and forth
very quick, you think, But there is something called a
switching cost. So every time that you're like you and
I are researching or something and we're like, oh wait,
I forgot we need to email Jerry about something, and
so I'll stop real quick and email Jerry and it
seems very seamless and then I go back to my work.
(06:17):
But there is a cost to that switch there where
it takes. It takes a second or two for your
brain to kind of ramp back up into what you
were on previously. May not seem like a lot, but
when you add that up over a lifetime of work,
there's a lot of inefficiencies going on.
Speaker 2 (06:33):
Yeah, for sure. So the switching costs is just a
time lag, a loss of productivity when you go from
one task to another, right, and especially if we're trying
to do two tasks at the same time, which we can't,
but we're switching back and forth over and over again,
that switching cost becomes more and more dramatic. And so
(06:55):
those two tasks, neither one of them gets done very well.
And there's theories about what's going on here. There's some
rival ones. The first one that was established, I think
as far back as the sixties. It's called the psychological
refractory period effect. And the psychological refractory period paradigm basically
says that when we're presented with two tasks that are
(07:19):
presented in quick secession, the response to task two is delayed. Right,
that's documented, we know that. But here's why they're saying that.
It's because the brain is still processing the response to
the first stimulus task one. So response to the response
to task two has to wait. And so the difference
(07:40):
in time between task two when that when we're presented
with that task and response one when we're complete the
first task. That period is called that refractory period, and
then it's followed by response too. So there's a there's
a gap, there's a chunk of time where we just
(08:00):
can't do anything for task two because our brains are
still working on task one, and then finally when we
complete task one, we can start on task two. And
that time in between that's the refractory period, and that's
what counts for that delay in response time, because our
response to task one is typically shorter than our response
(08:21):
to task two. So task two is completed in a
longer amount of time than task one was because it
was it was given to us while we were still
trying to complete task one.
Speaker 1 (08:34):
Right. Uh, that's a good way to put it. Like,
there's no progress being made that in that downtime.
Speaker 2 (08:38):
Right, No, not at least on task two from what
I can tell.
Speaker 1 (08:42):
Yeah, And I don't even think you're I mean, I
think guess you're putting to bed task one. I don't
think there's real progress being made at all.
Speaker 2 (08:49):
Yeah, that's why some people. That's so that's a new version,
that's part of the rival interpretation. They're like, no, this
actually seems like you're not still completing task one during
that refractory period while you're waiting on tests two. There
seems to be a blank spot where you're not able
to do anything when you're switching from one to the other.
Speaker 1 (09:08):
Oh okay, I gotcha.
Speaker 2 (09:09):
Yeah, so that's the new interpretation.
Speaker 1 (09:11):
Well, what they're talking about though, is the brain. And
when you look at the parts of the brain, the
prefrontal cortex is the one that is you know, if
you're doing something, you're paying attention to something, it's your
prefrontal cortex that is at work and it spans, as
we know, the left and right sides of the brain,
and it's coordinating with each other when you're doing one
(09:34):
thing at a time. If all of a sudden you
have two things, then the left side of your brain
is doing something, the right side of the brain is
doing something, and it's split up and that's where that
inefficiency really kicks in, right.
Speaker 2 (09:46):
Yeah, that's based on a French fMRI study from twenty ten.
Back in the ear where we used to call the
MRI the Wonder Machine. You remember that, right, So this
is like prime vintage Wonder Machine type study where they
found that you can still do a couple of tasks
that it does seem like there's a certain amount of
parallel processing the brain can do when it splits the
(10:09):
two lobes, the two frontal lobes up and says, here,
you do this, and you do this. We can still
kind of do it, but neither one is as good
or as fast as if we just did one after
the other. That's the big joke for multitasking. But if
you add a third one, the brain just goes hey,
wires just completely goes kaputz.
Speaker 1 (10:31):
Yeah, like two one is ideal two as possible, and
again we're not talking about supertaskers, which we'll get to.
And three is just don't even try. What are you doing?
What have you been trying to do that for?
Speaker 2 (10:43):
Or as the French researcher said, forget about it? Right?
Speaker 1 (10:50):
Oh man, that got me. I thought you were about
to hit me with a good French phrase. No, I
love it. There was another study conducted at Vanderbilt Universe
Go commodores, right.
Speaker 2 (11:03):
Yeah, yeah, they're easy like Sunday morning.
Speaker 1 (11:07):
They are, Oh boy, you're on a roll where they
talk about the brain exhibiting what's called a response selection bottleneck.
Another bottleneck, but this one's a little different. If you're
tasked with doing several things at one time, the brain
says what's more important, and so it sort of chooses
for you. But I also saw some other studies that
(11:30):
said that what also might be going on is you are,
maybe subconsciously, if you're trying to juggle two things, the
one that you're really paying the most attention to is
either the one that gives you the most pleasure or
the one that maybe can be completed as like a
sub goal.
Speaker 2 (11:48):
Yes, so that's kind of a different interpretation too. So
these are kind of rivals to the refractory period paradigm,
and they're basically saying, like, our brains actually require a
moment switch and like we've kind of established in that
moment we're not actually doing anything. But these two different
ones that these two kind of interpretations that you just mentioned,
(12:11):
they strike me as kind of tomato tomato because they're
essentially saying the same thing. One is that you know,
the brain has to decide which activity is important, and
that it takes more time. The other one from David Meyer,
University of Michigan is saying, well, the brain has this
thing called adaptive executive control that says this priority is
(12:32):
more important than this priority, So I need to work
on this one first. It's it's the same thing. Like
I genuinely could not find what the distinction is. And
there's even some bad reporting on some of this stuff
where I saw David Meyer and his study from University
of Michigan was essentially described to suggest that that it's
showing like, oh, yeah, we can, we can do multitasking,
(12:56):
we can process in parallel, and that's not at all correct,
like he's saying like you can't do that at all.
I don't know how it got all kind of messed
up like that, But there doesn't seem to be anybody
who says, no, we actually can. Everyone every single study
is it shows that we can't. The difference between the
studies is trying to interpret the results in different ways
(13:19):
to explain why we can't or what happens when we try.
Speaker 1 (13:23):
All right, so we're going to multitask. Now take a break,
I read a couple of ads, and we'll be right back.
(13:55):
All right. So we're back with multitasking. I mentioned early
on that memory, memory recall, when you're trying to do
something else can really suffer, and so we should talk
about memory a little bit. There's a guy named George
Miller who was a psychologist at Harvard who basically says
the human brain, as far as recall goes, is centered
(14:18):
around the number seven, with a little variation up and
down by two. So he's done studies where they basically
just say, hey, repeat these numbers after me. And what
they found is the average number of numbers that someone
can repeat back to somebody is seven, and again it
(14:38):
goes up and down a little bit. Some people are
inherently just going to be much better at that and
maybe can rattle off fifteen, but the average came down
to seven. So what people do when they're trying to
learn things or make something memorable is parse things out
and separate them into smaller bits for storage.
Speaker 2 (14:56):
Yeah, and so we do that with telephone numbers, social
security numbers, any string of ten numbers. We almost always
put hyphens or dots or something together. Dates. It's just
almost like an inherent thing that we do, an intuitive thing.
But we do that to make it easier on our
working memory. Remembering three sets of three numbers is easier
(15:18):
for our brains to keep in our working memory than
one long set of nine numbers.
Speaker 1 (15:24):
Yeah, I mean, I guess there's no reason a social
security number should have those dashes, right.
Speaker 2 (15:28):
I think that's exactly why it has dashes.
Speaker 1 (15:30):
Yeah, so you can so you can remember, so I
can just rattle out two eight seven nine six nine
four seven three.
Speaker 2 (15:36):
Oh man, I hope that's not legit?
Speaker 1 (15:39):
What so like, what could someone do with that?
Speaker 2 (15:42):
Are you the LifeLock guy? Now, of course that's not.
Speaker 1 (15:46):
I'm surprised I was able to even do that successfully
without saying my real social security number.
Speaker 2 (15:51):
It was really impressive. Actually, how is it a bunch
of numbers? So just kind of as a side note,
we've been talking a lot about working memory, and that's
a huge part of multitasking, because when you multitask, you
are you're not You're by definition, not completing one thing
before moving on to the other. You're stopping mid task
to move on to something else, which you probably stop
(16:14):
mid tasks to go back to the first one or
go to a third thing. That's what multitasking is like.
There's no, if you do it sequentially rather than at
the same time concurrently, then you're not multitasking. So it
requires working memory, it requires attention, it requires self regulation,
It requires an ability to keep goals directed in the
(16:37):
back of your head and also to be able to
place those goals on pause while you move on to
another goal. And if you have ADHD, you are you
have a challenge with every single one of those things. Memory, attention,
self regulation, goal direction. So it's Multitasking is really really
(16:58):
hard for people with AIDHD because it requires a lot
of functions that a lot of people with ADHD struggle with.
The big difference is in a lot of I think
I read at least one study it's like, well, if
you have ADHD, you know you're just completely distracted all
the time. You should be really good at multitasking because
in that what multitasking is. And it's like, absolutely not,
(17:21):
that's just not at all. So I mean you, yes,
you're more distracted. But people with ADHD, they they're slightly
deficient in a really important ability in multitasking, which is
quickly diminishing the size of that switching cost right where
you go from one task to the other, you're you're
(17:43):
if you're if you don't have ADHD, you're a lot
better at picking up that second task. That that gap
between switching is shorter with ADHD, it's longer. And then
the other problem with multitasking in ADHD is that if
you become hyper aroused when you multitask, and hyper arousal
(18:05):
leads to much more elevated levels of stress and people
with ADHD, which makes them even more prone to error
and to frustration and all sorts of stuff. That makes
multitasking that much harder.
Speaker 1 (18:16):
Yeah, and good setup for our eventual hopefully coming soon
ash ADHD episode. We've already got the stuff kind of culled,
but it's a lot, it's a big episode. Yeah, So
I know people have been asking for it for a
long time. So anyway, that's that's coming down the pike.
But one thing that we have roundly seen in study
(18:39):
after study is when you try to multitask or task
switch back and forth, is that your work suffers. Not
only are you taking longer to get things done than
you would if you did it sequentially, and by sequentially
we mean completing a task and then moving on to
the next. That not only are you taking more time
(18:59):
when you think you're not. You think you're actually being
more efficient maybe if you're you know, living a lie
like most of us are, but you're actually doing less
the work is less good and you're making more mistakes
along the way as well.
Speaker 2 (19:15):
Yeah, did you say that it can take up to
double the time or more? No. Yeah, when you try
to multitask. If let's say you're doing your test with
making a paper airplane and then shaving a bunny, if
you try to do those two things at the same time,
it will actually take sometimes twice as long when you
(19:36):
try to do them at the same time. Then it
will if you make the paper airplane and then shave
the bunny, try to do them at the same time
twice as long, and then you're probably gonna give the
bunny a bad haircut, and your paper airplane's gonna have
a wonky wing and it's not gonna fly.
Speaker 1 (19:53):
Sorry, shaving the bunny sounds like a very dirty euphemism.
Speaker 2 (19:56):
If that didn't even occur to me, you're a dirty
old man, he says.
Speaker 1 (20:00):
You know, man, Hey, I'm just a regular guy likes
to shave the bunny, you know what I mean?
Speaker 2 (20:04):
Oh my god, Oh god, see it's dirty, right, Yeah,
I feel like I'm blessing right now.
Speaker 1 (20:13):
When when I put it that way.
Speaker 2 (20:14):
Yeah. So in addition to it taking longer, didn't you
also say that the work suffers as well. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (20:22):
They've shown on in work studies and stuff like that
that you know, you can have up to a forty
percent loss in productivity if you're at your computer at
work and you're checking social media and you're doing quick
email checks and a quick browse to look up where
you know Tom Petty was what high school he went to? Like,
(20:42):
all that stuff takes a couple of seconds, but it
compounds throughout the day and you end up like forty
percent less efficient. And those are just things that can
happen at work, Like there are actual real dangers when
you start putting people in automobiles.
Speaker 2 (20:56):
Let's say, right, and Tom Petty went to Gainesville Heigh
School in Gainesville, Florida.
Speaker 1 (21:02):
Was it Gainesville High?
Speaker 2 (21:03):
Yeah?
Speaker 1 (21:04):
Okay, I knew he grew up there. I just didn't
know if it was, you know, the actual Gainsville High School? Yeah,
the one or a rival school.
Speaker 2 (21:11):
Nope. So driving a car is just dangerous enough, just
even if you're doing it right but since the advent
of smartphones, the ubiquity of smartphones, people have gotten really
really careless. Yeah. Dangerous, Yeah, I mean like there's nothing
(21:31):
more shocking and angering to me. And driving past somebody
who's just staring at their phone like they're they're not
even like like looking up every once in a while,
they're just watching a video on their phone. It drives
me crazy, and so I'm like, of course crashes have
gone up at a million percent. There's no actual good
studies or data on how many crashes are caused by
(21:54):
people distracted by their phones. The best I could find
was a study from twenty twenty two, and it estimated
that only two point there's only been a two point
seven percent increase since the advent of smartphones in crashes,
an extra thirty five hundred crashes each year. None of
those thirty five hundred is justified or something to sneeze at,
(22:16):
but I would have guessed it was way more than that.
And apparently there are more dangerous things you could do
than be distracted by your phone, some of which we've
been doing ever since we started driving, like eating while driving.
Speaker 1 (22:31):
Yeah, or writing a letter long hand, or reading.
Speaker 2 (22:34):
The newspaper, shaving a bunny.
Speaker 1 (22:40):
Yeah, of course, eating while driving is very dangerous. There's
a study in twenty twenty one where fifty percent of
drivers say they eat while they drive. And I think
a lot of people eat and drink while they drive
and they think, well, that's not really that big of
a deal. But the NHTSA says it sixty five percent
of near miss accidents are due to eating and drinking
(23:02):
behind the wheel. And if you're doing that, if you're
eating or drinking behind the wheel, it increases your chances
of being in an accident by eighty percent.
Speaker 2 (23:09):
That's shocking.
Speaker 1 (23:11):
That is shocking. Coffee, they said, is the most dangerous
thing to consume while driving, and this is one of
the favorite things I've read in a long time. Other
dangerous foods that they listed are soups, tacos, chili, Hamburger's barbecue,
fried chicken, and donuts, especially jelly filled donuts. Yeah, soft
(23:33):
drinking chocolate. But who's eating soup while they drive.
Speaker 2 (23:36):
I've not tried to eat soup, but I am guilty
of trying to eat chili while I was driving. Before
you mus like, this is ridiculous. You can't get chili
on road trips any longer?
Speaker 1 (23:47):
Would you stop by Wendy's?
Speaker 2 (23:49):
Yeah, it was, was it? Yeah?
Speaker 1 (23:51):
Oh man, I've had Wendy's Chilian so long.
Speaker 2 (23:53):
Yeah, this wasn't any time recent, but it was, you know,
it was a big moment in our life relationship.
Speaker 1 (24:01):
Yeah. I mean I've had moments where I've been on
a road trip and eating while I'm driving and been like,
oh crap, like I've swerved into the wrong lane or something.
I'm like, wait, what am I doing? This is completely
especially if you're like, you know, if you're trying to
mayonnaise up a hamburger or something like that. Not that
stuff is good to do while you're driving.
Speaker 2 (24:19):
No, or like dunk some nuggets and sauce or something
like that. That's a small target when you're going eighty
miles an hour, you know.
Speaker 1 (24:26):
Yeah, if you got a churo and some chocolate sauce,
you're trouble.
Speaker 2 (24:29):
Some of these foods they they actually qualified, like why
they were on the report, like fried chicken. They said
a lot of people lick their fingers afterward, just depending
on what you've done with your fingers recently, you do
not want to lick them, especially while driving. But that's
why fried chicken's on there, jelly filled donuts or powdered
(24:49):
because you can very easily drip on yourself and all
of a sudden you're looking down like trying to clean
powdered sugar off you. I think coffee was on there,
just because so many people drink coffee while they're driving. That.
Of course, just proportionately speaking, it's going to be one
of the highest food related or crash related foods.
Speaker 1 (25:11):
You're probably right. And fried chicken, I'm an expert. Unless
it's like a nugget or a finger, it's a two
handed affair generally, unless you have like a chicken leg.
But when you're eating something with fried chicken with bones,
it's a two handed affair. And you're also not something
you just bite into like a cheeseburger, because there are bones.
It's a little more, it bears more concentration.
Speaker 2 (25:36):
Yeah, you got a big old breast or a thigh,
you have to like basically palm it if you're eating
it one handed, And that's not how you're supposed to
eat fried chicken.
Speaker 1 (25:46):
Oh man, we should talk about schooling a little bit,
because there's obviously been a lot of studies about multitasking
and its effect on learning and stuff like that, And
there are studies that have found that it will really
affect your academic success. And if you have high levels
of multitasking in class or like while you're trying to
(26:08):
do homework, it's going to you know, just like your job,
it's going to have serious deleterious effects on your grades.
Speaker 2 (26:17):
It's true, but depending on what you do. I thought
this was interesting but also kind of intuitive as well.
It depends on what you're doing while you're multitasking. Of course,
the study found that Facebook and text messaging were related
to lower or poorer academic performances, while searching online and
(26:38):
emailing were less related to poor academic performance. And that
makes sense, Like, if you're on Facebook or you're texting,
you're probably not getting to the bottom of the research
paper you're writing, right, Yeah, if you're searching online or
you're emailing, there's a much higher chance that you are
trying to find an answer you are engaged in research,
So that makes sense. That's more And this is a
(27:02):
problem when you're talking about multitasking, Like studies, they very
easily conflate distractions and multitasking. Yeah, and we yes, we
do multitask and a lot of on a lot of
occasions because we are being distracted, right, and so we
(27:25):
have to like kind of do something while we're still
doing the thing we're meant to be doing. But they're
not exactly the same thing, although they do seem to
kind of be related. We'll just call them cousins kissing cousins.
Speaker 1 (27:38):
Even I saw step sibling, but I like cousin better.
Speaker 2 (27:41):
Okay, Yeah, either one works.
Speaker 1 (27:44):
Frankly, I fall into this trap a lot because not generally,
when I'm researching for our show, I tend to focus
pretty well, except for maybe email because of that stupidding
comes through on my computer, which I need to shut
Down'll get to actually, we can talk about it now.
One of the things that you very much should do
if you have a problem with this kind of distraction
(28:07):
is is getting those notifications turned off on your phone. Yeah.
I don't like they annoy me, so I've always had
my phone ringer off and I get zero notifications just
because it bugs me. But especially if you have issues
trying to focus, like don't get notified when someone comments
(28:30):
on your Instagram post or whatever. There's notifications for everything.
Speaker 2 (28:33):
It seems like, yeah, no, for sure, that's like one
of the first best steps you can do is start
turning off notifications, turning your ringer off when you're trying
to concentrate, like just really basic stuff that people are like, no,
thank you, I'd rather suffer in every way, shape and form.
Speaker 1 (28:49):
Yeah. But where I was going with that is I'm
pretty good when I'm doing this job, but when I
just when we have one of our non research or
recording days and it's sort of I call them admin
when we're just doing all the other stuff that goes
along with the job, I really bounce around on those
days between tasks.
Speaker 2 (29:09):
For me the like I can pay attention generally while
I'm researching the difficulty or the challenges I run into.
Remember that article from maybe The Atlantic in two thousand
and nine by Nicholas Carr is Google making us stupid?
Oh yeah, yeah, where he talks about we don't read
(29:29):
deeply any longer, we're just superficial readers. I can fall
into that a lot, Like I have to force myself
to not just get the information I'm looking for from
an article, but to ingest it because there's always more
stuff that ties into other parts of whatever topic we're
researching in that article, and I but so rather than
just going in harvesting what I'm looking for and then
(29:51):
moving on or going in reading until I find something
I need to go look up because I don't know
what they're talking about, so open another tab and then
I just move on the line like that. If I
can just take the time to ingest like each article,
I get so much more out of it than I
do when I'm just kind of reading superficially from tab
to tab.
Speaker 1 (30:11):
How do you read for pleasure? Is that easier for you?
Speaker 2 (30:17):
I forced myself to relearn how to read for pleasure
because I realized, like I was reading nothing but nonfiction
and it was always for work all the time. And
so I started reading short horror fiction again, ex buying
anthologies of horror fiction. And it's been a great, huge,
wonderful like change in my life because I forgot how
(30:39):
much I like reading fiction again.
Speaker 1 (30:42):
Same here, man, I'm reading a novel for the first
time in a long time. Wow, And I used to
be nothing, but I used to be in b N
oh yeah, nothing but novels. And then went through a
She's twelve year period where it was n BM almost
nothing but memoir well and autobiographies and biographies. But now
(31:03):
I'm reading a novel again and I'm just having so
much fun. I was like, oh man, I used to
love this, and I'm glad I'm getting back into it
well and I can focus. Like we have family reading
time because you know, we're encouraging Ruby just to read
more for pleasure on our own, so the whole it's
hard to say, like, hey, go read and I'm just
gonna sit here and scroll on Instagram. So we have
(31:25):
our like our family reading times. We're like thirty minutes
every night. We all sit in the same room and
read our book together, which is really good.
Speaker 2 (31:31):
That's awesome.
Speaker 1 (31:32):
Yeah, it's fun, very nice.
Speaker 2 (31:34):
I think that's a great place for a break. We
can let everybody just sit there and think about the
wholesomeness of the scene you just described. That's right, Okay,
we'll be right back. So I don't know if you
(32:09):
picked up on it yet, everybody, but there are there's
some low quality studies and even lower quality reporting when
it comes to something like multitasking. It's a bit of
a wild West still as far as our understanding of
what the brain's doing and why we can't do it
very well. We've got a general idea. I think we've
kind of gotten that across. But there's enough like leeway
(32:31):
that people can come along with stupid, stupid studies and
the media will report on it breathlessly and it'll turn
out to just be not really right at all when
you dive into the study.
Speaker 1 (32:44):
Yeah, and I think a lot of those, at least
in terms of this research, I thought came down to, well,
who's better at this? Men or women?
Speaker 2 (32:53):
Right?
Speaker 1 (32:53):
Is that what you were thinking?
Speaker 2 (32:55):
Yeah, that's a huge part of it for sure.
Speaker 1 (32:57):
Yeah, because they've done all kinds of studies of worse
because you know, what better time to pour money into
research than to pit men and women versus one another
and a challenge and a competition of multitasking and task switching.
And there have been a lot of studies that do
(33:18):
show some differences. A lot of them have been very inconsistent.
A lot of the studies haven't been great. There have
been studies that say that, like, men are better at this,
there have been studies say that women are better at this.
So I don't even know what to think.
Speaker 2 (33:36):
I think the answer is we don't really know yet. Probably,
so yeah, Yeah, there hasn't been like a really good
study or series of studies on it. I also don't
think it matters, but who knows. If we're on a
quest to understand everything, including ourselves, and maybe it is
worth investigating the problem with the studies that have been
(33:57):
done so far as they jump to massive conclusions based
on really poor data. Sometimes there was this one that
the media was like, this guy did it proved it
women are better at multitasking than men, And when you
read into it, you find that the response time of
women was about sixty nine percent compared to seventy seven
(34:19):
percent of men. So men had an eight percent slower
response time at a multitasking task. And then, to put
the icing on the cake, they were worse at a
key a lost key task. And get this, this is
the lost key task. You take a blank piece of
paper and you show the researcher how you would go
(34:42):
find a key, imagining the blank piece of paper as
a field and the keys in there somewhere. It's one
of the most objectively interpreted tests I've ever heard of
in my life, and men were apparently not as good
at it, or drew fewer lines than women did. Hence
further supporting the idea that the women were better at
(35:05):
multitasking than men because they could find a key in
a field better. Imaginarily speaking, is it is it like
a maze? No, it's a blank piece of paper, and
you show how you would cross this field to look
everywhere for the key. I saw an example.
Speaker 1 (35:22):
Oh, okay, okay, an example.
Speaker 2 (35:25):
I'll get. It's just a series of lines back and
forth crossing the entire paper. Okay. For some reason, a
man who had completely taken leave of his senses made
a circle design like a swirl, starting from the inside out,
and then like missed some owners of the paper. So
(35:47):
clearly women are better at multitaskingmment.
Speaker 1 (35:51):
Yeah, that is very interesting and so subjective. You're right,
because like, I don't know, I feel like if you've
got one hundred people, there would be one hundred different scribbles.
Speaker 2 (36:00):
Yeah, exactly, And then who are you the researcher to
be like, that's a pretty good strategy for finding a key,
you pass.
Speaker 1 (36:10):
I have seen studies. There was one from pen Medicine
that found that men on average or are better at
performing and learning a single task, whereas women are better
with their memory to have a better memory and better
social cognition skills that suggest that they may be like
(36:32):
more apt to be better at multitasking.
Speaker 2 (36:34):
So that's another study that you can poke a bunch
of holes in. The study didn't do anything with multitasking.
It was a brain imaging study that looked at the
connectome how the brains of men and women are connected,
and found some differences in the directions of the connections.
Men had more connections from front to rear and rear
(36:55):
to front. Women had more connections from left to right hemisphere.
And that's it. That's what that's what it found. And
for some reason, in the pressure releases in the in
what the media picked up, that was immediately translated and
extrapolated into women being better at memory and social cognition
(37:17):
and men are better at navigating directions. That's what I'm
talking about. Like you, Yeah, Like I feel like this
has devolved into a like, be careful what you read
kind of lesson, But that's always a good lesson to include.
Speaker 1 (37:29):
Yeah, as far as media goes, you know, we talked
a lot about smartphones and stuff like that. It's sort
of a different deal these days because in the old days,
there would usually be a media. It's called an exchange
of media. So, uh, you know, TV comes along and
replaces radio, something might replace print. New equipment replaces the
(37:53):
old equipment. But now things are technology has moved such
that things are being stacked admin to the Internet and
smartphones and TV and gaming and texting and emailing like,
things have stacked upon one another such that they've done
studies where they found in the late nineties about sixteen
percent of time media time was concurrent or combined basically,
(38:20):
and in two I've tried to get something a little
more up to date than this, but just six years later,
in two thousand and five, that went up to twenty
six percent of media being used together. And I guarantee
you that number is way way bigger now.
Speaker 2 (38:33):
So the most recent I could find was in twenty eleven,
and it was up to thirty percent. I mean, think
about the difference between what technology you have in your
house in twenty twenty four and what you had in
twenty eleven.
Speaker 1 (38:48):
Yeah. I remember our old buddy Luke Ryan. Remember Luke, Yeah,
he he was working in he's like an executive in
TV and film and stuff, And I remember this is
very early on where he talked about the multi screen
experience and that they were all searching, you know, how
(39:09):
to crack that, and I was like, what do you mean.
He's like, you know, like if you're looking at your
iPad while you watch TV. And it was so early
in that technology that I was like, what, Like, that's
so weird, right, And now I just feel like even
I fall into the trap, even when I'm watching things
I like of being distracted by my phone, yeah, which
I hate doing. I really try to make an effort
(39:32):
if it's not just some throw a dumb thing I'm watching,
to really like all right, pretend like I'm in a
movie theater and like put that thing away.
Speaker 2 (39:39):
Yeah, But it does take effort, doesn't It takes conscious effort.
Speaker 1 (39:42):
It does.
Speaker 2 (39:43):
So one of the weird things about media multitasking was
what that's called when you have multiple screens that you're
looking at at the same time, getting multiple inputs makes
you dumber. Well, there's no study that shows that necessarily.
There has been a study that it's related to a
lower density of gray matter in the back of your brain,
(40:05):
but that hasn't necessarily been shown to be a bad thing.
And is that like the result of it we don't know.
I think the thing that interested me about it is
that there's a group of people who were accidentally discovered
in just a few years back from some University of
Utah researchers that are they're considered super taskers. To where
(40:28):
they were they were part of a study of just
finding out like differences in multitasking and cost switching, just
a general study on multitasking, and they accidentally discovered the small,
small group of people who there was no effect on
performance when they were when they were doing like performing multitasking,
(40:50):
like they were just as good doing it at the
same time as they would have been doing it sequentially.
And this one article I read about it, they were
they were kind of positing, like, you know, why is
this such a small population. I think they found like
two and a half percent out of four hundred people,
just a handful. Do the math yourself, because I'm done.
(41:13):
We're super taskers. And they were wondering if, like there's
such a small population because it's a newly developing trait
among friends that.
Speaker 1 (41:26):
Like a new benefit.
Speaker 2 (41:27):
Yeah, Like because we're doing things like exposing ourselves to
so many different inputs of information at once, some of
us are getting better at it sooner than others, and
that maybe we'll all be super taskers in one hundred
or two hundred years or something like that.
Speaker 1 (41:42):
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.
Speaker 2 (41:43):
I think I thought so too.
Speaker 1 (41:46):
So, you know, to finish up earlier, we said, obviously
to turn off those notifications and things like that, as
far as like how to focus more on how to
get a little bit better at this try and you know,
turn off the email, certainly, turn off social media and
things like that. If you have to sit down and
accomplish like a well, not even at the computer, if
you want to sit down and read a book or
(42:07):
do anything and you're getting notifications that can redirect you.
There is a method that you found called the Pomodoro
technique created by Francisco Serelo, And basically there are these
Pomodoro's timer but you can you can find them online
if you want. They're very kind of clean and simple.
(42:27):
But you decide at a task, you set your little
timer for twenty five minutes, and you work on that
task until the little timer goes off. You record a
little X there and take a break for five minutes
and then go back to your work. And then every
time you have four of those, so twenty five times four,
howevery minutes?
Speaker 2 (42:47):
That is well plus can you take it two?
Speaker 1 (42:50):
Well yeah, plus the breaks then you take a longer break,
You take a ten minute break before you go back.
And apparently it's a pretty good technique.
Speaker 2 (42:57):
Yeah. So during that time, like all your emails off,
all your notifications are off, your ringers are off during
that twenty five minute period, your heads down focusing on
that task. Yeah, you're end of time management stuff.
Speaker 1 (43:11):
That's a good way to go totally. But some people
are like, no, it cares. I love being distracted with
all that stuff.
Speaker 2 (43:18):
Yep. Those are women because they're better super taskers than men.
Speaker 1 (43:23):
Apparently that sounds like it.
Speaker 2 (43:25):
If you want to know more about multitask king, then
you can go read all about it on the internet
and see what you think of the quality of studies
that have been produced on it so far. Maybe you'll agree,
maybe you won't. That's okay, because we're all people. And
since I said that baffling thing, it's time for listener man.
Speaker 1 (43:43):
That's right, this pretty delightful email. Sometimes when we talk
about stuff, we hear from actual people that were involved
in that stuff. OHI just great. Yeah, and this one
was an actual student of the Spruce Elementary School in
San Francisco that was a part of that pioneering program
in the nineteen sixties that we talked about in the
(44:05):
Pigmalion Show. So hey guys, I'm a sixty six year
old man, retired elementary music teacher from California City councilman
in Syriana, Italy, and an alum of Spruce Elementary School
in South San Francisco. My husband and I usually fall
asleep to your show and replay the show in the
morning catch what we missed. When the Sandman arrived. Last night,
(44:25):
I was on the brink of slumber and I heard
Spruce School. I woke my storing partner and made him
replay the podcast from the beginning, and needless to say,
I was wide awake the entire show and stayed up
late into the night in the morning hours scouring the
internet for Pigmilion in the classroom. I was flabbergasted, to
say the least, to learn that I was part of
that experiment. Also surprised to learn doctor Leonora Jacobson is
(44:49):
still with us at one hundred and one years old.
I entered the Spruce School as a kindergartener in the
fall of nineteen sixty two, the same year actually midyear
when doctor Lenora and Jacobson became principal. Doctor Jacobson left
after my fifth grade year in sixty eight. I had
his reeling at this point, guys, I've ordered the book,
the first edition coming from the UK. I made a
(45:10):
mental list of my classmates who I'm going to send
to your podcast. I remember the testing. We thought they
were fun. Actually, I was a bit of a class
clown and always one of my teacher's pets. My memory
has always been sharp and can remember several personal interactions
with doctor Jacobson in her office. You boys have given
me a wonderful assignment as I tripped down memory lane.
(45:32):
And that is from the city Councilman of Siriana, Italy,
none other than Bob Giorsi.
Speaker 2 (45:40):
Very nice, Bob, I'd love that email. Like just he
didn't realize what he'd been through until he heard the podcast.
It's just nuts to me.
Speaker 1 (45:47):
I love it, amazing great to hear from you, Bob.
Speaker 2 (45:50):
Yeah, for sure, Bob. And if you want to be
like Bob and just knock our socks off, give it
a shot. Do it via email, though, wrap it up,
spank it on the bottom, and send it off to
stuff podcast did iHeartRadio dot com. Stuff you Should Know
is a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1 (46:09):
For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff you Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, there's Chuck,
and we're doing this on our own, flying high like
an eagle to the seat. No, no, no, and this
is stuff you should know. No, no, no.
Speaker 1 (00:26):
I'm so annoyed at this.
Speaker 2 (00:28):
The episode from twenty eleven that we somehow recorded in
twenty twenty four.
Speaker 1 (00:34):
It feels that way a little bit, doesn't it.
Speaker 2 (00:36):
Yes, it does, it really does.
Speaker 1 (00:38):
I think I was annoyed because and I put this
one together, so it's my fault, but like I feel
like it was just like, well, this study says this
about multitasking, and this study says this, and this study
says this.
Speaker 2 (00:48):
I think you feel that way because that's exactly what
it does.
Speaker 1 (00:52):
There's just no good story here. I think that's my problem.
Speaker 2 (00:54):
There is there is. I think the story is is
that we're going to like flip everybody's wig because it
turns out that multitasking is a myth, a fraud. You
shouldn't even try to do it because not only is
multitasking impossible for you to do puny human, it actually
makes you worse at what you are doing.
Speaker 1 (01:15):
Yeah, I think there are people plenty of people who
think they're great multitaskers. Yeah, they may be among the
very small small percentage of people who are super taskers,
which we'll talk about, but more than likely they probably
just think they're getting a lot more done by switching
(01:35):
back and forth between a bunch of different things. Yeah,
when they're really really not. And that's really what we're
talking about. Multitasking isn't even really multitasking, it's just it's
task switching very fast.
Speaker 2 (01:48):
That's a much much better description of a task switching,
because when you're trying to do multiple things at once,
even something as simple as say like baking a cake,
like stirring like the batter while you're talking on the phone,
you're not actually doing those two things at the same
time as far as your brain is concerned. It's basically
(02:09):
flipping back and forth to make sure you're doing them
both adequately. And we actually can do something as simple
as that fairly well. But the more complex the tasks get,
and the more numerous the tasks get, everything just starts
the short circuit and you sit there and wake up
every morning and wonder why you're still so tired and
(02:30):
stressed out all the time. It's multitasking.
Speaker 1 (02:33):
Yeah, since you said short circuit, we should mention the
origin of the term is from a computer ad in
nineteen sixty five IBM report basically talking about their new
IBM system three sixty and talking about a computer's ability
to multitask or process tasks at the same time. And
(02:54):
since then, since the nineteen sixties, that really took hold
as far as a catchphrase, and psychologists have gone wild
with doing studies and experiments to see what are the
limits of the human brain as far as taking on
multiple things at once, which again, is it exactly at once,
Like you can do things like at the same time,
(03:18):
like bake air, stirring batter and talking on the phone.
But I think generally when people are talking about multitasking today,
they think more about I'm sitting at my computer and
I've got like five different tabs that are sort of
doing different things, and I'm also emailing and I'm researching this,
and I'm doing that at the same time.
Speaker 2 (03:36):
And somebody's texting me and I'm getting push notifications. Yeah,
it's a thing for sure. That's one reason why it's
worth talking about, because if it's not actually effective and productive.
People should know that because it's becoming such a huge
part of our modern world.
Speaker 1 (03:55):
Yeah, for sure, So let's talk about it today.
Speaker 2 (03:58):
Okay, So, sadly you already hit on the fact of
the podcast that multitasking comes from an IBM AD, but
you said that psychologists had gone I thought that joke
would have gone over better. You said that psychologists had
gone wild like trying to figure out the computational processing
power of humans, And I think that's actually one of
(04:21):
the first problems that IBM AD kind of set it
up for us to view the human brain as a computer,
and that's not an exact analogy, which is why I
think we thought we could multitask for a while, because
we even thought computers could. But it wasn't until the
advent of multi core processors that computers themselves could actually
(04:42):
process more than one thing at the same time. At
the outset, including for the IBM System three sixty, the
computer with a single CPU was not actually multitasking. It
was doing the same thing that our brains do. It
was jumping back and forth between tasks really fast to
make sure it was doing them both adequately. So when
(05:05):
we kind of figured out that there was a problem
with processing, that there were limits to it. We established
very quickly something called a processing bottleneck. That, yeah, there is.
It's documented humans do not multitask to begin with, and
when we try to multitask, the results are terrible. And
(05:26):
it seems to be because there's like too much stuff
is trying to get through too narrow a passageway.
Speaker 1 (05:32):
Yeah, and some people think that, you know, this bottleneck
happens most severely when you're trying to plan like an
action that you're going to do at the same time
as you're trying to retrieve something from your memory bank.
Memory plays a big part in all of this. And
what we're doing, like we said, we're task switching. We're
(05:55):
performing things in sequence. So you're switching back and forth
very quick, you think, But there is something called a
switching cost. So every time that you're like you and
I are researching or something and we're like, oh wait,
I forgot we need to email Jerry about something, and
so I'll stop real quick and email Jerry and it
seems very seamless and then I go back to my work.
(06:17):
But there is a cost to that switch there where
it takes. It takes a second or two for your
brain to kind of ramp back up into what you
were on previously. May not seem like a lot, but
when you add that up over a lifetime of work,
there's a lot of inefficiencies going on.
Speaker 2 (06:33):
Yeah, for sure. So the switching costs is just a
time lag, a loss of productivity when you go from
one task to another, right, and especially if we're trying
to do two tasks at the same time, which we can't,
but we're switching back and forth over and over again,
that switching cost becomes more and more dramatic. And so
(06:55):
those two tasks, neither one of them gets done very well.
And there's theories about what's going on here. There's some
rival ones. The first one that was established, I think
as far back as the sixties. It's called the psychological
refractory period effect. And the psychological refractory period paradigm basically
says that when we're presented with two tasks that are
(07:19):
presented in quick secession, the response to task two is delayed. Right,
that's documented, we know that. But here's why they're saying that.
It's because the brain is still processing the response to
the first stimulus task one. So response to the response
to task two has to wait. And so the difference
(07:40):
in time between task two when that when we're presented
with that task and response one when we're complete the
first task. That period is called that refractory period, and
then it's followed by response too. So there's a there's
a gap, there's a chunk of time where we just
(08:00):
can't do anything for task two because our brains are
still working on task one, and then finally when we
complete task one, we can start on task two. And
that time in between that's the refractory period, and that's
what counts for that delay in response time, because our
response to task one is typically shorter than our response
(08:21):
to task two. So task two is completed in a
longer amount of time than task one was because it
was it was given to us while we were still
trying to complete task one.
Speaker 1 (08:34):
Right. Uh, that's a good way to put it. Like,
there's no progress being made that in that downtime.
Speaker 2 (08:38):
Right, No, not at least on task two from what
I can tell.
Speaker 1 (08:42):
Yeah, And I don't even think you're I mean, I
think guess you're putting to bed task one. I don't
think there's real progress being made at all.
Speaker 2 (08:49):
Yeah, that's why some people. That's so that's a new version,
that's part of the rival interpretation. They're like, no, this
actually seems like you're not still completing task one during
that refractory period while you're waiting on tests two. There
seems to be a blank spot where you're not able
to do anything when you're switching from one to the other.
Speaker 1 (09:08):
Oh okay, I gotcha.
Speaker 2 (09:09):
Yeah, so that's the new interpretation.
Speaker 1 (09:11):
Well, what they're talking about though, is the brain. And
when you look at the parts of the brain, the
prefrontal cortex is the one that is you know, if
you're doing something, you're paying attention to something, it's your
prefrontal cortex that is at work and it spans, as
we know, the left and right sides of the brain,
and it's coordinating with each other when you're doing one
(09:34):
thing at a time. If all of a sudden you
have two things, then the left side of your brain
is doing something, the right side of the brain is
doing something, and it's split up and that's where that
inefficiency really kicks in, right.
Speaker 2 (09:46):
Yeah, that's based on a French fMRI study from twenty ten.
Back in the ear where we used to call the
MRI the Wonder Machine. You remember that, right, So this
is like prime vintage Wonder Machine type study where they
found that you can still do a couple of tasks
that it does seem like there's a certain amount of
parallel processing the brain can do when it splits the
(10:09):
two lobes, the two frontal lobes up and says, here,
you do this, and you do this. We can still
kind of do it, but neither one is as good
or as fast as if we just did one after
the other. That's the big joke for multitasking. But if
you add a third one, the brain just goes hey,
wires just completely goes kaputz.
Speaker 1 (10:31):
Yeah, like two one is ideal two as possible, and
again we're not talking about supertaskers, which we'll get to.
And three is just don't even try. What are you doing?
What have you been trying to do that for?
Speaker 2 (10:43):
Or as the French researcher said, forget about it? Right?
Speaker 1 (10:50):
Oh man, that got me. I thought you were about
to hit me with a good French phrase. No, I
love it. There was another study conducted at Vanderbilt Universe
Go commodores, right.
Speaker 2 (11:03):
Yeah, yeah, they're easy like Sunday morning.
Speaker 1 (11:07):
They are, Oh boy, you're on a roll where they
talk about the brain exhibiting what's called a response selection bottleneck.
Another bottleneck, but this one's a little different. If you're
tasked with doing several things at one time, the brain
says what's more important, and so it sort of chooses
for you. But I also saw some other studies that
(11:30):
said that what also might be going on is you are,
maybe subconsciously, if you're trying to juggle two things, the
one that you're really paying the most attention to is
either the one that gives you the most pleasure or
the one that maybe can be completed as like a
sub goal.
Speaker 2 (11:48):
Yes, so that's kind of a different interpretation too. So
these are kind of rivals to the refractory period paradigm,
and they're basically saying, like, our brains actually require a
moment switch and like we've kind of established in that
moment we're not actually doing anything. But these two different
ones that these two kind of interpretations that you just mentioned,
(12:11):
they strike me as kind of tomato tomato because they're
essentially saying the same thing. One is that you know,
the brain has to decide which activity is important, and
that it takes more time. The other one from David Meyer,
University of Michigan is saying, well, the brain has this
thing called adaptive executive control that says this priority is
(12:32):
more important than this priority, So I need to work
on this one first. It's it's the same thing. Like
I genuinely could not find what the distinction is. And
there's even some bad reporting on some of this stuff
where I saw David Meyer and his study from University
of Michigan was essentially described to suggest that that it's
showing like, oh, yeah, we can, we can do multitasking,
(12:56):
we can process in parallel, and that's not at all correct,
like he's saying like you can't do that at all.
I don't know how it got all kind of messed
up like that, But there doesn't seem to be anybody
who says, no, we actually can. Everyone every single study
is it shows that we can't. The difference between the
studies is trying to interpret the results in different ways
(13:19):
to explain why we can't or what happens when we try.
Speaker 1 (13:23):
All right, so we're going to multitask. Now take a break,
I read a couple of ads, and we'll be right back.
(13:55):
All right. So we're back with multitasking. I mentioned early
on that memory, memory recall, when you're trying to do
something else can really suffer, and so we should talk
about memory a little bit. There's a guy named George
Miller who was a psychologist at Harvard who basically says
the human brain, as far as recall goes, is centered
(14:18):
around the number seven, with a little variation up and
down by two. So he's done studies where they basically
just say, hey, repeat these numbers after me. And what
they found is the average number of numbers that someone
can repeat back to somebody is seven, and again it
(14:38):
goes up and down a little bit. Some people are
inherently just going to be much better at that and
maybe can rattle off fifteen, but the average came down
to seven. So what people do when they're trying to
learn things or make something memorable is parse things out
and separate them into smaller bits for storage.
Speaker 2 (14:56):
Yeah, and so we do that with telephone numbers, social
security numbers, any string of ten numbers. We almost always
put hyphens or dots or something together. Dates. It's just
almost like an inherent thing that we do, an intuitive thing.
But we do that to make it easier on our
working memory. Remembering three sets of three numbers is easier
(15:18):
for our brains to keep in our working memory than
one long set of nine numbers.
Speaker 1 (15:24):
Yeah, I mean, I guess there's no reason a social
security number should have those dashes, right.
Speaker 2 (15:28):
I think that's exactly why it has dashes.
Speaker 1 (15:30):
Yeah, so you can so you can remember, so I
can just rattle out two eight seven nine six nine
four seven three.
Speaker 2 (15:36):
Oh man, I hope that's not legit?
Speaker 1 (15:39):
What so like, what could someone do with that?
Speaker 2 (15:42):
Are you the LifeLock guy? Now, of course that's not.
Speaker 1 (15:46):
I'm surprised I was able to even do that successfully
without saying my real social security number.
Speaker 2 (15:51):
It was really impressive. Actually, how is it a bunch
of numbers? So just kind of as a side note,
we've been talking a lot about working memory, and that's
a huge part of multitasking, because when you multitask, you
are you're not You're by definition, not completing one thing
before moving on to the other. You're stopping mid task
to move on to something else, which you probably stop
(16:14):
mid tasks to go back to the first one or
go to a third thing. That's what multitasking is like.
There's no, if you do it sequentially rather than at
the same time concurrently, then you're not multitasking. So it
requires working memory, it requires attention, it requires self regulation,
It requires an ability to keep goals directed in the
(16:37):
back of your head and also to be able to
place those goals on pause while you move on to
another goal. And if you have ADHD, you are you
have a challenge with every single one of those things. Memory, attention,
self regulation, goal direction. So it's Multitasking is really really
(16:58):
hard for people with AIDHD because it requires a lot
of functions that a lot of people with ADHD struggle with.
The big difference is in a lot of I think
I read at least one study it's like, well, if
you have ADHD, you know you're just completely distracted all
the time. You should be really good at multitasking because
in that what multitasking is. And it's like, absolutely not,
(17:21):
that's just not at all. So I mean you, yes,
you're more distracted. But people with ADHD, they they're slightly
deficient in a really important ability in multitasking, which is
quickly diminishing the size of that switching cost right where
you go from one task to the other, you're you're
(17:43):
if you're if you don't have ADHD, you're a lot
better at picking up that second task. That that gap
between switching is shorter with ADHD, it's longer. And then
the other problem with multitasking in ADHD is that if
you become hyper aroused when you multitask, and hyper arousal
(18:05):
leads to much more elevated levels of stress and people
with ADHD, which makes them even more prone to error
and to frustration and all sorts of stuff. That makes
multitasking that much harder.
Speaker 1 (18:16):
Yeah, and good setup for our eventual hopefully coming soon
ash ADHD episode. We've already got the stuff kind of culled,
but it's a lot, it's a big episode. Yeah, So
I know people have been asking for it for a
long time. So anyway, that's that's coming down the pike.
But one thing that we have roundly seen in study
(18:39):
after study is when you try to multitask or task
switch back and forth, is that your work suffers. Not
only are you taking longer to get things done than
you would if you did it sequentially, and by sequentially
we mean completing a task and then moving on to
the next. That not only are you taking more time
(18:59):
when you think you're not. You think you're actually being
more efficient maybe if you're you know, living a lie
like most of us are, but you're actually doing less
the work is less good and you're making more mistakes
along the way as well.
Speaker 2 (19:15):
Yeah, did you say that it can take up to
double the time or more? No. Yeah, when you try
to multitask. If let's say you're doing your test with
making a paper airplane and then shaving a bunny, if
you try to do those two things at the same time,
it will actually take sometimes twice as long when you
(19:36):
try to do them at the same time. Then it
will if you make the paper airplane and then shave
the bunny, try to do them at the same time
twice as long, and then you're probably gonna give the
bunny a bad haircut, and your paper airplane's gonna have
a wonky wing and it's not gonna fly.
Speaker 1 (19:53):
Sorry, shaving the bunny sounds like a very dirty euphemism.
Speaker 2 (19:56):
If that didn't even occur to me, you're a dirty
old man, he says.
Speaker 1 (20:00):
You know, man, Hey, I'm just a regular guy likes
to shave the bunny, you know what I mean?
Speaker 2 (20:04):
Oh my god, Oh god, see it's dirty, right, Yeah,
I feel like I'm blessing right now.
Speaker 1 (20:13):
When when I put it that way.
Speaker 2 (20:14):
Yeah. So in addition to it taking longer, didn't you
also say that the work suffers as well. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (20:22):
They've shown on in work studies and stuff like that
that you know, you can have up to a forty
percent loss in productivity if you're at your computer at
work and you're checking social media and you're doing quick
email checks and a quick browse to look up where
you know Tom Petty was what high school he went to? Like,
(20:42):
all that stuff takes a couple of seconds, but it
compounds throughout the day and you end up like forty
percent less efficient. And those are just things that can
happen at work, Like there are actual real dangers when
you start putting people in automobiles.
Speaker 2 (20:56):
Let's say, right, and Tom Petty went to Gainesville Heigh
School in Gainesville, Florida.
Speaker 1 (21:02):
Was it Gainesville High?
Speaker 2 (21:03):
Yeah?
Speaker 1 (21:04):
Okay, I knew he grew up there. I just didn't
know if it was, you know, the actual Gainsville High School? Yeah,
the one or a rival school.
Speaker 2 (21:11):
Nope. So driving a car is just dangerous enough, just
even if you're doing it right but since the advent
of smartphones, the ubiquity of smartphones, people have gotten really
really careless. Yeah. Dangerous, Yeah, I mean like there's nothing
(21:31):
more shocking and angering to me. And driving past somebody
who's just staring at their phone like they're they're not
even like like looking up every once in a while,
they're just watching a video on their phone. It drives
me crazy, and so I'm like, of course crashes have
gone up at a million percent. There's no actual good
studies or data on how many crashes are caused by
(21:54):
people distracted by their phones. The best I could find
was a study from twenty twenty two, and it estimated
that only two point there's only been a two point
seven percent increase since the advent of smartphones in crashes,
an extra thirty five hundred crashes each year. None of
those thirty five hundred is justified or something to sneeze at,
(22:16):
but I would have guessed it was way more than that.
And apparently there are more dangerous things you could do
than be distracted by your phone, some of which we've
been doing ever since we started driving, like eating while driving.
Speaker 1 (22:31):
Yeah, or writing a letter long hand, or reading.
Speaker 2 (22:34):
The newspaper, shaving a bunny.
Speaker 1 (22:40):
Yeah, of course, eating while driving is very dangerous. There's
a study in twenty twenty one where fifty percent of
drivers say they eat while they drive. And I think
a lot of people eat and drink while they drive
and they think, well, that's not really that big of
a deal. But the NHTSA says it sixty five percent
of near miss accidents are due to eating and drinking
(23:02):
behind the wheel. And if you're doing that, if you're
eating or drinking behind the wheel, it increases your chances
of being in an accident by eighty percent.
Speaker 2 (23:09):
That's shocking.
Speaker 1 (23:11):
That is shocking. Coffee, they said, is the most dangerous
thing to consume while driving, and this is one of
the favorite things I've read in a long time. Other
dangerous foods that they listed are soups, tacos, chili, Hamburger's barbecue,
fried chicken, and donuts, especially jelly filled donuts. Yeah, soft
(23:33):
drinking chocolate. But who's eating soup while they drive.
Speaker 2 (23:36):
I've not tried to eat soup, but I am guilty
of trying to eat chili while I was driving. Before
you mus like, this is ridiculous. You can't get chili
on road trips any longer?
Speaker 1 (23:47):
Would you stop by Wendy's?
Speaker 2 (23:49):
Yeah, it was, was it? Yeah?
Speaker 1 (23:51):
Oh man, I've had Wendy's Chilian so long.
Speaker 2 (23:53):
Yeah, this wasn't any time recent, but it was, you know,
it was a big moment in our life relationship.
Speaker 1 (24:01):
Yeah. I mean I've had moments where I've been on
a road trip and eating while I'm driving and been like,
oh crap, like I've swerved into the wrong lane or something.
I'm like, wait, what am I doing? This is completely
especially if you're like, you know, if you're trying to
mayonnaise up a hamburger or something like that. Not that
stuff is good to do while you're driving.
Speaker 2 (24:19):
No, or like dunk some nuggets and sauce or something
like that. That's a small target when you're going eighty
miles an hour, you know.
Speaker 1 (24:26):
Yeah, if you got a churo and some chocolate sauce,
you're trouble.
Speaker 2 (24:29):
Some of these foods they they actually qualified, like why
they were on the report, like fried chicken. They said
a lot of people lick their fingers afterward, just depending
on what you've done with your fingers recently, you do
not want to lick them, especially while driving. But that's
why fried chicken's on there, jelly filled donuts or powdered
(24:49):
because you can very easily drip on yourself and all
of a sudden you're looking down like trying to clean
powdered sugar off you. I think coffee was on there,
just because so many people drink coffee while they're driving. That.
Of course, just proportionately speaking, it's going to be one
of the highest food related or crash related foods.
Speaker 1 (25:11):
You're probably right. And fried chicken, I'm an expert. Unless
it's like a nugget or a finger, it's a two
handed affair generally, unless you have like a chicken leg.
But when you're eating something with fried chicken with bones,
it's a two handed affair. And you're also not something
you just bite into like a cheeseburger, because there are bones.
It's a little more, it bears more concentration.
Speaker 2 (25:36):
Yeah, you got a big old breast or a thigh,
you have to like basically palm it if you're eating
it one handed, And that's not how you're supposed to
eat fried chicken.
Speaker 1 (25:46):
Oh man, we should talk about schooling a little bit,
because there's obviously been a lot of studies about multitasking
and its effect on learning and stuff like that, And
there are studies that have found that it will really
affect your academic success. And if you have high levels
of multitasking in class or like while you're trying to
(26:08):
do homework, it's going to you know, just like your job,
it's going to have serious deleterious effects on your grades.
Speaker 2 (26:17):
It's true, but depending on what you do. I thought
this was interesting but also kind of intuitive as well.
It depends on what you're doing while you're multitasking. Of course,
the study found that Facebook and text messaging were related
to lower or poorer academic performances, while searching online and
(26:38):
emailing were less related to poor academic performance. And that
makes sense, Like, if you're on Facebook or you're texting,
you're probably not getting to the bottom of the research
paper you're writing, right, Yeah, if you're searching online or
you're emailing, there's a much higher chance that you are
trying to find an answer you are engaged in research,
So that makes sense. That's more And this is a
(27:02):
problem when you're talking about multitasking, Like studies, they very
easily conflate distractions and multitasking. Yeah, and we yes, we
do multitask and a lot of on a lot of
occasions because we are being distracted, right, and so we
(27:25):
have to like kind of do something while we're still
doing the thing we're meant to be doing. But they're
not exactly the same thing, although they do seem to
kind of be related. We'll just call them cousins kissing cousins.
Speaker 1 (27:38):
Even I saw step sibling, but I like cousin better.
Speaker 2 (27:41):
Okay, Yeah, either one works.
Speaker 1 (27:44):
Frankly, I fall into this trap a lot because not generally,
when I'm researching for our show, I tend to focus
pretty well, except for maybe email because of that stupidding
comes through on my computer, which I need to shut
Down'll get to actually, we can talk about it now.
One of the things that you very much should do
if you have a problem with this kind of distraction
(28:07):
is is getting those notifications turned off on your phone. Yeah.
I don't like they annoy me, so I've always had
my phone ringer off and I get zero notifications just
because it bugs me. But especially if you have issues
trying to focus, like don't get notified when someone comments
(28:30):
on your Instagram post or whatever. There's notifications for everything.
Speaker 2 (28:33):
It seems like, yeah, no, for sure, that's like one
of the first best steps you can do is start
turning off notifications, turning your ringer off when you're trying
to concentrate, like just really basic stuff that people are like, no,
thank you, I'd rather suffer in every way, shape and form.
Speaker 1 (28:49):
Yeah. But where I was going with that is I'm
pretty good when I'm doing this job, but when I
just when we have one of our non research or
recording days and it's sort of I call them admin
when we're just doing all the other stuff that goes
along with the job, I really bounce around on those
days between tasks.
Speaker 2 (29:09):
For me the like I can pay attention generally while
I'm researching the difficulty or the challenges I run into.
Remember that article from maybe The Atlantic in two thousand
and nine by Nicholas Carr is Google making us stupid?
Oh yeah, yeah, where he talks about we don't read
(29:29):
deeply any longer, we're just superficial readers. I can fall
into that a lot, Like I have to force myself
to not just get the information I'm looking for from
an article, but to ingest it because there's always more
stuff that ties into other parts of whatever topic we're
researching in that article, and I but so rather than
just going in harvesting what I'm looking for and then
(29:51):
moving on or going in reading until I find something
I need to go look up because I don't know
what they're talking about, so open another tab and then
I just move on the line like that. If I
can just take the time to ingest like each article,
I get so much more out of it than I
do when I'm just kind of reading superficially from tab
to tab.
Speaker 1 (30:11):
How do you read for pleasure? Is that easier for you?
Speaker 2 (30:17):
I forced myself to relearn how to read for pleasure
because I realized, like I was reading nothing but nonfiction
and it was always for work all the time. And
so I started reading short horror fiction again, ex buying
anthologies of horror fiction. And it's been a great, huge,
wonderful like change in my life because I forgot how
(30:39):
much I like reading fiction again.
Speaker 1 (30:42):
Same here, man, I'm reading a novel for the first
time in a long time. Wow, And I used to
be nothing, but I used to be in b N
oh yeah, nothing but novels. And then went through a
She's twelve year period where it was n BM almost
nothing but memoir well and autobiographies and biographies. But now
(31:03):
I'm reading a novel again and I'm just having so
much fun. I was like, oh man, I used to
love this, and I'm glad I'm getting back into it
well and I can focus. Like we have family reading
time because you know, we're encouraging Ruby just to read
more for pleasure on our own, so the whole it's
hard to say, like, hey, go read and I'm just
gonna sit here and scroll on Instagram. So we have
(31:25):
our like our family reading times. We're like thirty minutes
every night. We all sit in the same room and
read our book together, which is really good.
Speaker 2 (31:31):
That's awesome.
Speaker 1 (31:32):
Yeah, it's fun, very nice.
Speaker 2 (31:34):
I think that's a great place for a break. We
can let everybody just sit there and think about the
wholesomeness of the scene you just described. That's right, Okay,
we'll be right back. So I don't know if you
(32:09):
picked up on it yet, everybody, but there are there's
some low quality studies and even lower quality reporting when
it comes to something like multitasking. It's a bit of
a wild West still as far as our understanding of
what the brain's doing and why we can't do it
very well. We've got a general idea. I think we've
kind of gotten that across. But there's enough like leeway
(32:31):
that people can come along with stupid, stupid studies and
the media will report on it breathlessly and it'll turn
out to just be not really right at all when
you dive into the study.
Speaker 1 (32:44):
Yeah, and I think a lot of those, at least
in terms of this research, I thought came down to, well,
who's better at this? Men or women?
Speaker 2 (32:53):
Right?
Speaker 1 (32:53):
Is that what you were thinking?
Speaker 2 (32:55):
Yeah, that's a huge part of it for sure.
Speaker 1 (32:57):
Yeah, because they've done all kinds of studies of worse
because you know, what better time to pour money into
research than to pit men and women versus one another
and a challenge and a competition of multitasking and task switching.
And there have been a lot of studies that do
(33:18):
show some differences. A lot of them have been very inconsistent.
A lot of the studies haven't been great. There have
been studies that say that, like, men are better at this,
there have been studies say that women are better at this.
So I don't even know what to think.
Speaker 2 (33:36):
I think the answer is we don't really know yet. Probably,
so yeah, Yeah, there hasn't been like a really good
study or series of studies on it. I also don't
think it matters, but who knows. If we're on a
quest to understand everything, including ourselves, and maybe it is
worth investigating the problem with the studies that have been
(33:57):
done so far as they jump to massive conclusions based
on really poor data. Sometimes there was this one that
the media was like, this guy did it proved it
women are better at multitasking than men, And when you
read into it, you find that the response time of
women was about sixty nine percent compared to seventy seven
(34:19):
percent of men. So men had an eight percent slower
response time at a multitasking task. And then, to put
the icing on the cake, they were worse at a
key a lost key task. And get this, this is
the lost key task. You take a blank piece of
paper and you show the researcher how you would go
(34:42):
find a key, imagining the blank piece of paper as
a field and the keys in there somewhere. It's one
of the most objectively interpreted tests I've ever heard of
in my life, and men were apparently not as good
at it, or drew fewer lines than women did. Hence
further supporting the idea that the women were better at
(35:05):
multitasking than men because they could find a key in
a field better. Imaginarily speaking, is it is it like
a maze? No, it's a blank piece of paper, and
you show how you would cross this field to look
everywhere for the key. I saw an example.
Speaker 1 (35:22):
Oh, okay, okay, an example.
Speaker 2 (35:25):
I'll get. It's just a series of lines back and
forth crossing the entire paper. Okay. For some reason, a
man who had completely taken leave of his senses made
a circle design like a swirl, starting from the inside out,
and then like missed some owners of the paper. So
(35:47):
clearly women are better at multitaskingmment.
Speaker 1 (35:51):
Yeah, that is very interesting and so subjective. You're right,
because like, I don't know, I feel like if you've
got one hundred people, there would be one hundred different scribbles.
Speaker 2 (36:00):
Yeah, exactly, And then who are you the researcher to
be like, that's a pretty good strategy for finding a key,
you pass.
Speaker 1 (36:10):
I have seen studies. There was one from pen Medicine
that found that men on average or are better at
performing and learning a single task, whereas women are better
with their memory to have a better memory and better
social cognition skills that suggest that they may be like
(36:32):
more apt to be better at multitasking.
Speaker 2 (36:34):
So that's another study that you can poke a bunch
of holes in. The study didn't do anything with multitasking.
It was a brain imaging study that looked at the
connectome how the brains of men and women are connected,
and found some differences in the directions of the connections.
Men had more connections from front to rear and rear
(36:55):
to front. Women had more connections from left to right hemisphere.
And that's it. That's what that's what it found. And
for some reason, in the pressure releases in the in
what the media picked up, that was immediately translated and
extrapolated into women being better at memory and social cognition
(37:17):
and men are better at navigating directions. That's what I'm
talking about. Like you, Yeah, Like I feel like this
has devolved into a like, be careful what you read
kind of lesson, But that's always a good lesson to include.
Speaker 1 (37:29):
Yeah, as far as media goes, you know, we talked
a lot about smartphones and stuff like that. It's sort
of a different deal these days because in the old days,
there would usually be a media. It's called an exchange
of media. So, uh, you know, TV comes along and
replaces radio, something might replace print. New equipment replaces the
(37:53):
old equipment. But now things are technology has moved such
that things are being stacked admin to the Internet and
smartphones and TV and gaming and texting and emailing like,
things have stacked upon one another such that they've done
studies where they found in the late nineties about sixteen
percent of time media time was concurrent or combined basically,
(38:20):
and in two I've tried to get something a little
more up to date than this, but just six years later,
in two thousand and five, that went up to twenty
six percent of media being used together. And I guarantee
you that number is way way bigger now.
Speaker 2 (38:33):
So the most recent I could find was in twenty eleven,
and it was up to thirty percent. I mean, think
about the difference between what technology you have in your
house in twenty twenty four and what you had in
twenty eleven.
Speaker 1 (38:48):
Yeah. I remember our old buddy Luke Ryan. Remember Luke, Yeah,
he he was working in he's like an executive in
TV and film and stuff, And I remember this is
very early on where he talked about the multi screen
experience and that they were all searching, you know, how
(39:09):
to crack that, and I was like, what do you mean.
He's like, you know, like if you're looking at your
iPad while you watch TV. And it was so early
in that technology that I was like, what, Like, that's
so weird, right, And now I just feel like even
I fall into the trap, even when I'm watching things
I like of being distracted by my phone, yeah, which
I hate doing. I really try to make an effort
(39:32):
if it's not just some throw a dumb thing I'm watching,
to really like all right, pretend like I'm in a
movie theater and like put that thing away.
Speaker 2 (39:39):
Yeah, But it does take effort, doesn't It takes conscious effort.
Speaker 1 (39:42):
It does.
Speaker 2 (39:43):
So one of the weird things about media multitasking was
what that's called when you have multiple screens that you're
looking at at the same time, getting multiple inputs makes
you dumber. Well, there's no study that shows that necessarily.
There has been a study that it's related to a
lower density of gray matter in the back of your brain,
(40:05):
but that hasn't necessarily been shown to be a bad thing.
And is that like the result of it we don't know.
I think the thing that interested me about it is
that there's a group of people who were accidentally discovered
in just a few years back from some University of
Utah researchers that are they're considered super taskers. To where
(40:28):
they were they were part of a study of just
finding out like differences in multitasking and cost switching, just
a general study on multitasking, and they accidentally discovered the small,
small group of people who there was no effect on
performance when they were when they were doing like performing multitasking,
(40:50):
like they were just as good doing it at the
same time as they would have been doing it sequentially.
And this one article I read about it, they were
they were kind of positing, like, you know, why is
this such a small population. I think they found like
two and a half percent out of four hundred people,
just a handful. Do the math yourself, because I'm done.
(41:13):
We're super taskers. And they were wondering if, like there's
such a small population because it's a newly developing trait
among friends that.
Speaker 1 (41:26):
Like a new benefit.
Speaker 2 (41:27):
Yeah, Like because we're doing things like exposing ourselves to
so many different inputs of information at once, some of
us are getting better at it sooner than others, and
that maybe we'll all be super taskers in one hundred
or two hundred years or something like that.
Speaker 1 (41:42):
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.
Speaker 2 (41:43):
I think I thought so too.
Speaker 1 (41:46):
So, you know, to finish up earlier, we said, obviously
to turn off those notifications and things like that, as
far as like how to focus more on how to
get a little bit better at this try and you know,
turn off the email, certainly, turn off social media and
things like that. If you have to sit down and
accomplish like a well, not even at the computer, if
you want to sit down and read a book or
(42:07):
do anything and you're getting notifications that can redirect you.
There is a method that you found called the Pomodoro
technique created by Francisco Serelo, And basically there are these
Pomodoro's timer but you can you can find them online
if you want. They're very kind of clean and simple.
(42:27):
But you decide at a task, you set your little
timer for twenty five minutes, and you work on that
task until the little timer goes off. You record a
little X there and take a break for five minutes
and then go back to your work. And then every
time you have four of those, so twenty five times four,
howevery minutes?
Speaker 2 (42:47):
That is well plus can you take it two?
Speaker 1 (42:50):
Well yeah, plus the breaks then you take a longer break,
You take a ten minute break before you go back.
And apparently it's a pretty good technique.
Speaker 2 (42:57):
Yeah. So during that time, like all your emails off,
all your notifications are off, your ringers are off during
that twenty five minute period, your heads down focusing on
that task. Yeah, you're end of time management stuff.
Speaker 1 (43:11):
That's a good way to go totally. But some people
are like, no, it cares. I love being distracted with
all that stuff.
Speaker 2 (43:18):
Yep. Those are women because they're better super taskers than men.
Speaker 1 (43:23):
Apparently that sounds like it.
Speaker 2 (43:25):
If you want to know more about multitask king, then
you can go read all about it on the internet
and see what you think of the quality of studies
that have been produced on it so far. Maybe you'll agree,
maybe you won't. That's okay, because we're all people. And
since I said that baffling thing, it's time for listener man.
Speaker 1 (43:43):
That's right, this pretty delightful email. Sometimes when we talk
about stuff, we hear from actual people that were involved
in that stuff. OHI just great. Yeah, and this one
was an actual student of the Spruce Elementary School in
San Francisco that was a part of that pioneering program
in the nineteen sixties that we talked about in the
(44:05):
Pigmalion Show. So hey guys, I'm a sixty six year
old man, retired elementary music teacher from California City councilman
in Syriana, Italy, and an alum of Spruce Elementary School
in South San Francisco. My husband and I usually fall
asleep to your show and replay the show in the
morning catch what we missed. When the Sandman arrived. Last night,
(44:25):
I was on the brink of slumber and I heard
Spruce School. I woke my storing partner and made him
replay the podcast from the beginning, and needless to say,
I was wide awake the entire show and stayed up
late into the night in the morning hours scouring the
internet for Pigmilion in the classroom. I was flabbergasted, to
say the least, to learn that I was part of
that experiment. Also surprised to learn doctor Leonora Jacobson is
(44:49):
still with us at one hundred and one years old.
I entered the Spruce School as a kindergartener in the
fall of nineteen sixty two, the same year actually midyear
when doctor Lenora and Jacobson became principal. Doctor Jacobson left
after my fifth grade year in sixty eight. I had
his reeling at this point, guys, I've ordered the book,
the first edition coming from the UK. I made a
(45:10):
mental list of my classmates who I'm going to send
to your podcast. I remember the testing. We thought they
were fun. Actually, I was a bit of a class
clown and always one of my teacher's pets. My memory
has always been sharp and can remember several personal interactions
with doctor Jacobson in her office. You boys have given
me a wonderful assignment as I tripped down memory lane.
(45:32):
And that is from the city Councilman of Siriana, Italy,
none other than Bob Giorsi.
Speaker 2 (45:40):
Very nice, Bob, I'd love that email. Like just he
didn't realize what he'd been through until he heard the podcast.
It's just nuts to me.
Speaker 1 (45:47):
I love it, amazing great to hear from you, Bob.
Speaker 2 (45:50):
Yeah, for sure, Bob. And if you want to be
like Bob and just knock our socks off, give it
a shot. Do it via email, though, wrap it up,
spank it on the bottom, and send it off to
stuff podcast did iHeartRadio dot com. Stuff you Should Know
is a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1 (46:09):
For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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