Our
brains are busier than ever before. We’re assaulted with facts, pseudo facts,
jibber-jabber, and rumour, all posing as information. Trying to figure out what
you need to know and what you can ignore is exhausting. At the same time, we
are all doing more. Thirty years ago, travel agents made our airline and rail
reservations, salespeople helped us find what we were looking for in shops, and
professional typists or secretaries helped busy people with their
correspondence. Now we do most of those things ourselves. We are doing the jobs
of 10 different people while still trying to keep up with our lives, our
children and parents, our friends, our careers, our hobbies, and our favourite
TV shows.
Our smartphones have become Swiss army
knife–like appliances that include a dictionary, calculator, web browser,
email, Game Boy, appointment calendar, voice recorder, guitar tuner, weather
forecaster, GPS, texter, tweeter, Facebookupdater, and
flashlight. They’re more powerful and do more things than the most advanced
computer at IBM corporate headquarters 30 years ago. And we use them all the
time, part of a 21st-century mania for cramming everything we do into every
single spare moment of downtime. We text while we’re walking across the street,
catch up on email while standing in a queue – and while having lunch with
friends, we surreptitiously check to see what our other friends are doing. At
the kitchen counter, cosy and secure in our domicile, we write our shopping
lists on smartphones while we are listening to that wonderfully informative
podcast on urban beekeeping.
But
there’s a fly in the ointment. Although we think we’re doing several things at once,
multitasking, this is a powerful and diabolical illusion. Earl Miller, a
neuroscientist at MIT and one of the world experts on divided attention, says
that our brains are “not wired to multitask well… When people think they’re
multitasking, they’re actually just switching from one task to another very
rapidly. And every time they do, there’s a cognitive cost in doing so.” So
we’re not actually keeping a lot of balls in the air like an expert juggler;
we’re more like a bad amateur plate spinner, frantically switching from one
task to another, ignoring the one that is not right in front of us but worried
it will come crashing down any minute. Even though we think we’re getting a lot
done, ironically, multitasking makes us demonstrably less efficient.
Multitasking
has been found to increase the production of the stress hormone cortisol as
well as the fight-or-flight hormone adrenaline, which can overstimulate your
brain and cause mental fog or scrambled thinking. Multitasking creates a
dopamine-addiction feedback loop, effectively rewarding the brain for losing
focus and for constantly searching for external stimulation. To make matters
worse, the prefrontal cortex has a novelty bias, meaning that its attention can
be easily hijacked by something new – the proverbial shiny objects we use to
entice infants, puppies, and kittens. The irony here for those of us who are
trying to focus amid competing activities is clear: the very brain region we
need to rely on for staying on task is easily distracted. We answer the phone,
look up something on the internet, check our email, send an SMS, and each of
these things tweaks the novelty- seeking, reward-seeking centres of the brain,
causing a burst of endogenous opioids (no wonder it feels so good!), all to the
detriment of our staying on task. It is the ultimate empty-caloried brain
candy. Instead of reaping the big rewards that come from sustained, focused
effort, we instead reap empty rewards from completing a thousand little
sugar-coated tasks.
In
the old days, if the phone rang and we were busy, we either didn’t answer or we
turned the ringer off. When all phones were wired to a wall, there was no
expectation of being able to reach us at all times – one might have gone out
for a walk or been between places – and so if someone couldn’t reach you (or
you didn’t feel like being reached), it was considered normal.
Now
more people have mobile phones than have toilets. This has created an implicit
expectation that you should be able to reach someone when it is convenient for
you, regardless of whether it is convenient for them. This expectation is so
ingrained that people in meetings routinely answer their mobile phones to say,
“I’m sorry, I can’t talk now, I’m in a meeting.” Just a decade or two ago,
those same people would have let a landline on their desk go unanswered during
a meeting, so different were the expectations for reachability.
Just
having the opportunity to multitask is detrimental to cognitive performance.
Glenn Wilson, former visiting professor of psychology at Gresham College,
London, calls it info-mania.
His research found that being in a situation where you are trying to
concentrate on a task, and an email is sitting unread in your inbox, can reduce
your effective IQ by 10 points. And although people ascribe many benefits to
marijuana, including enhanced creativity and reduced pain and stress, it is
well documented that its chief ingredient, cannabinol, activates dedicated cannabinol
receptors in the brain and interferes profoundly with memory and with our
ability to concentrate on several things at once. Wilson showed that the
cognitive losses from multitasking are even greater than the cognitive losses
from pot‑smoking.
Russ
Poldrack, a neuroscientist at Stanford, found that learning information while
multitasking causes the new information to go to the wrong part of the brain.
If students study and watch TV at the same time, for example, the information
from their schoolwork goes into the striatum, a region specialised for storing
new procedures and skills, not facts and ideas. Without the distraction of TV,
the information goes into the hippocampus, where it is organised and
categorised in a variety of ways, making it easier to retrieve. MIT’s Earl
Miller adds, “People can’t do [multitasking] very well, and when they say they
can, they’re deluding themselves.” And it turns out the brain is very good at
this deluding business.
Then
there are the metabolic costs that I wrote about earlier. Asking the brain to
shift attention from one activity to another causes the prefrontal cortex and
striatum to burn up oxygenated glucose, the same fuel they need to stay on
task. And the kind of rapid, continual shifting we do with multitasking causes
the brain to burn through fuel so quickly that we feel exhausted and
disoriented after even a short time. We’ve literally depleted the nutrients in
our brain. This leads to compromises in both cognitive and physical
performance. Among other things, repeated task switching leads to anxiety,
which raises levels of the stress hormone cortisol in the brain, which in turn
can lead to aggressive and impulsive behaviour. By contrast, staying on task is
controlled by the anterior cingulate and the striatum, and once we engage the
central executive mode, staying in that state uses less energy than
multitasking and actually reduces the brain’s need for glucose.
To
make matters worse, lots of multitasking requires decision-making: Do I answer
this text message or ignore it? How do I respond to this? How do I file this
email? Do I continue what I’m working on now or take a break? It turns out that
decision-making is also very hard on your neural resources and that little
decisions appear to take up as much energy as big ones. One of the first things
we lose is impulse control. This rapidly spirals into a depleted state in
which, after making lots of insignificant decisions, we can end up making truly
bad decisions about something important. Why would anyone want to add to their
daily weight of information processing by trying to multitask?
In
discussing information overload with Fortune 500 leaders, top scientists,
writers, students, and small business owners, email comes up again and again as
a problem. It’s not a philosophical objection to email itself, it’s the
mind-numbing number of emails that come in. When the 10-year-old son of my
neuroscience colleague Jeff Mogil (head of the Pain Genetics lab at McGill
University) was asked what his father does for a living, he responded, “He
answers emails.” Jeff admitted after some thought that it’s not so far from the
truth. Workers in government, the arts, and industry report that the sheer
volume of email they receive is overwhelming, taking a huge bite out of their
day. We feel obliged to answer our emails, but it seems impossible to do so and
get anything else done.
Before
email, if you wanted to write to someone, you had to invest some effort in it.
You’d sit down with pen and paper, or at a typewriter, and carefully compose a
message. There wasn’t anything about the medium that lent itself to dashing off
quick notes without giving them much thought, partly because of the ritual
involved, and the time it took to write a note, find and address an envelope,
add postage, and take the letter to a mailbox. Because the very act of writing
a note or letter to someone took this many steps, and was spread out over time,
we didn’t go to the trouble unless we had something important to say. Because
of email’s immediacy, most of us give little thought to typing up any little
thing that pops in our heads and hitting the send button. And email doesn’t
cost anything.
Sure,
there’s the money you paid for your computer and your internet connection, but
there is no incremental cost to sending one more email. Compare this with paper
letters. Each one incurred the price of the envelope and the postage stamp, and
although this doesn’t represent a lot of money, these were in limited supply –
if you ran out of them, you’d have to make a special trip to the stationery
store and the post office to buy more, so you didn’t use them frivolously. The
sheer ease of sending emails has led to a change in manners, a tendency to be
less polite about what we ask of others. Many professionals tell a similar
story. One said, “A large proportion of emails I receive are from people I
barely know asking me to do something for them that is outside what would
normally be considered the scope of my work or my relationship with them.Email somehow apparently makes it OK to ask
for things they would never ask by phone, in person, or in snail mail.”
There
are also important differences between snail mail and email on the receiving
end. In the old days, the only mail we got came once a day, which effectively
created a cordoned-off section of your day to collect it from the mailbox and
sort it. Most importantly, because it took a few days to arrive, there was no
expectation that you would act on it immediately. If you were engaged in
another activity, you’d simply let the mail sit in the box outside or on your
desk until you were ready to deal with it. Now email arrives continuously, and
most emails demand some sort of action: Click on this link to see a video of a
baby panda, or answer this query from a co-worker, or make plans for lunch with
a friend, or delete this email as spam. All this activity gives us a sense that
we’re getting things done – and in some cases we are. But we are sacrificing
efficiency and deep concentration when we interrupt our priority activities
with email.
Until
recently, each of the many different modes of communication we used signalled
its relevance, importance, and intent. If a loved one communicated with you via
a poem or a song, even before the message was apparent, you had a reason to
assume something about the nature of the content and its emotional value. If
that same loved one communicated instead via a summons, delivered by an officer
of the court, you would have expected a different message before even reading
the document. Similarly, phone calls were typically used to transact different
business from that of telegrams or business letters. The medium was a clue to
the message. All of that has changed with email, and this is one of its
overlooked disadvantages – because it is used for everything. In the old days,
you might sort all of your postal mail into two piles, roughly corresponding to
personal letters and bills. If you were a corporate manager with a busy
schedule, you might similarly sort your telephone messages for callbacks. But
emails are used for all of life’s messages. We compulsively check our email in
part because we don’t know whether the next message will be for
leisure/amusement, an overdue bill, a “to do”, a query… something you can do
now, later, something life-changing, something irrelevant.
This
uncertainty wreaks havoc with our rapid perceptual categorisation system,
causes stress, and leads to decision overload. Every email requires a decision!
Do I respond to it? If so, now or later? How important is it? What will be the
social, economic, or job-related consequences if I don’t answer, or if I don’t
answer right now?
Now
of course email is approaching obsolescence as a communicative medium. Most
people under the age of 30 think of email as an outdated mode of communication
used only by “old people”. In its place they text, and some still post to
Facebook. They attach documents, photos, videos, and links to their text
messages and Facebook posts the way people over 30 do with email. Many people
under 20 now see Facebook as a medium for the older generation.
For
them, texting has become the primary mode of communication. It offers privacy
that you don’t get with phone calls, and immediacy you don’t get with email.
Crisis hotlines have begun accepting calls from at-risk youth via texting and
it allows them two big advantages: they can deal with more than one person at a
time, and they can pass the conversation on to an expert, if needed, without
interrupting the conversation.
But
texting suffers from most of the problems of email and then some. Because it is
limited in characters, it discourages thoughtful discussion or any level of
detail. And the addictive problems are compounded by texting’s hyperimmediacy.
Emails take some time to work their way through the internet and they require
that you take the step of explicitly opening them. Text messages magically
appear on the screen of your phone and demand immediate attention from you. Add
to that the social expectation that an unanswered text feels insulting to the
sender, and you’ve got a recipe for addiction: you receive a text, and that
activates your novelty centres. You respond and feel rewarded for having
completed a task (even though that task was entirely unknown to you 15 seconds
earlier). Each of those delivers a shot of dopamine as your limbic system cries
out “More! More! Give me more!”
In a famous experiment, my
McGill colleagues Peter Milner and James Olds, both neuroscientists, placed a
small electrode in the brains of rats, in a small structure of the limbic
system called the nucleus accumbens. This structure regulates dopamine
production and is the region that “lights up” when gamblers win a bet, drug
addicts take cocaine, or people have orgasms – Olds and Milner called it the
pleasure centre. A lever in the cage allowed the rats to send a small electrical
signal directly to their nucleus accumbens. Do you think they liked it? Boy how
they did! They liked it so much that they did nothing else. They forgot all
about eating and sleeping. Long after they were hungry, they ignored tasty food
if they had a chance to press that little chrome bar; they even ignored the
opportunity for sex. The rats just pressed the lever over and over again, until
they died of starvation and exhaustion. Does that remind you of anything? A
30-year-old man died in Guangzhou (China) after playing
video games continuously for three days. Another man died in Daegu
(Korea) after playing video games almost continuously for 50 hours, stopped only by
his going into cardiac arrest.
Each
time we dispatch an email in one way or another, we feel a sense of
accomplishment, and our brain gets a dollop of reward hormones telling us we
accomplished something. Each time we check a Twitter feed or Facebook update, we encounter
something novel and feel more connected socially (in a kind of weird,
impersonal cyber way) and get another dollop of reward hormones. But remember,
it is the dumb, novelty-seeking portion of the brain driving the limbic system
that induces this feeling of pleasure, not the planning, scheduling,
higher-level thought centres in the prefrontal cortex. Make no mistake: email-,
Facebook- and Twitter-checking constitute a neural addiction.
http://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/jan/18/modern-world-bad-for-brain-daniel-j-levitin-organized-mind-information-overload
© Daniel J. Levitin. Extracted from The Organized
Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload, published by Viking
(£13.60 from Amazon)
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