February 7, 2013 • 41 mins
Is multitasking a female super power, a learnable skill or pure myth? In this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Julie and Robert consider our multitasking world, our unitasking minds and the rare "super taskers" capable of doing it all.
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot Com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Julie Douglas. Last
time we talked, we talked a little bit about multitasking,
a little bit about multitasking as it relates to distraction,
the inner distractions, it's to a certain extant outer distractions.
(00:26):
But in this episode we're going to really get down
to brass tacks about multitasking in the human mind and
if ultimately it is even possible, that's right, because you know,
we all do it at all times. In fact, I
bet a lot of you out there right now are
listening to us and doing something else. And of course
we do that, right. I mean, when I'm working on something,
I'll tend to listen to music or podcast. Um. So,
(00:48):
in one way, you could say that as a society
we can't uh not multitask just because of of where
we are. Yeah, it is a busy, busy world. We
we inevitably complicate our lives with this endeavor and that
endeavor we have. You know, we have family and home
and relationships, stuff we need to take care of. We
have bills, we need to take care of their stuff
(01:10):
around the house. There are pets who are pooping in
boxes and those boxes need to be cleaned out. We
have jobs, we have we have transportation, we have to
take their their varying levels of news that we ideally
want to keep an eye on. And then we have
recreations and we have passions that we wish to pursue
as well. And if you're lucky, you have a few
(01:31):
of those things that are so satisfying that when you
engage in them, everything else can fade away for a
little bit and you can sort of turn off the chatter,
turn off the multitasking noise. Like like, in researching this,
I couldn't help but think about the default network that
we talked about a little bit, about the the the
endless chatter, and about um loops that have not been closed,
(01:53):
these little things in our lives that we haven't checked
off yet, so they're always resonating when we see that
person or dry by that building, or whatever the case
may be. We have we have all of this stuff
just chattering in the background. And as you had alluded to,
when we get in that flow state, when we un
task um that is when we can experience, the chattering
(02:15):
just kind of going away, right, because you get into
that lovely state where you're only doing one thing and
you're really enjoying it. But most of the time we
are dipping our fingers and our thoughts in multitude of things,
and we think we're good at it that we are not.
We're going to discuss more about that today. And I
love that you said you mentioned unitasking because it instantly
brings my mind to to cooking and the idea, of
(02:35):
course that a unitasker is a kitchen object that has
only one purpose, and certain food people tend to frown
on the idea of a unitasker because it's like it's
a wasted gadget, like why do you have a melon baller?
It can only be used for melon balling when you
could use, you know, something else that can have multiple functions.
Because it's actually turned out in some of the experiments
we we looked at were so I guess more in
(02:57):
the commentary on some of the experiments we looked at,
um cooking like a really busy professional restaurant. UH kitchen
is often considered an environment where multitasking shines, where if
you if multitasking is possible, and people can do it,
or at least try to do it. That's one of
the places you want to because there's so many different tasks,
(03:18):
so many different meals being prepared in varying arrangements for
different tables, and only so many instruments and ingredients with
which to create it all. Well. Now, some people might
argue that those people are super taskers, and we talked
about that in the last podcast, But some other people
might say it's pretty wrote because you're doing the same ingredients,
the same recipes over and over again and things. If
(03:40):
you've ever been inside a professional kitchen or you work
in one, you already know that things already set forth
pretty clearly. The missing scene is already set up for
each station. In other words, everything is where it needs
to be. So it becomes a lot more a lot
more intuitive to to do that work. But the rest
of us, of us, right, who are not supertaskers, who
(04:01):
tend to go about our day in a haphazard way.
Sometimes we think we're good at this multitasking. But just
as an example of of how we are not, I
wanted to bring up email voice. This is like the
serie thing, right, So what thing no, no, this is
Have you ever been on the phone with someone, You're
having engaging conversation, You're pouring your heart out, okay, there
(04:23):
with you, there with you, and all of a sudden, uh,
someone seems suddenly disconnected and they start to go, well,
what huh that? And then you hear tapping in the
background and you realize, oh my god, you're emailing as
I am pouring out that this this darkest secret of
my life to you. You know, I don't know that
(04:43):
I've encountered it personally, but maybe they're just clacking really quietly.
I have to say that there are a number of
people in my life who are multiteskers, particularly when it
comes to the phone. So I have, I have noticed this,
but I think all of you out there probably have
experienced this at one point or another. So it comes
back to this idea that you really can only do
one task well at a time. Um, even something is wrote,
(05:06):
is talking on the phone can be impaired if you're
trying to do something like emailing or reading or something. Yeah,
I have. I do have to say that there have
been some individuals that I've I've interviewed, either for this
podcast or for news stories, and there'll be a point
where I'm like, oh my goodness, they're driving a car. There,
there's no way I'm gonna get some good copy out
of them, Like um, a recent one I did. I'm
(05:27):
not going to out them as having driven for the
first portion of the interview, and I ended up not
using that that part because unsurprisingly, he was much better
once he stopped driving his car. But there was this
one virtual reality dude who was kind of like the
hot shot, like a he's older now, but like especially
back in the early days of virtual reality, he was
a real, uh superstar. You know. He was doing some
(05:48):
photo shoots for for the different tech magazines at all,
and I remember interviewing and I'm like, oh my goodness,
he is in a convertible. He's driving down and I'm imagining, like,
you know, like a highway out of fear and loathing,
and he's chatting with me about virtual reality and gave
me some great copy. But he was driving a convertible
at at god knows what speed, so better I think
it inconvertible than in the bathroom. Have you read has
(06:10):
someone ever taking you to the bathroom where they've been
on the phone. No, I mean, I've heard people doing
it here at work, but but luckily nobody has has
has revealed themselves as doing that during an interview. It's
amazing to me. It's a sanctuary. You probably shouldn't bring
other people in with you, even if they're disconnected in
a way. You know. I had another guy who was
making coffee while talking to me about I think about
(06:33):
global warming uh and and climate change uh and just
in the background suddenly he's grinding beans. But but anyway,
I digress. Um, Okay, so obviously, yeah, we're not great
at multitasking. Um. If you need another example. Another classic
example is texting and driving. The R a c Foundation,
which is a British nonprofit organization that focuses on driving issues,
(06:55):
asked seventeen drivers h four to use a dry think
simulator to see how texting affected their driving. The reaction
time was around thirty slower when writing a text message,
slower than driving drunk or stoned. And we had mentioned
this in the last podcast. This is due to doing
(07:16):
two visual tasks at the same time, because apparently, if
you're going to a multitask, you should not do two
of the same types of tasks at the same time, Yeah,
because talking on the phone is certainly certainly distracts you're
still quote unquote multitasking to a certain extent, but but
you're combining um, you know, speaking auditory with visual Uh.
(07:36):
But when you are you know, like you said, when
you're when you're driving and you're trying to text, you're
combining two visual things. So both of those things, uh,
the performance rate drops impressively. That's right. So if you're
in a multitask, multitasking and that the smartest way you
can um and obviously texting and driving is not smart
at all, but there's a good reason for that. Again visually,
(07:59):
you know, if you're taxing yourself in that way, there's
no way that you can really give the ultimate attention
to what you're doing. Yeah, because both of these especially
the driving, there's so many variables. Well even though we
do it enough to where it kind of becomes automatic,
but there are so many variables and driving there's so
many things you have to control that that the the
impact of multitasking really uh takes a toll in your performance.
(08:21):
As we mentioned in the other podcast, if you're chewing
gum while walking, you're technically doing two things at the
same time, but the the required skill in both of
those tasks, so low you're you're you're probably not going
to see any change in your ability. But if you're
talking and you're walking, you are sure to miss the
clown that rives past you, because we saw in another
(08:43):
study exactly right. So let's come back to the supertasker.
And we touched on this a little bit in the
previous episode, but now we're gonna we're gonna dive a
little deeper into what this is and who these people are.
I mean, in a in a way, they're kind of
the the quiz dots Hotter act of the um of
of of of the tasking world. Um, the Dune fans
(09:05):
will remember, that's the idea. They're just like the perfect
godlike being that will deliver the planet. I was just
gonna say, bless you. What was the name of it
against Okay, yeah, well thank you. Uh but yeah, so
the idea of the supertask like I said, they're they're
one one in a d um very rare. Most of
us cannot multitask, but as a one experiment revealed, you
(09:28):
can find individuals whose brains seem uniquely capable of handling
multiple things at once. It's true. University of Utah professors
David Strayer and John Watson put student subjects into a
driving similar and at the simulator, and then at the
same time, they received a call on a hands free
cell phone, and Strayer says that they engaged in a
(09:49):
conversation that involved memorizing strings of words that were presented
as well as solving math problems. So they're driving along,
they give this call, and first they're asked, uh, math,
these math problems are correct? They given these examples, and
then they're asked to list words in order, all right,
and they're up to five math problems in words that
could be included in a single conversation. Finally, the drivers
were asked to follow another car at a specific distance,
(10:12):
you know, keep the keep a reasonable distance between themselves
in that car, right, not crashing into them. And that's
what they study was the distance between that car to
see how the conversation affected that distancing. All right. So
most did far worse when doing both tasks than when
they did only a single task. Uh. Their break reaction
time was much longer, and they tended to follow the
(10:33):
lead vehicle to greater distance. In addition, their memory and
math performance has suffered as well. But in in the
course of all these studies, out of about a thousand students,
they found around twelve who didn't have worst driving performance
and on average performed better on the memory and math
tasks while they were driving. And so here we have
(10:54):
the quitsas hat Iraq, the Messiah of multitasking, the quote
unquote supertaskers it. That's amazing to me because nine and nine,
eight of them excuse me, n them tanked, right, But
these twelve, these special twelve, something is going on obviously
with them to allow them to have such recall. Now
(11:15):
they want to do follow up studies about this, obviously,
and do a little bit more mr I and get
into the brain because obviously that's where they're going to
find some answer to their questions about what's going on
um And we should probably dip into the brain as
well and figure out what parts are active here when
we're multitasking. Yes, let's dip in with with a melancholer
it were okay, let me take out a little bit
(11:37):
of the pre frontal cortex because apparently this is very
important because as part of the brain plans and coordinate actions.
And here's a really cool thing. And humans, the prefrontal
cortex is about one third of the entire cortex, while
in dogs and cats it's about four or five percent,
monkeys about So this means the bigger the prefrontal cortex,
the more flexible our behavior can be, and the more
(12:00):
we can multitask. So um, some people would actually argue
that our early hominid ancestors had to multitask. This didn't start, um,
you know, in the twentieth century. This this rapid multitasking,
although of course it's gotten much more aggressive, but you know,
as soon as as early man had to deal with
multiple things going on. Um, you know, maybe it's stoking
(12:24):
a fire. And yeah, I mean certainly, when you get
into tool use and the use of cooking and basically
external digestion, you're beginning to the human as a as
a as an organism is beginning to expand and all
these varying occupations. And then once we this culture builds up,
and certainly once you reach the point where individuals can
specialize in a given task, all the more. Right, So
(12:46):
there's an idea that it's hardwired in us where we
need to do it we're supposed to do it. But
to what degree, I guess is the question. And to
what degree have we evolved alongside what we're actually capable
of doing now or sort of capable of doing. Um.
What we find out is that when we are doing
a couple of things at once, yes, we've got the
(13:09):
prefrontal cortex to do it, but we're demanding much more
of the cognitive process. You and I have talked about
this before, this idea that we have a finite amount
of mental energy that we can sometimes bolster with food
and whatnot. UM. But like a video game, you have
a power meter, and everything that happens to you in
the course of the day is going to influence that
(13:31):
power meter. In the occasional power up may give you
a little boost, but at the end of the day
it's gonna wear. Yeah. But let's say that you are depleted.
You you don't have you know, a good, um glycost
bump there with a piece of food or an apple
or something like that, and you're just tired, and you're multitasking,
you're demanding a lot. You've got a big cognitive load
going on. And this is when you see the brain
(13:53):
um entering into what we call bottlenecking, and that's just
what it sounds like, right, nothing's really getting through because
you're trying to do a bunch of tasks at once.
And this is because you're doing something called task switching.
Right now. This is Yeah, this is really interesting because
it gets into the idea that there really isn't such
any such thing as multitasking, the idea that well, not
(14:16):
in the sense that we're doing two things at once. Instead,
we're more like an individual who who instead of doing
one thing with one hand and one thing with the other,
is switching back and forth between two tasks with both hands,
if that makes any sense. Yeah, I kind of think
of it as a train conductor to right, like you're
you're switching tracks. Yeah, I mean, well, there's since the
(14:36):
title of the podcast, a one track mind, um, which
is generally kind of used as a put down. Oh
they've got a one track mind. They're only thinking about
one thing. But at any given moment, we can only
have a one track mind. Uh, that's just the the
extent of our cognitive capabilities. And uh, I can also
(14:57):
think of it like a two deck tape player. You know,
you got two decks there, You've got two different tapes
in there. Maybe one's Queen's Greatest hits and maybe the
other one is Bob Speaker's greatest hits. But you're only
gonna play Bob Sneaker or Queen. You're not gonna play
them both at the same time unless you do a
little mash up thing, which is going to require some
pre planning. And it's still just one track, right exactly.
Um yeah. Brain scans during task switching show activity in
(15:20):
four major areas. The prefrontal cortex, of course, which is
involved in shifting and focusing your attention and selecting which
task to do one. And then you've got the posterior
parietal lobe, which activates rules for each task you switch to.
The anterior singulate gyrus monitors errors errors again very important.
We'll talk more about that and the pre mot motor
(15:42):
car text. It's one of those morning's pre motor cortex
is preparing you to move in some way, right, that's
the part that makes your hands, in your legs and
your feet all moved together. So, according to Psychology Today's
article the true cost of multitasking, each task switch might
waste only one tenth of a second. But if you
(16:03):
do a lot of switching throughout the day. This can
add up to a loss oft of your productivity. Yeah,
It's like, if you're doing two different things in two
different rooms of your house, you're gonna have to move
back and forth between the two and it may not
be much of a distance, but the more you go
back and forth, the more you're pacing around the house. Um.
It's it's also interesting thinking and looking at this multitasking
(16:24):
to to think of it as kind of juggling as well,
the idea that you have three balls and you're trying
to keep at least one of them in the air
at any given moment. But but that that tends to
serve as a slightly better way of thinking about it.
There's a study in the July sixteenth episode of neuron
Um that suggested that our brains aren't really built to
handle parallel processing like we've been talking about. But the
(16:48):
good news is that studies have shown that extensive training
can make us better at doing two things at once
or more, you know, juggling back and forth between these
two different things. And there are various theories and why
this is the case, but one of the strong ones
is that with a lot of practice, certain routines become
kind of automatic. UM. An example of this that came
to mind actually has to do with I was reading
(17:11):
some Roger Ebert reviews the other day because he tends
to be my go to guy, like with a lot
of people, he's kind of my go to guy for
movie reviews, and I ran across a thread where he
was responding to uh, some listener feedback on his review
for Silent Hill. Uh. The movie based on a video
game that came out a few years back from Christoph Ghans,
wonderful imaginative French director who did Brotherhood the Wolf and UM,
(17:35):
and Ebert was just kind of perplexed by the movie.
He was just like, that didn't really make sense to me,
and um, and somebody ask him a few questions about
an Ebert to drew some parallels to the study. UH.
It analyze people's brain activity during video games, and when
they first start playing a video game, a whole lot
of the brain area lights up because they're they're having
to deal with new controls and new environment and new activities.
(17:58):
But as they become better and better at the at
the game, that that neural activity shrinks down to like
just a very small area. And then and then in
this we get into the whole idea of video games
as a as a release, Like I don't want to
use my whole brain. I just want to use a
very little portion of it and give give my my
thinking arrest. So which kind of goes into the flow
state in a weird way, right, Yeah. And so the
(18:19):
better you become at a task, the more of a
flow state it is, or the more familiar you are
with the various things that go into it. Like I
think of activities we do on the computer, like like
um goodness, I used to when I worked in newspapers,
had he's in design all the time to build these pages,
and they're all these hot keys, you know, different combinations
that then make that just save you enormous amounts of time. Uh,
(18:44):
and you end up just committing those two memory and
then inevitably you reach that point we're having to train
someone else and how to use it and cannot you know,
and there's like no actual memory of what any of
those hot keys are, Like I can only form up
by game memory, just like pure muscle memory. So I
had my brain had refined it down to just the
bare minimum amount of thought required to carry it out,
(19:05):
which enabled me to do things like build pages and
listen to science podcast at the same time. That's interesting
because I used to do a lot of database work
and it's sort of the same thing. And sometimes I
felt like, you know, sort of like I was in
the matrix and I was just like moving through space
and time and yeah, and fulfilling because you're doing all
these things at once. Yeah, you're right, because I felt
(19:25):
like I was being really productive. Put that hatteract making
a spreadsheet in that in that moment, I might have
just because it depended on the task. Again, it could
have been wrote at that point, but if I had
to engage a little bit more cognitive muscle, not so much.
Now here's the question men women do we have a
different share and multitasking is the jury out. Is it
(19:47):
true that women are great multitaskers or is it just
sort of cultural baggage. I've been thinking about this one
because in terms of cultural baggage, I mean, I can
definitely see where individuals would and I'm not not without
even dry any science into it, yet, I can see
where the cultural idea that women are multitaskers and men
are not they both men and women could really get
(20:09):
behind that idea. Because for women, Uh, if someone says, oh, well,
you're a natural multitasker, it's well, it's like, thank you,
that's great, because that means I'm capable of doing I
am the hits that cataract of spreadsheets, Thank you very much.
And then for men, if someone says, don't you know,
don't worry, You're just not your your gender is not
about multitasking, then it's kind of like, well, WHOA, Thank goodness,
that's a load off my shoulders. I can only be
(20:31):
expected to do one task well at any given time,
so I've kind of got an out for all the
other things I screw up in my life. All Right, Well,
so I'm about to mention this study, but before I
do so, I will listen that. And I'd like to
hear from the women out there too. Maybe you don't
want to be known as a multitask or maybe you
feel the cultural baggage of that. And I say that
because there's a two thousand eleven study at the Department
of Sociology Anthropology at Bar Lawn University in Israel, and
(20:55):
this found that working mothers came This is a family
of working mothers and fathers, they spend about ten more
hours per week multitasking than do working fathers. So we're
talking about forty eight point three hours as UH compared
to thirty eight point nine for dad's okay. The lead
author of the studies share Offer said when they multitask
(21:15):
at home, for example, mothers are more likely than fathers
to engage in housework or childcare activities, which are usually
labor intensive efforts. Fathers, by contrast, tend to engage in
other types of activities when they multitask at home, such
as talking to a third person who are engaging in
self care. These are less burden sum experiences. So this
(21:36):
is very interesting to me because I do think that
the cultural norm has informed the behavior. And as someone
who is a working mom and a multitasker, I guess
with the capital M, you do kind of feel that
sense of it. I don't feel that I'm good at it,
but some of these things are very wrote and they're
very physical when they're easy to do, but it still
(21:58):
takes a lot of energy out of you. Yeah, that
makes sense. I found it interesting with some of the
older anthropology kind of arguments about this were that if
you go back to um Our, most ancient days, you
had men who had to go out and do one thing.
Supposedly they like, we were hunter gatherers, So the men
went out to hunt down and kill particular animals, and
(22:18):
then the women gathered things and looked after the children
and kept the fire going and all that, which I
guess kind of as an idea, it's kind of interesting,
but but but apparently holds no real real sway over there.
And see, the thing about that too, is that not
only are they keeping their tending the children the fire,
but they're also foraging because most of the diet is
(22:41):
predicated on their ability to go out and find foods
there that are non meat, right, and then also the
men like and where again going with sort of a
non historical, vague idea of the past when we're discussing this.
But but yeah, if you're going out to hunt an animal,
it's not quite as simple as just one single task.
You're having to deal with with weapon crafting up, weapon upkeep.
(23:04):
Even if that weapon is just like a sharpened stone
or a bone, you know, still you've gotta keep it
in good repair. You're having to possibly track animals and
and if you're doing it on foot, you're talking about
a rather labor intensive hunt there. So I don't even
buy that the hunting for food in in the in
our ancient in the ancient times would have been a single,
(23:25):
one track mind kind of a deal, right, right, So
what I'm proposing is I think that man canal task
just as well as women, but perhaps there's some cultural
stuff going on there. However, we have to talk about
the corpus colusum, because apparently in women are not Apparently,
we know for sure that this part of the brain,
which handles communication between the two hemispheres, is actually wider
(23:47):
than in men's brains, which has made some people wonder
whether or not um this helps to synthesize information better
in women, to communicate better in both sides of the hemispheres,
But we don't have any really big conclusive evidence that
says this allows women to multitask better. Along the same lines,
there was a French National Institute of Health and Medical
(24:10):
Research study and they took thirty two right handed people
and they were asked to match some letters. And of course,
given this the study, the brain, of course we had
fr fm R eyes loaded up as well. Scanning the brains,
seeing what's flowing around, what kind of activity has taken place.
And it's also important that there was money on the line.
There's a financial reward for the participants in this study
(24:31):
to match things up correctly. All right, So during this task,
both him hemispheres of the brains medial frontal cortex, which
is involved in motivation, lights up. All right. Then the
researchers shook it up. They introduced a second task where
the subjects had to match like upper case letters in
addition to matching like lower case letters with separately occuring
(24:53):
reward tallies. So, uh, what they found was the subjects
brains divided the two reward bay skulls between the two
sides of the region of the brain. So what what
they ended up finding here was that, okay, the area
of the brain that was highly active and the observed
multitasking behavior was the was the front o polar cortex,
which organizes pending goals while the brain completes another task,
(25:16):
and this is especially well developed in humans. But they
also the the the scientists also argued that humans have
this problem though, of deciding between more than two alternatives,
and a possible explanation so they cannot keep in mind
and switch back and forth between three or more alternatives.
(25:37):
So we're basically A or D. If you certainly A,
B and C, then then the cognitive load increases dramatically. Okay,
so again there's like that switch on the track, right, yeah,
either or Yeah. This was particularly interesting when I think two.
One of my favorite authors are Scott Baker has a
series of fantasy books. I mentioned them before. The first
(26:00):
one in the series is The Darkness That Comes Before
and It. He has this whole He himself is uh
heavy into psychology and neuroscience and weaves all that through
this book. Even though the book deals with with magic
and and and the like and their sorcerers, he's very
into the neuroscience of how that works, and particularly there's
a there's a type of magic in the books called
(26:21):
the nosis, and it's revealed eventually in the books that
it works by holding two different interpretations of the same
spell chant in your mind at the same time. So
so being able to to work these acts of magic
involves the cognitive process of holding two things in your mind,
(26:42):
two meanings that are parallel, at the same time. And
in the books there's a there's a special character. H
got a superhuman that emerges who's able to work even
greater works of magic because he can hold three different
ideas in his mind at the same time. So I
find that that could be a really interesting take on
(27:03):
magic by combining it with sort of what we know
through neuroscience about our ability to multitask. Is like mental
scrolls of of magic in our minds that we're trying
to Yeah, yeah, multitasking is a kind of magic for that.
All right, um, we're gonna take a quick break, and
when we get back, we're going to talk about the
cognitive and physiological costs of multitasking, like a short term
(27:28):
memory for instance. All Right, we're back, and we're gonna
look a little bit more at multitasking and what all
of this multitasking at least these attempts at multitasking due
to our minds. Okay, So we talked about bottlenecking, we
(27:52):
we talked about this ability to keep some things in
our minds. Well, it turns out that, of course it's
all has to do with short term memory and committing
short term memory into long term memory if you can. Um, so,
of course, if you're multitasking, if you're um, let's say
you're studying for an exam, but you're listening to music
or you're watching TV. Turns out these short term memory
(28:12):
is going to be taxed and you're probably not going
to get a lot of recall out of that experience.
Um Our short term memories can only store between five
and nine things at once, so when information doesn't make
it into short term memory, it can't be transferred into
long term memory for recall later. Okay, that's why if
you're watching TV while you're studying, it's not going to
(28:33):
be as effective. So if you can't recall it, you
can't use it now. I did also find them one
of our our studies we're looking at. They did argue that,
you know, it depends on what you're doing. Because I
was very concerned about the music thing because I listen
to music all the time. When it works, I was
started thinking, well, maybe I'm doing all this wrong and
then I need to cut out the music. But they
(28:54):
did say that for some people, listening to music while
working actually makes them more creative because they're using different
car that it functions, which I think lines up well
with what I've sort of observed before. And if I'm
doing something that really requires me to think that I
can't listen to anything the lyrics in it. Right. We
talked about that before that lyrics sometimes can mess with
what you're trying to do, right, because you hear those
(29:16):
messages and trying to do language, and then I'm also
I'm also absorbing language. Then then that's going to hit
both of those, uh, those categories. Right. But you know,
so if you're listening to something instrumental in your researching
or trying to learn something or studying, then that should
be fined. Research shows that people use different areas of
the brain for learning and storing new information when they
are distracted. So brain scans of people who are distracted
(29:39):
or multitasking show activity in the stray item, and this
is a region of the brain involved in learning new skills.
Brain scans of people who are not distracted show activity
in the hippocampus, and this is a region involved in
storing and recalling information. So again it points to this
idea that if you are unit asking, if you're studying,
if you're researching, your doing this one thing and then
(30:01):
you're engaging your hippocampus more. And that's good because then
you're storing those memories and your recall for that material
is going to be better later. Now, another thing that
multitasking effects is stress and stress levels. And UH professor
Gloria Marks April study and we talked about this in
(30:21):
the last podcast. UM. This this Landmark study. She found
that after only twenty minutes of interrupted performance, people reported
significantly higher stress, frustration, workload, effort, and pressure. So it's
like this low lying level of stress that people put
upon themselves when they are multitasking. And UH psychologist David
(30:43):
Meyer at the University of Michigan found that multitasking contributes
to the release of stress hormones and adrenaline, which can
cause of course, we know that long term health problems
if not controlled, and it also contributes to the loss
of short term memory. So what's you're the The sort
of story that comes out here is that if you're
multitasking throughout the day and you're doing a lot, what
(31:03):
you find is that you've got that low level of
anxiety building because it always feels like those loops or
open those loops that we talked about, the tasks that
we need to complete, and that also kind of falls
back into some of the stereotypes about say busy moms,
you know, being kind of frazzled, or anybody that's really
got a lot on their plate being a bit frazzled
because they are doing so many things and there's so
(31:25):
many loops open that it's having it's take an impact
on their short term memory and their ability to perform.
And um, you know, in the in the case of
say studying for an exam or researching, if you are multitesting,
you're trying to do a deep dive into a topic,
and you're switching between tasks and you know in an
hour you've maybe gleaned only ten minutes of that research.
(31:46):
That's not a deep dive. That's not a lot of
time to think in depth about any one thing. So
of course it behooves you to try to unitask in
those instances where it's really important to commit that to
memory or you really need to come to trade on something. Yeah.
This also leads us into this area UM referred to
as a tension deficit traite, which I found really interesting. Now,
(32:07):
this is not attention deficit, uh disorder disorder. This is
attention deficit. There's a trait that emerges due to the
environment that you've put yourself in. So you're putting yourself
in this environment where there's all the stimuli coming at you.
There's all there, all these different tasks that you've you've
put before yourself. You're multitasking or trying to and it
(32:29):
generates basically the symptoms of attention deficit disorder. I think
what's interesting about this is that again it's um, it's
something in our environment, and it's something that we condition
ourselves into. Now it's a pretty new idea. We've been
studying attention deficit disorder for for years and years, but
this idea of attention deficit traite really comes out of
(32:50):
a two thousand five Harvard Business Review article Overloaded Circuits,
Why smart people under Perform? And this was by Glenn Wilson,
the guy who who wrote the study and UH and
and and most of these ideas really hinge back to
his UH, his his UH studies regarding attention deficit as
it emerges again as a as as a symptom of
(33:11):
environmental stimuli. Yeah, and he did the study for Hewlett
Packard um to look at this productivity of multitasking. What
I think is cool that he just not so cool
But interesting is that he discovered is that the average
workers functioning i Q um a temporary qualitative of state here,
and we're talking about drops ten points when multitasking, and
that is more than double the four point drop it
(33:34):
occurs when someone smokes marijuana. Wow. So I mean that really,
especially for anyone out there in in a management position,
I mean it really should make you think twice about
putting new responsibilities on an employer because you're basically taking
a notch out of their i Q with with each task,
(33:54):
until you just reduced them to a a just a
mumbling ball of goog with a whole just spreadsheets to
fill up. Yes, just you can hear the stress and
buzzing off of that person. Yeah um. But you know,
of course that leads to this idea of how can
you best rein this in and manage it? And there's
something called the rule Uh. This says that the work
(34:15):
you do gives eight of the impact and effectiveness. So
you focus on identifying the of your task that are
really effective and then you do them one at a time.
I tend to, I guess I tend to sort of
do maybe a take on that where since I'm better
in the morning, and I guess it makes sense because
I haven't had much time to deplete my cognitive abilities. Uh.
(34:37):
Pick the things that are most important and require the
the most amount of thought and creativity to do those first,
and then do the other things later. That's the smart
way to approach it. But of course, as we found
in the last podcast that people usually do the the inverse.
They typically um kind of distract themselves and multitask earlier
in the day and then they battened down the hatches
(35:01):
and concentrate later in the day. But you're right, that's
the way to do it is in the morning, is
to unit task and then multitask later in the day
because you have more energy in the morning and you're
fresh and you haven't become ego depleted by all the
choices of that day. So there you have it. Multitasking, Um,
the single track mind. Multitasking is magic. All of these
(35:22):
various ways of looking at it, which it really did
force me to to reevaluate the way I approach all
the things I have to do in my life and uh,
and the and and really how we function as human beings. UM.
But of course none of this is necessarily new because
we've got people have been figuring this out for for ages. Uh.
(35:42):
In fact, back in seven in the seventeen forties, Lord
Chesterfield offered the following advice. He said, quote, there is
time enough for everything in the course of the day
if you do but one thing at a time, But
there is not time enough in the year if you
will do two things at a time. So Lord Chesterfield
(36:03):
knew the the importance of really focusing in on a
single task, and he knew that you'd have to be
a wizard to do two things at once. You know. Purportedly,
even Albert Einstein weighed in on this, and this is
from a Scientific American article about multitesting. He is purported
to have said, any man who can drive safely while
(36:24):
kissing a pretty girl is simply not giving the kiss
the attention it deserves. Yeah, that rogue, That makes sense.
I mean, yeah, I mean it just gets down to
if you do try and do two things at once,
you're not gonna do either thing. Well, all right, well
let's uh, let's call over the road but now and
get a little listener and mail. First off, we heard
(36:44):
from Gregory who's responding to um some stuff I recently
said about pugs the dog breed, because I used to
think of the pug is just kind of this um
amusing but are ultimately kind of worthless breed. That it
was just kind of bread into a corner physiologically just
wasn't capable of much. But then I saw a helper
dog that was a pug at the train station. So
(37:05):
Gregory writes in and says, Robert, Robert, Robert about pugs.
My father in law had a beef farm and his
dog a pug. It became one of his farm helpers. Terminator,
that's the dog's name. May have been tiny, but he
was one of the best dogs I've ever seen to
help direct the cows. Since Terminator was so small, Uh,
he never got stepped on or kicked, and he was
never made to help, but he liked to do it.
(37:26):
As soon as he saw Tom get get the barn closed,
term was at the door, jumping and turning circles waiting
for the door to open. I think we were all
shocked the first time we saw him in action, but
he was tiny but impressive. So that little sip it
comes to us from from Gregory, that was very interesting.
And then we also heard from our listener Marta Um
(37:46):
and she writes it and says, uh me again from Portugal,
just to quit comment on Your Walls podcast. I am
a big fan of Murakami, the Japanese writer h but
he has a book that was quite hard for me
to get into, Hard Boiled Wonderland for the End of
the World. It's quite fantastic about a guy whose brain
is being experimented on, and it describes two parallel realities,
(38:07):
one of his actual life developing and one of what
is going on inside his brain at the same time,
the inner world. But this is a very real world
comprised within a long wall. The character arrives at this
city and as he walks past the gates, he is
forced to leave his shadow there, for it is that
it is the link to his real life and his
memories of that life. The story then develops inside the city,
(38:30):
and the presence of the wall is quite amazing. Um omnipotent, unbreached, unbreakable,
and actual limit between the two worlds. He has confronted
with the fact that there is no way to go
back through the wall or the gates, so he needs
to find another way. No spoilers, I'll just drop here Anyway,
this is the strangest wall I could remember. Thanks again, Marta. Well,
I like that dropping the shadow as a narrative technique,
(38:52):
you know, because then then that's sort of like a
was the movie um about Dreaming with Leo DiCaprio, Leo
like I know him. Oh you're talking about the Christopher
Nolan film Inception. Yeah, you know how they knew when
they were dreaming and they're in reality not in reality
they had the turning Top. But I like this idea
(39:12):
of not seeing your shadow and realizing that you're in
this altar universe. Yeah, that sounds really. It also reminds
me of a book I've not read. You, I really
want to See the City read The City in the
City by China Melville. But and I think it maybe
falls along similar lines. But Murracami is great. I haven't
read this particular book. Um have you? If you read
any more comments, I haven't. Um Cough on the Shore
(39:35):
was a big one. That one, the wind Up Bird
Chronicle both along but very much in a I think
maybe the And I'm not no expert by any means
in Japanese literature, uh, certainly, but certainly there there seems
to be sort of a long form aspect of his
work that maybe doesn't doesn't job immediately with with a
(39:56):
Western reader, but but it's but he's a great writer.
It's it's very satisfying, very imaginative. One of the books
had talking cats in it, and uh, but then also
one of the books had a man being skinned alive,
so he kind of it gives you various aspects of
like every day minosa plus some imaginative almost kind of
(40:16):
cute stuff. And then also there's a there's there's room
for wacky and or horrible happenings as well. So glad
guts in Kawai. Yeah, yeah, kind of nice. So hey,
if you would like to reach out to us and
chat with us a little bit about Murakami, about walls,
about uh, multitasking. Are you a multitasker? Do you think
you're a multitasker? What happens when you try and multitask? Uh?
(40:39):
And then what happens when you were able to set
everything aside and focus on that one thing in your
life or you know, you can have multiple things in
your life that you can really get into a flow
state with. Let us know, we'd love to hear from you.
You can find us on Facebook, you can find us
on Tumbler. On both of those, we go by the
handles stuff to Blow your Mind, and if you go
to Twitter, you'll find us with the handle blow the Mind.
(41:00):
And you can always drop us a line at blow
the Mind at discovery dot com. For more on this
and thousands of other topics, Is it How Stuff Works
dot com
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot Com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Julie Douglas. Last
time we talked, we talked a little bit about multitasking,
a little bit about multitasking as it relates to distraction,
the inner distractions, it's to a certain extant outer distractions.
(00:26):
But in this episode we're going to really get down
to brass tacks about multitasking in the human mind and
if ultimately it is even possible, that's right, because you know,
we all do it at all times. In fact, I
bet a lot of you out there right now are
listening to us and doing something else. And of course
we do that, right. I mean, when I'm working on something,
I'll tend to listen to music or podcast. Um. So,
(00:48):
in one way, you could say that as a society
we can't uh not multitask just because of of where
we are. Yeah, it is a busy, busy world. We
we inevitably complicate our lives with this endeavor and that
endeavor we have. You know, we have family and home
and relationships, stuff we need to take care of. We
have bills, we need to take care of their stuff
(01:10):
around the house. There are pets who are pooping in
boxes and those boxes need to be cleaned out. We
have jobs, we have we have transportation, we have to
take their their varying levels of news that we ideally
want to keep an eye on. And then we have
recreations and we have passions that we wish to pursue
as well. And if you're lucky, you have a few
(01:31):
of those things that are so satisfying that when you
engage in them, everything else can fade away for a
little bit and you can sort of turn off the chatter,
turn off the multitasking noise. Like like, in researching this,
I couldn't help but think about the default network that
we talked about a little bit, about the the the
endless chatter, and about um loops that have not been closed,
(01:53):
these little things in our lives that we haven't checked
off yet, so they're always resonating when we see that
person or dry by that building, or whatever the case
may be. We have we have all of this stuff
just chattering in the background. And as you had alluded to,
when we get in that flow state, when we un
task um that is when we can experience, the chattering
(02:15):
just kind of going away, right, because you get into
that lovely state where you're only doing one thing and
you're really enjoying it. But most of the time we
are dipping our fingers and our thoughts in multitude of things,
and we think we're good at it that we are not.
We're going to discuss more about that today. And I
love that you said you mentioned unitasking because it instantly
brings my mind to to cooking and the idea, of
(02:35):
course that a unitasker is a kitchen object that has
only one purpose, and certain food people tend to frown
on the idea of a unitasker because it's like it's
a wasted gadget, like why do you have a melon baller?
It can only be used for melon balling when you
could use, you know, something else that can have multiple functions.
Because it's actually turned out in some of the experiments
we we looked at were so I guess more in
(02:57):
the commentary on some of the experiments we looked at,
um cooking like a really busy professional restaurant. UH kitchen
is often considered an environment where multitasking shines, where if
you if multitasking is possible, and people can do it,
or at least try to do it. That's one of
the places you want to because there's so many different tasks,
(03:18):
so many different meals being prepared in varying arrangements for
different tables, and only so many instruments and ingredients with
which to create it all. Well. Now, some people might
argue that those people are super taskers, and we talked
about that in the last podcast, But some other people
might say it's pretty wrote because you're doing the same ingredients,
the same recipes over and over again and things. If
(03:40):
you've ever been inside a professional kitchen or you work
in one, you already know that things already set forth
pretty clearly. The missing scene is already set up for
each station. In other words, everything is where it needs
to be. So it becomes a lot more a lot
more intuitive to to do that work. But the rest
of us, of us, right, who are not supertaskers, who
(04:01):
tend to go about our day in a haphazard way.
Sometimes we think we're good at this multitasking. But just
as an example of of how we are not, I
wanted to bring up email voice. This is like the
serie thing, right, So what thing no, no, this is
Have you ever been on the phone with someone, You're
having engaging conversation, You're pouring your heart out, okay, there
(04:23):
with you, there with you, and all of a sudden, uh,
someone seems suddenly disconnected and they start to go, well,
what huh that? And then you hear tapping in the
background and you realize, oh my god, you're emailing as
I am pouring out that this this darkest secret of
my life to you. You know, I don't know that
(04:43):
I've encountered it personally, but maybe they're just clacking really quietly.
I have to say that there are a number of
people in my life who are multiteskers, particularly when it
comes to the phone. So I have, I have noticed this,
but I think all of you out there probably have
experienced this at one point or another. So it comes
back to this idea that you really can only do
one task well at a time. Um, even something is wrote,
(05:06):
is talking on the phone can be impaired if you're
trying to do something like emailing or reading or something. Yeah,
I have. I do have to say that there have
been some individuals that I've I've interviewed, either for this
podcast or for news stories, and there'll be a point
where I'm like, oh my goodness, they're driving a car. There,
there's no way I'm gonna get some good copy out
of them, Like um, a recent one I did. I'm
(05:27):
not going to out them as having driven for the
first portion of the interview, and I ended up not
using that that part because unsurprisingly, he was much better
once he stopped driving his car. But there was this
one virtual reality dude who was kind of like the
hot shot, like a he's older now, but like especially
back in the early days of virtual reality, he was
a real, uh superstar. You know. He was doing some
(05:48):
photo shoots for for the different tech magazines at all,
and I remember interviewing and I'm like, oh my goodness,
he is in a convertible. He's driving down and I'm imagining, like,
you know, like a highway out of fear and loathing,
and he's chatting with me about virtual reality and gave
me some great copy. But he was driving a convertible
at at god knows what speed, so better I think
it inconvertible than in the bathroom. Have you read has
(06:10):
someone ever taking you to the bathroom where they've been
on the phone. No, I mean, I've heard people doing
it here at work, but but luckily nobody has has
has revealed themselves as doing that during an interview. It's
amazing to me. It's a sanctuary. You probably shouldn't bring
other people in with you, even if they're disconnected in
a way. You know. I had another guy who was
making coffee while talking to me about I think about
(06:33):
global warming uh and and climate change uh and just
in the background suddenly he's grinding beans. But but anyway,
I digress. Um, Okay, so obviously, yeah, we're not great
at multitasking. Um. If you need another example. Another classic
example is texting and driving. The R a c Foundation,
which is a British nonprofit organization that focuses on driving issues,
(06:55):
asked seventeen drivers h four to use a dry think
simulator to see how texting affected their driving. The reaction
time was around thirty slower when writing a text message,
slower than driving drunk or stoned. And we had mentioned
this in the last podcast. This is due to doing
(07:16):
two visual tasks at the same time, because apparently, if
you're going to a multitask, you should not do two
of the same types of tasks at the same time, Yeah,
because talking on the phone is certainly certainly distracts you're
still quote unquote multitasking to a certain extent, but but
you're combining um, you know, speaking auditory with visual Uh.
(07:36):
But when you are you know, like you said, when
you're when you're driving and you're trying to text, you're
combining two visual things. So both of those things, uh,
the performance rate drops impressively. That's right. So if you're
in a multitask, multitasking and that the smartest way you
can um and obviously texting and driving is not smart
at all, but there's a good reason for that. Again visually,
(07:59):
you know, if you're taxing yourself in that way, there's
no way that you can really give the ultimate attention
to what you're doing. Yeah, because both of these especially
the driving, there's so many variables. Well even though we
do it enough to where it kind of becomes automatic,
but there are so many variables and driving there's so
many things you have to control that that the the
impact of multitasking really uh takes a toll in your performance.
(08:21):
As we mentioned in the other podcast, if you're chewing
gum while walking, you're technically doing two things at the
same time, but the the required skill in both of
those tasks, so low you're you're you're probably not going
to see any change in your ability. But if you're
talking and you're walking, you are sure to miss the
clown that rives past you, because we saw in another
(08:43):
study exactly right. So let's come back to the supertasker.
And we touched on this a little bit in the
previous episode, but now we're gonna we're gonna dive a
little deeper into what this is and who these people are.
I mean, in a in a way, they're kind of
the the quiz dots Hotter act of the um of
of of of the tasking world. Um, the Dune fans
(09:05):
will remember, that's the idea. They're just like the perfect
godlike being that will deliver the planet. I was just
gonna say, bless you. What was the name of it
against Okay, yeah, well thank you. Uh but yeah, so
the idea of the supertask like I said, they're they're
one one in a d um very rare. Most of
us cannot multitask, but as a one experiment revealed, you
(09:28):
can find individuals whose brains seem uniquely capable of handling
multiple things at once. It's true. University of Utah professors
David Strayer and John Watson put student subjects into a
driving similar and at the simulator, and then at the
same time, they received a call on a hands free
cell phone, and Strayer says that they engaged in a
(09:49):
conversation that involved memorizing strings of words that were presented
as well as solving math problems. So they're driving along,
they give this call, and first they're asked, uh, math,
these math problems are correct? They given these examples, and
then they're asked to list words in order, all right,
and they're up to five math problems in words that
could be included in a single conversation. Finally, the drivers
were asked to follow another car at a specific distance,
(10:12):
you know, keep the keep a reasonable distance between themselves
in that car, right, not crashing into them. And that's
what they study was the distance between that car to
see how the conversation affected that distancing. All right. So
most did far worse when doing both tasks than when
they did only a single task. Uh. Their break reaction
time was much longer, and they tended to follow the
(10:33):
lead vehicle to greater distance. In addition, their memory and
math performance has suffered as well. But in in the
course of all these studies, out of about a thousand students,
they found around twelve who didn't have worst driving performance
and on average performed better on the memory and math
tasks while they were driving. And so here we have
(10:54):
the quitsas hat Iraq, the Messiah of multitasking, the quote
unquote supertaskers it. That's amazing to me because nine and nine,
eight of them excuse me, n them tanked, right, But
these twelve, these special twelve, something is going on obviously
with them to allow them to have such recall. Now
(11:15):
they want to do follow up studies about this, obviously,
and do a little bit more mr I and get
into the brain because obviously that's where they're going to
find some answer to their questions about what's going on
um And we should probably dip into the brain as
well and figure out what parts are active here when
we're multitasking. Yes, let's dip in with with a melancholer
it were okay, let me take out a little bit
(11:37):
of the pre frontal cortex because apparently this is very
important because as part of the brain plans and coordinate actions.
And here's a really cool thing. And humans, the prefrontal
cortex is about one third of the entire cortex, while
in dogs and cats it's about four or five percent,
monkeys about So this means the bigger the prefrontal cortex,
the more flexible our behavior can be, and the more
(12:00):
we can multitask. So um, some people would actually argue
that our early hominid ancestors had to multitask. This didn't start, um,
you know, in the twentieth century. This this rapid multitasking,
although of course it's gotten much more aggressive, but you know,
as soon as as early man had to deal with
multiple things going on. Um, you know, maybe it's stoking
(12:24):
a fire. And yeah, I mean certainly, when you get
into tool use and the use of cooking and basically
external digestion, you're beginning to the human as a as
a as an organism is beginning to expand and all
these varying occupations. And then once we this culture builds up,
and certainly once you reach the point where individuals can
specialize in a given task, all the more. Right, So
(12:46):
there's an idea that it's hardwired in us where we
need to do it we're supposed to do it. But
to what degree, I guess is the question. And to
what degree have we evolved alongside what we're actually capable
of doing now or sort of capable of doing. Um.
What we find out is that when we are doing
a couple of things at once, yes, we've got the
(13:09):
prefrontal cortex to do it, but we're demanding much more
of the cognitive process. You and I have talked about
this before, this idea that we have a finite amount
of mental energy that we can sometimes bolster with food
and whatnot. UM. But like a video game, you have
a power meter, and everything that happens to you in
the course of the day is going to influence that
(13:31):
power meter. In the occasional power up may give you
a little boost, but at the end of the day
it's gonna wear. Yeah. But let's say that you are depleted.
You you don't have you know, a good, um glycost
bump there with a piece of food or an apple
or something like that, and you're just tired, and you're multitasking,
you're demanding a lot. You've got a big cognitive load
going on. And this is when you see the brain
(13:53):
um entering into what we call bottlenecking, and that's just
what it sounds like, right, nothing's really getting through because
you're trying to do a bunch of tasks at once.
And this is because you're doing something called task switching.
Right now. This is Yeah, this is really interesting because
it gets into the idea that there really isn't such
any such thing as multitasking, the idea that well, not
(14:16):
in the sense that we're doing two things at once. Instead,
we're more like an individual who who instead of doing
one thing with one hand and one thing with the other,
is switching back and forth between two tasks with both hands,
if that makes any sense. Yeah, I kind of think
of it as a train conductor to right, like you're
you're switching tracks. Yeah, I mean, well, there's since the
(14:36):
title of the podcast, a one track mind, um, which
is generally kind of used as a put down. Oh
they've got a one track mind. They're only thinking about
one thing. But at any given moment, we can only
have a one track mind. Uh, that's just the the
extent of our cognitive capabilities. And uh, I can also
(14:57):
think of it like a two deck tape player. You know,
you got two decks there, You've got two different tapes
in there. Maybe one's Queen's Greatest hits and maybe the
other one is Bob Speaker's greatest hits. But you're only
gonna play Bob Sneaker or Queen. You're not gonna play
them both at the same time unless you do a
little mash up thing, which is going to require some
pre planning. And it's still just one track, right exactly.
Um yeah. Brain scans during task switching show activity in
(15:20):
four major areas. The prefrontal cortex, of course, which is
involved in shifting and focusing your attention and selecting which
task to do one. And then you've got the posterior
parietal lobe, which activates rules for each task you switch to.
The anterior singulate gyrus monitors errors errors again very important.
We'll talk more about that and the pre mot motor
(15:42):
car text. It's one of those morning's pre motor cortex
is preparing you to move in some way, right, that's
the part that makes your hands, in your legs and
your feet all moved together. So, according to Psychology Today's
article the true cost of multitasking, each task switch might
waste only one tenth of a second. But if you
(16:03):
do a lot of switching throughout the day. This can
add up to a loss oft of your productivity. Yeah,
It's like, if you're doing two different things in two
different rooms of your house, you're gonna have to move
back and forth between the two and it may not
be much of a distance, but the more you go
back and forth, the more you're pacing around the house. Um.
It's it's also interesting thinking and looking at this multitasking
(16:24):
to to think of it as kind of juggling as well,
the idea that you have three balls and you're trying
to keep at least one of them in the air
at any given moment. But but that that tends to
serve as a slightly better way of thinking about it.
There's a study in the July sixteenth episode of neuron
Um that suggested that our brains aren't really built to
handle parallel processing like we've been talking about. But the
(16:48):
good news is that studies have shown that extensive training
can make us better at doing two things at once
or more, you know, juggling back and forth between these
two different things. And there are various theories and why
this is the case, but one of the strong ones
is that with a lot of practice, certain routines become
kind of automatic. UM. An example of this that came
to mind actually has to do with I was reading
(17:11):
some Roger Ebert reviews the other day because he tends
to be my go to guy, like with a lot
of people, he's kind of my go to guy for
movie reviews, and I ran across a thread where he
was responding to uh, some listener feedback on his review
for Silent Hill. Uh. The movie based on a video
game that came out a few years back from Christoph Ghans,
wonderful imaginative French director who did Brotherhood the Wolf and UM,
(17:35):
and Ebert was just kind of perplexed by the movie.
He was just like, that didn't really make sense to me,
and um, and somebody ask him a few questions about
an Ebert to drew some parallels to the study. UH.
It analyze people's brain activity during video games, and when
they first start playing a video game, a whole lot
of the brain area lights up because they're they're having
to deal with new controls and new environment and new activities.
(17:58):
But as they become better and better at the at
the game, that that neural activity shrinks down to like
just a very small area. And then and then in
this we get into the whole idea of video games
as a as a release, Like I don't want to
use my whole brain. I just want to use a
very little portion of it and give give my my
thinking arrest. So which kind of goes into the flow
state in a weird way, right, Yeah. And so the
(18:19):
better you become at a task, the more of a
flow state it is, or the more familiar you are
with the various things that go into it. Like I
think of activities we do on the computer, like like
um goodness, I used to when I worked in newspapers,
had he's in design all the time to build these pages,
and they're all these hot keys, you know, different combinations
that then make that just save you enormous amounts of time. Uh,
(18:44):
and you end up just committing those two memory and
then inevitably you reach that point we're having to train
someone else and how to use it and cannot you know,
and there's like no actual memory of what any of
those hot keys are, Like I can only form up
by game memory, just like pure muscle memory. So I
had my brain had refined it down to just the
bare minimum amount of thought required to carry it out,
(19:05):
which enabled me to do things like build pages and
listen to science podcast at the same time. That's interesting
because I used to do a lot of database work
and it's sort of the same thing. And sometimes I
felt like, you know, sort of like I was in
the matrix and I was just like moving through space
and time and yeah, and fulfilling because you're doing all
these things at once. Yeah, you're right, because I felt
(19:25):
like I was being really productive. Put that hatteract making
a spreadsheet in that in that moment, I might have
just because it depended on the task. Again, it could
have been wrote at that point, but if I had
to engage a little bit more cognitive muscle, not so much.
Now here's the question men women do we have a
different share and multitasking is the jury out. Is it
(19:47):
true that women are great multitaskers or is it just
sort of cultural baggage. I've been thinking about this one
because in terms of cultural baggage, I mean, I can
definitely see where individuals would and I'm not not without
even dry any science into it, yet, I can see
where the cultural idea that women are multitaskers and men
are not they both men and women could really get
(20:09):
behind that idea. Because for women, Uh, if someone says, oh, well,
you're a natural multitasker, it's well, it's like, thank you,
that's great, because that means I'm capable of doing I
am the hits that cataract of spreadsheets, Thank you very much.
And then for men, if someone says, don't you know,
don't worry, You're just not your your gender is not
about multitasking, then it's kind of like, well, WHOA, Thank goodness,
that's a load off my shoulders. I can only be
(20:31):
expected to do one task well at any given time,
so I've kind of got an out for all the
other things I screw up in my life. All Right, Well,
so I'm about to mention this study, but before I
do so, I will listen that. And I'd like to
hear from the women out there too. Maybe you don't
want to be known as a multitask or maybe you
feel the cultural baggage of that. And I say that
because there's a two thousand eleven study at the Department
of Sociology Anthropology at Bar Lawn University in Israel, and
(20:55):
this found that working mothers came This is a family
of working mothers and fathers, they spend about ten more
hours per week multitasking than do working fathers. So we're
talking about forty eight point three hours as UH compared
to thirty eight point nine for dad's okay. The lead
author of the studies share Offer said when they multitask
(21:15):
at home, for example, mothers are more likely than fathers
to engage in housework or childcare activities, which are usually
labor intensive efforts. Fathers, by contrast, tend to engage in
other types of activities when they multitask at home, such
as talking to a third person who are engaging in
self care. These are less burden sum experiences. So this
(21:36):
is very interesting to me because I do think that
the cultural norm has informed the behavior. And as someone
who is a working mom and a multitasker, I guess
with the capital M, you do kind of feel that
sense of it. I don't feel that I'm good at it,
but some of these things are very wrote and they're
very physical when they're easy to do, but it still
(21:58):
takes a lot of energy out of you. Yeah, that
makes sense. I found it interesting with some of the
older anthropology kind of arguments about this were that if
you go back to um Our, most ancient days, you
had men who had to go out and do one thing.
Supposedly they like, we were hunter gatherers, So the men
went out to hunt down and kill particular animals, and
(22:18):
then the women gathered things and looked after the children
and kept the fire going and all that, which I
guess kind of as an idea, it's kind of interesting,
but but but apparently holds no real real sway over there.
And see, the thing about that too, is that not
only are they keeping their tending the children the fire,
but they're also foraging because most of the diet is
(22:41):
predicated on their ability to go out and find foods
there that are non meat, right, and then also the
men like and where again going with sort of a
non historical, vague idea of the past when we're discussing this.
But but yeah, if you're going out to hunt an animal,
it's not quite as simple as just one single task.
You're having to deal with with weapon crafting up, weapon upkeep.
(23:04):
Even if that weapon is just like a sharpened stone
or a bone, you know, still you've gotta keep it
in good repair. You're having to possibly track animals and
and if you're doing it on foot, you're talking about
a rather labor intensive hunt there. So I don't even
buy that the hunting for food in in the in
our ancient in the ancient times would have been a single,
(23:25):
one track mind kind of a deal, right, right, So
what I'm proposing is I think that man canal task
just as well as women, but perhaps there's some cultural
stuff going on there. However, we have to talk about
the corpus colusum, because apparently in women are not Apparently,
we know for sure that this part of the brain,
which handles communication between the two hemispheres, is actually wider
(23:47):
than in men's brains, which has made some people wonder
whether or not um this helps to synthesize information better
in women, to communicate better in both sides of the hemispheres,
But we don't have any really big conclusive evidence that
says this allows women to multitask better. Along the same lines,
there was a French National Institute of Health and Medical
(24:10):
Research study and they took thirty two right handed people
and they were asked to match some letters. And of course,
given this the study, the brain, of course we had
fr fm R eyes loaded up as well. Scanning the brains,
seeing what's flowing around, what kind of activity has taken place.
And it's also important that there was money on the line.
There's a financial reward for the participants in this study
(24:31):
to match things up correctly. All right, So during this task,
both him hemispheres of the brains medial frontal cortex, which
is involved in motivation, lights up. All right. Then the
researchers shook it up. They introduced a second task where
the subjects had to match like upper case letters in
addition to matching like lower case letters with separately occuring
(24:53):
reward tallies. So, uh, what they found was the subjects
brains divided the two reward bay skulls between the two
sides of the region of the brain. So what what
they ended up finding here was that, okay, the area
of the brain that was highly active and the observed
multitasking behavior was the was the front o polar cortex,
which organizes pending goals while the brain completes another task,
(25:16):
and this is especially well developed in humans. But they
also the the the scientists also argued that humans have
this problem though, of deciding between more than two alternatives,
and a possible explanation so they cannot keep in mind
and switch back and forth between three or more alternatives.
(25:37):
So we're basically A or D. If you certainly A,
B and C, then then the cognitive load increases dramatically. Okay,
so again there's like that switch on the track, right, yeah,
either or Yeah. This was particularly interesting when I think two.
One of my favorite authors are Scott Baker has a
series of fantasy books. I mentioned them before. The first
(26:00):
one in the series is The Darkness That Comes Before
and It. He has this whole He himself is uh
heavy into psychology and neuroscience and weaves all that through
this book. Even though the book deals with with magic
and and and the like and their sorcerers, he's very
into the neuroscience of how that works, and particularly there's
a there's a type of magic in the books called
(26:21):
the nosis, and it's revealed eventually in the books that
it works by holding two different interpretations of the same
spell chant in your mind at the same time. So
so being able to to work these acts of magic
involves the cognitive process of holding two things in your mind,
(26:42):
two meanings that are parallel, at the same time. And
in the books there's a there's a special character. H
got a superhuman that emerges who's able to work even
greater works of magic because he can hold three different
ideas in his mind at the same time. So I
find that that could be a really interesting take on
(27:03):
magic by combining it with sort of what we know
through neuroscience about our ability to multitask. Is like mental
scrolls of of magic in our minds that we're trying
to Yeah, yeah, multitasking is a kind of magic for that.
All right, um, we're gonna take a quick break, and
when we get back, we're going to talk about the
cognitive and physiological costs of multitasking, like a short term
(27:28):
memory for instance. All Right, we're back, and we're gonna
look a little bit more at multitasking and what all
of this multitasking at least these attempts at multitasking due
to our minds. Okay, So we talked about bottlenecking, we
(27:52):
we talked about this ability to keep some things in
our minds. Well, it turns out that, of course it's
all has to do with short term memory and committing
short term memory into long term memory if you can. Um, so,
of course, if you're multitasking, if you're um, let's say
you're studying for an exam, but you're listening to music
or you're watching TV. Turns out these short term memory
(28:12):
is going to be taxed and you're probably not going
to get a lot of recall out of that experience.
Um Our short term memories can only store between five
and nine things at once, so when information doesn't make
it into short term memory, it can't be transferred into
long term memory for recall later. Okay, that's why if
you're watching TV while you're studying, it's not going to
(28:33):
be as effective. So if you can't recall it, you
can't use it now. I did also find them one
of our our studies we're looking at. They did argue that,
you know, it depends on what you're doing. Because I
was very concerned about the music thing because I listen
to music all the time. When it works, I was
started thinking, well, maybe I'm doing all this wrong and
then I need to cut out the music. But they
(28:54):
did say that for some people, listening to music while
working actually makes them more creative because they're using different
car that it functions, which I think lines up well
with what I've sort of observed before. And if I'm
doing something that really requires me to think that I
can't listen to anything the lyrics in it. Right. We
talked about that before that lyrics sometimes can mess with
what you're trying to do, right, because you hear those
(29:16):
messages and trying to do language, and then I'm also
I'm also absorbing language. Then then that's going to hit
both of those, uh, those categories. Right. But you know,
so if you're listening to something instrumental in your researching
or trying to learn something or studying, then that should
be fined. Research shows that people use different areas of
the brain for learning and storing new information when they
are distracted. So brain scans of people who are distracted
(29:39):
or multitasking show activity in the stray item, and this
is a region of the brain involved in learning new skills.
Brain scans of people who are not distracted show activity
in the hippocampus, and this is a region involved in
storing and recalling information. So again it points to this
idea that if you are unit asking, if you're studying,
if you're researching, your doing this one thing and then
(30:01):
you're engaging your hippocampus more. And that's good because then
you're storing those memories and your recall for that material
is going to be better later. Now, another thing that
multitasking effects is stress and stress levels. And UH professor
Gloria Marks April study and we talked about this in
(30:21):
the last podcast. UM. This this Landmark study. She found
that after only twenty minutes of interrupted performance, people reported
significantly higher stress, frustration, workload, effort, and pressure. So it's
like this low lying level of stress that people put
upon themselves when they are multitasking. And UH psychologist David
(30:43):
Meyer at the University of Michigan found that multitasking contributes
to the release of stress hormones and adrenaline, which can
cause of course, we know that long term health problems
if not controlled, and it also contributes to the loss
of short term memory. So what's you're the The sort
of story that comes out here is that if you're
multitasking throughout the day and you're doing a lot, what
(31:03):
you find is that you've got that low level of
anxiety building because it always feels like those loops or
open those loops that we talked about, the tasks that
we need to complete, and that also kind of falls
back into some of the stereotypes about say busy moms,
you know, being kind of frazzled, or anybody that's really
got a lot on their plate being a bit frazzled
because they are doing so many things and there's so
(31:25):
many loops open that it's having it's take an impact
on their short term memory and their ability to perform.
And um, you know, in the in the case of
say studying for an exam or researching, if you are multitesting,
you're trying to do a deep dive into a topic,
and you're switching between tasks and you know in an
hour you've maybe gleaned only ten minutes of that research.
(31:46):
That's not a deep dive. That's not a lot of
time to think in depth about any one thing. So
of course it behooves you to try to unitask in
those instances where it's really important to commit that to
memory or you really need to come to trade on something. Yeah.
This also leads us into this area UM referred to
as a tension deficit traite, which I found really interesting. Now,
(32:07):
this is not attention deficit, uh disorder disorder. This is
attention deficit. There's a trait that emerges due to the
environment that you've put yourself in. So you're putting yourself
in this environment where there's all the stimuli coming at you.
There's all there, all these different tasks that you've you've
put before yourself. You're multitasking or trying to and it
(32:29):
generates basically the symptoms of attention deficit disorder. I think
what's interesting about this is that again it's um, it's
something in our environment, and it's something that we condition
ourselves into. Now it's a pretty new idea. We've been
studying attention deficit disorder for for years and years, but
this idea of attention deficit traite really comes out of
(32:50):
a two thousand five Harvard Business Review article Overloaded Circuits,
Why smart people under Perform? And this was by Glenn Wilson,
the guy who who wrote the study and UH and
and and most of these ideas really hinge back to
his UH, his his UH studies regarding attention deficit as
it emerges again as a as as a symptom of
(33:11):
environmental stimuli. Yeah, and he did the study for Hewlett
Packard um to look at this productivity of multitasking. What
I think is cool that he just not so cool
But interesting is that he discovered is that the average
workers functioning i Q um a temporary qualitative of state here,
and we're talking about drops ten points when multitasking, and
that is more than double the four point drop it
(33:34):
occurs when someone smokes marijuana. Wow. So I mean that really,
especially for anyone out there in in a management position,
I mean it really should make you think twice about
putting new responsibilities on an employer because you're basically taking
a notch out of their i Q with with each task,
(33:54):
until you just reduced them to a a just a
mumbling ball of goog with a whole just spreadsheets to
fill up. Yes, just you can hear the stress and
buzzing off of that person. Yeah um. But you know,
of course that leads to this idea of how can
you best rein this in and manage it? And there's
something called the rule Uh. This says that the work
(34:15):
you do gives eight of the impact and effectiveness. So
you focus on identifying the of your task that are
really effective and then you do them one at a time.
I tend to, I guess I tend to sort of
do maybe a take on that where since I'm better
in the morning, and I guess it makes sense because
I haven't had much time to deplete my cognitive abilities. Uh.
(34:37):
Pick the things that are most important and require the
the most amount of thought and creativity to do those first,
and then do the other things later. That's the smart
way to approach it. But of course, as we found
in the last podcast that people usually do the the inverse.
They typically um kind of distract themselves and multitask earlier
in the day and then they battened down the hatches
(35:01):
and concentrate later in the day. But you're right, that's
the way to do it is in the morning, is
to unit task and then multitask later in the day
because you have more energy in the morning and you're
fresh and you haven't become ego depleted by all the
choices of that day. So there you have it. Multitasking, Um,
the single track mind. Multitasking is magic. All of these
(35:22):
various ways of looking at it, which it really did
force me to to reevaluate the way I approach all
the things I have to do in my life and uh,
and the and and really how we function as human beings. UM.
But of course none of this is necessarily new because
we've got people have been figuring this out for for ages. Uh.
(35:42):
In fact, back in seven in the seventeen forties, Lord
Chesterfield offered the following advice. He said, quote, there is
time enough for everything in the course of the day
if you do but one thing at a time, But
there is not time enough in the year if you
will do two things at a time. So Lord Chesterfield
(36:03):
knew the the importance of really focusing in on a
single task, and he knew that you'd have to be
a wizard to do two things at once. You know. Purportedly,
even Albert Einstein weighed in on this, and this is
from a Scientific American article about multitesting. He is purported
to have said, any man who can drive safely while
(36:24):
kissing a pretty girl is simply not giving the kiss
the attention it deserves. Yeah, that rogue, That makes sense.
I mean, yeah, I mean it just gets down to
if you do try and do two things at once,
you're not gonna do either thing. Well, all right, well
let's uh, let's call over the road but now and
get a little listener and mail. First off, we heard
(36:44):
from Gregory who's responding to um some stuff I recently
said about pugs the dog breed, because I used to
think of the pug is just kind of this um
amusing but are ultimately kind of worthless breed. That it
was just kind of bread into a corner physiologically just
wasn't capable of much. But then I saw a helper
dog that was a pug at the train station. So
(37:05):
Gregory writes in and says, Robert, Robert, Robert about pugs.
My father in law had a beef farm and his
dog a pug. It became one of his farm helpers. Terminator,
that's the dog's name. May have been tiny, but he
was one of the best dogs I've ever seen to
help direct the cows. Since Terminator was so small, Uh,
he never got stepped on or kicked, and he was
never made to help, but he liked to do it.
(37:26):
As soon as he saw Tom get get the barn closed,
term was at the door, jumping and turning circles waiting
for the door to open. I think we were all
shocked the first time we saw him in action, but
he was tiny but impressive. So that little sip it
comes to us from from Gregory, that was very interesting.
And then we also heard from our listener Marta Um
(37:46):
and she writes it and says, uh me again from Portugal,
just to quit comment on Your Walls podcast. I am
a big fan of Murakami, the Japanese writer h but
he has a book that was quite hard for me
to get into, Hard Boiled Wonderland for the End of
the World. It's quite fantastic about a guy whose brain
is being experimented on, and it describes two parallel realities,
(38:07):
one of his actual life developing and one of what
is going on inside his brain at the same time,
the inner world. But this is a very real world
comprised within a long wall. The character arrives at this
city and as he walks past the gates, he is
forced to leave his shadow there, for it is that
it is the link to his real life and his
memories of that life. The story then develops inside the city,
(38:30):
and the presence of the wall is quite amazing. Um omnipotent, unbreached, unbreakable,
and actual limit between the two worlds. He has confronted
with the fact that there is no way to go
back through the wall or the gates, so he needs
to find another way. No spoilers, I'll just drop here Anyway,
this is the strangest wall I could remember. Thanks again, Marta. Well,
I like that dropping the shadow as a narrative technique,
(38:52):
you know, because then then that's sort of like a
was the movie um about Dreaming with Leo DiCaprio, Leo
like I know him. Oh you're talking about the Christopher
Nolan film Inception. Yeah, you know how they knew when
they were dreaming and they're in reality not in reality
they had the turning Top. But I like this idea
(39:12):
of not seeing your shadow and realizing that you're in
this altar universe. Yeah, that sounds really. It also reminds
me of a book I've not read. You, I really
want to See the City read The City in the
City by China Melville. But and I think it maybe
falls along similar lines. But Murracami is great. I haven't
read this particular book. Um have you? If you read
any more comments, I haven't. Um Cough on the Shore
(39:35):
was a big one. That one, the wind Up Bird
Chronicle both along but very much in a I think
maybe the And I'm not no expert by any means
in Japanese literature, uh, certainly, but certainly there there seems
to be sort of a long form aspect of his
work that maybe doesn't doesn't job immediately with with a
(39:56):
Western reader, but but it's but he's a great writer.
It's it's very satisfying, very imaginative. One of the books
had talking cats in it, and uh, but then also
one of the books had a man being skinned alive,
so he kind of it gives you various aspects of
like every day minosa plus some imaginative almost kind of
(40:16):
cute stuff. And then also there's a there's there's room
for wacky and or horrible happenings as well. So glad
guts in Kawai. Yeah, yeah, kind of nice. So hey,
if you would like to reach out to us and
chat with us a little bit about Murakami, about walls,
about uh, multitasking. Are you a multitasker? Do you think
you're a multitasker? What happens when you try and multitask? Uh?
(40:39):
And then what happens when you were able to set
everything aside and focus on that one thing in your
life or you know, you can have multiple things in
your life that you can really get into a flow
state with. Let us know, we'd love to hear from you.
You can find us on Facebook, you can find us
on Tumbler. On both of those, we go by the
handles stuff to Blow your Mind, and if you go
to Twitter, you'll find us with the handle blow the Mind.
(41:00):
And you can always drop us a line at blow
the Mind at discovery dot com. For more on this
and thousands of other topics, Is it How Stuff Works
dot com
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United States of Kennedy is a podcast about our cultural fascination with the Kennedy dynasty. Every week, hosts Lyra Smith and George Civeris go into one aspect of the Kennedy story.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
Bookmarked by Reese's Book Club
Welcome to Bookmarked by Reese’s Book Club — the podcast where great stories, bold women, and irresistible conversations collide! Hosted by award-winning journalist Danielle Robay, each week new episodes balance thoughtful literary insight with the fervor of buzzy book trends, pop culture and more. Bookmarked brings together celebrities, tastemakers, influencers and authors from Reese's Book Club and beyond to share stories that transcend the page. Pull up a chair. You’re not just listening — you’re part of the conversation.