A New York Times article looks at work interrupts as enemies of productivity.
A 2005 study, “No Task Left Behind? Examining the Nature of Fragmented Work,” found that people were interrupted and moved from one project to another about every 11 minutes. And each time, it took about 25 minutes to circle back to that same project.
Interestingly, a study published last April, “The Cost of Interrupted Work: More Speed and Stress,” found that “people actually worked faster in conditions where they were interrupted, but they produced less,” said Gloria Mark, a professor of informatics at the University of California at Irvine and a co-author of both studies. And she also found that people were as likely to self-interrupt as to be interrupted by someone else.
“As observers, we’ll watch, and then after every 12 minutes or so, for no apparent reasons, someone working on a document will turn and call someone or e-mail,” she said. As I read that, I realized how often I was switching between writing this article and checking my e-mail.
Professor Mark said further research needed to be done to know why people work in these patterns, but our increasingly shorter attention spans probably have something to do with it.
What I wonder: Do we interrupt ourselves because it is in our nature to periodically look around and pay attention to other things in our environment? Do modern working conditions create demands upon us that clash with the mind's own instincts? Do we need to somehow suppress our instinctive tendencies in order to maximize our productivity?
Her study found that after only 20 minutes of interrupted performance, people reported significantly higher stress, frustration, workload, effort and pressure.
So then how much of our stress and frustration stems from inflicting ourselves with interrupts of checking mail, checking web sites, sending text messages, and answering cell phone calls? I am amazed at how many times certain co-workers let themselves get interrupted by cell phone calls. I get interrupted enough by people in front of me without the need to get still more interrupts from people in other locations.
Also see my previous posts Brain Limits Ability To Multitask Interruptions, Work Distractions Lower Effective IQ, and Brain Scans Indicate When Best To Multitask.
While having the study participants multitask, Leber and his colleagues at Yale University monitored their brain activity using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). The research confirmed that multitasking is, on average, inefficient. However, the brain scans allowed the researchers to predict when people would be poor multitaskers and optimal multitaskers.
There's another way to spin this result: If we could find ways to up the level of activity in certain areas of hte brain then we could multitask better.
Most dramatically, the changes in performance were preceded by changes in the participants' brain activity patterns. Higher levels of activity in brain regions such as the basal ganglia, anterior cingulate cortex, prefrontal cortex, and parietal cortex corresponded to better multitasking performance.
"What is so striking about this result is that brain activity predicted multitasking performance before participants even knew whether they would be asked to switch or repeat tasks," Leber said.
Being able to predict when people are in optimal multitasking states raises tantalizing prospects for maximizing productivity in our daily lives, according to Leber. Ideally, we should reserve task juggling for known periods of optimal multitasking while doing repetitive tasks during known periods of poor multitasking.
I would like to know what sorts of environmental influences put us in states where we are more able to multitask. Also, what do we lose in such states? Are we less able to think through a single task when in a state where our multitasking ability is improved? That is what I perceive. I get into states where I think I'm better off handling yet more interrupts once I've started getting interrupted. Getting back to the single minded focus on a single task can be hard once one starts juggling lots of things.
Experienced Zen meditators can clear their minds of distractions more quickly than novices, according to a new brain imaging study.
After being interrupted by a word-recognition task, experienced meditators' brains returned faster to their pre-interruption condition, researchers at Emory University School of Medicine found.
The results will be published online by the journal Public Library of Science One (PLoS ONE). http://dx.plos.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0003083
When shown two images in quick succession, one of a dot on the left of a screen and one with the dot on the right, the brain sees motion from left to right, even though there was none. The visual system has apparently constructed the scenario after it has been perceived, reconciling the jagged images by imputing motion.
In an experiment originated by Dr. Nijhawan, people watch an object pass a flashbulb. The timing is exact: the bulb flashes precisely as the object passes. But people perceive that the object has moved past the bulb before it flashes. Scientists argue that the brain has evolved to see a split second into the future when it perceives motion. Because it takes the brain at least a tenth of a second to model visual information, it is working with old information. By modeling the future during movement, it is “seeing” the present.
Dr. Changizi and his colleagues hold that it is a general principle the brain applies to a wide variety of illusions that trick the brain into sensing motion.
Usually the brain's visual simulation of the future helps you to understand the past, present, and future. But your conscious mind is constantly getting fed a projection based on older sensory input.
Do you think this generation of illusion by the mind is limited to what you see? I seriously doubt it. There are plenty of signs from the research literature that human brains fool themselves in all sorts of ways. People in negative moods seem to form more accurate memories than those in positive moods. Whether depressed people see themselves more or less accurately than non-depressed people is debated. My guess is the answer is it depends on the depth of the depression and which aspect of self-evaluation is in question.
Individual subjects were placed in front of a panel with a green light, a yellow light and a spring loaded button, and were instructed to make the green light flash as often as possible. In one segment, they would win money every time the green light went on. In another, they would lose money when it didn't. A screen in the room showed their score. Afterward, subjects were asked how much control they had. … Among the "normal," non-depressed subjects, it depended on whether they were losing or making money. When they were winning money, they thought they had considerable control. … When they were losing money, they thought they had virtually no control. In other words, these subjects took credit for good scores and dished off blame when scores were poor. … The depressed subjects saw things differently. Whether they were winning or losing money, they tended to believe they had no control. And they were correct: the "game" was a fiction.
This desire to feel in control is probably adaptive. Even if one is not in absolute control believing and behaving as if one has some control over one's circumstances probably boosts survival by motivating people to act and to try to manipulate reality.
You often make up your mind and then wait to find out what you decided.
Already several seconds before we consciously make a decision its outcome can be predicted from unconscious activity in the brain. This is shown in a study by scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig, in collaboration with the Charité University Hospital and the Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience in Berlin. The researchers from the group of Professor John-Dylan Haynes used a brain scanner to investigate what happens in the human brain just before a decision is made. "Many processes in the brain occur automatically and without involvement of our consciousness. This prevents our mind from being overloaded by simple routine tasks. But when it comes to decisions we tend to assume they are made by our conscious mind. This is questioned by our current findings." (Nature Neuroscience, April 13th 2008)
Do we just have the illusion of free will? Probably. Does our mind full the conscious part of the brain into believing it is in charge when it is not?
Imagine a computer that monitors your brain, detects a choice you want to make, and carries out your will before you consciously know what you decided.
In the study, participants could freely decide if they wanted to press a button with their left or right hand. They were free to make this decision whenever they wanted, but had to remember at which time they felt they had made up their mind. The aim of the experiment was to find out what happens in the brain in the period just before the person felt the decision was made. The researchers found that it was possible to predict from brain signals which option participants would take already seven seconds before they consciously made their decision. Normally researchers look at what happens when the decision is made, but not at what happens several seconds before. The fact that decisions can be predicted so long before they are made is a astonishing finding.
The ability to detect decision in advance would give fighter pilots a big advantage. Ditto for car drivers who need to avoid an accident.
Thanks to Jill (whoever she is) for the heads up.
Kids asked to physically gesture at math problems are nearly three times more likely than non-gesturers to remember what they’ve learned. In today’s issue of the journal Cognition, a University of Rochester scientist suggests it’s possible to help children learn difficult concepts by providing gestures as an additional and potent avenue for taking in information.
“We’ve known for a while that we use gestures to add information to a conversation even when we’re not entirely clear how that information relates to what we’re saying,” says Susan Wagner Cook, lead author and postdoctoral fellow at the University. “We asked if the reverse could be true; if actively employing gestures when learning helps retain new information.”
It turned out to have a more dramatic effect than Cook expected. In her study, 90 percent of students who had learned algebraic concepts using gestures remembered them three weeks later. Only 33 percent of speech-only students who had learned the concept during instruction later retained the lesson. And perhaps most astonishing of all, 90 percent of students who had learned by gesture alone—no speech at all—recalled what they’d been taught.
I find that both saying what I learn and writing what I learn helps to retain the concepts and information better. Also, getting questioned about recently learned information increases retention.
Ever find a thought somehow gets lost in the noise? Our neurons suffer from noise effects when transmitting data.
Addressing a current issue in neuroscience, Aldo Faisal and Simon Laughlin from Cambridge University investigate the reliability of thin axons for transmitting information. They show that noise effects in ion channels in the brain are much larger than previously assumed – meaning the fidelity of transmission is compromised.
Neurons in the cerebral cortex of the brain can have a wiring density of up to 4km per mm3 by using incredibly thin axons as wires, with an average diameter of 0.3 micrometers (1ěm is one millionth of a meter). Although, as in computer chips, this miniaturization economizes on space and energy, it increases the noise introduced by thermodynamic fluctuations in a neuron's voltage-gated ion channels. Axons use action potential (AP) to transmit information fast and reliably to synapses, but the reliability of transmissions down fibers of less than 0.5 ěm in diameter was unknown until this paper.
The human brain is a pretty flawed instrument. Those who claim that human bodies must be the product of an intelligent designer obviously aren't looking at the human body from an engineering perspective. The deficiencies of the structure and function of the human body seem obvious though.
Looking forward a future generation of transhumans will gain many advantages over humans. Those advantages will come from intelligent design done by humans to improve our brains with better designs of brain components.
You can read the full article.
You learn less when you have to juggle more distractions.
Multi-tasking affects the brain's learning systems, and as a result, we do not learn as well when we are distracted, UCLA psychologists report this week in the online edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
"Multi-tasking adversely affects how you learn," said Russell Poldrack, UCLA associate professor of psychology and co-author of the study. "Even if you learn while multi-tasking, that learning is less flexible and more specialized, so you cannot retrieve the information as easily. Our study shows that to the degree you can learn while multi-tasking, you will use different brain systems.
"The best thing you can do to improve your memory is to pay attention to the things you want to remember," Poldrack added. "Our data support that. When distractions force you to pay less attention to what you are doing, you don't learn as well as if you had paid full attention."
You'll remember less about how you did a task if you had to do another task at the same time.
Participants in the study, who were in their 20s, learned a simple classification task by trial-and-error. They were asked to make predictions after receiving a set of cues concerning cards that displayed various shapes, and divided the cards into two categories. With one set of cards, they learned without any distractions. With a second set of cards, they performed a simultaneous task: listening to high and low beeps through headphones and keeping a mental count of the high-pitch beeps. While the distraction of the beeps did not reduce the accuracy of the predictions - people could learn the task either way - it did reduce the participants' subsequent knowledge about the task during a follow-up session.
When the subjects were asked questions about the cards afterward, they did much better on the task they learned without the distraction. On the task they learned with the distraction, they could not extrapolate; in scientific terms, their knowledge was much less "flexible."
This result demonstrates a reduced capacity to recall memories when placed in a different context, Poldrack said.
If you have only one task to focus on your can notice more patterns and look at it in more ways while you are doing it. You can basically sift through and make more sense of it. That lets you use the experience of that task in more ways.
It is a continual source of amazement to me just how distracting office workplaces are. This report is yet another argument against the rows of cubicles with all the noise and distractionn the lack of walls brings.
Chinese and English speakers both use the inferior parietal cortex when doing math. But Chinese and English speakers use different additional brain regions for calculating.
“But native English speakers rely more on additional brain regions involved in the meaning of words, whereas native Chinese speakers rely more on additional brain regions involved in the visual appearance and physical manipulation of numbers,” says Eric Reiman of the Banner Good Samaritan Medical Center in Phoenix, Arizona, US, one of the team.
Specifically, Chinese speakers had more activity in the visual and spatial brain centre called the visuo-premotor association network. Native English speakers showed more activity in the language network known as perisylvian cortices in the left half of the brain.
Reiman and his colleagues suggest that the Chinese language’s simple way of describing numbers may make native speakers less reliant on language processing when doing maths. For example, “eleven” is “ten one” in Chinese “twenty-one” is “two ten one”.
Note that the native Engilsih speakers used in the study probably were not ethnic Chinese. So this study does not control for genetic factors. I'd like to see this study repeated in an English speaking country with Chinese ethnics who were raised to speak English from birth. Also, a comparison with other groups and with more languages would provide more controls.
The difference "may mean that Chinese speakers perform problems in a different manner than do English speakers," said lead author Yiyuan Tang of Dalian University of Technology in Dalian, China.
"In part that might represent the difference in language. It could be that the difference in language encourages different styles of computation and this may be enhanced by different methods of learning to deal with numbers," Tang said in an interview via e-mail.
More use of some part of the brain to do computations might reduce the availability of that part of the brain for other uses. That, in turn, probably changes how the mind models the world.
This report is consistent with previous research which found differences in which parts of the mind process language. See Mandarin Language Uses More Of The Brain Than English.
I'd also like to brain scan comparisons done of people with different occupations (e.g. physicists, mathematicians, truck drivers, lawyers, reporters) for how they do mathematics. Do they differ between occupations as much as English and Chinese speakers differ?
Dr. Sophie Scott of the University College London and colleagues have discovered that English and Mandarin language speakers use their brains in different ways to decode language.
They found that the left temporal lobe, which is located by the left temple, becomes active when English speakers hear English.
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However, they found that both their left and right temporal lobes become active when they hear Mandarin.
"People who speak different sorts of languages use their brains to decode speech in different ways," said Dr Scott.
Two questions immediately arise in my mind in response to these results:
- By causing more language processing to take place on the right side of the brain does the use of Mandarin versus English exert subtle effects on how people think about the world?
- Did the need to speak Mandarin exert any kind of natural selection effect on genes coding for mental characteristics in humans in those areas where it has been spoken for a long time? For instance, did it select for a greater integration between the two halves of the brain in order to be able to process tones and integrate them with the brain's language center?l
People have been arguing for a long time whether the language one speaks is responsible for at least some of the conceptual model which one uses to make sense of the world. I'm reminded of Samuel Delaney's Babel 17 in which a character learns a more precise alien language and by doing so has the way she looks at life altered.
Locked into English, Rydra awakens to a certain reality - she is trapped in a strange restraining web. In desperation she switches in her thoughts to the language Babel-17, which she has partially mastered: "She looked down at the - not 'webbing' but rather a three particle vowel differential, each part of which defined one stress of the three-way tie, so that the weakest points in the mesh were identified when the total sound of the differential reached its lowest point." The perspective afforded by the new language enables her to see the weakness of the webbing: "By breaking the threads at these points, she realized, the whole web would unravel". Switching to another language creates another reality: Rydra is able to free herself."
Now, Delaney's novel is kinda nuts and hard slogging to get thru. If I went back and read it now I'd probably not even like it as much as I did way back when. But while the exact effects that Babel-17 had on the characters in his book may have little in common with the differences caused by thinking in different human languages the idea that the structure of a language has effects on how we think seems a lot more plausble. That two languages can differ so much in their intellectual demands that the effects of hearing them causes a large visible difference in brain scans certainly makes much more plausible the idea that differences between human languages can cause significant differences in cognitive processing.
For example, given that parsing the sounds of Mandarin language into something intelligible causes both sides of the brain to light up does that make it more likely that a Mandarin speaker will access different kinds of memories (textual vs emotional vs visual and so on) from both sides of the brain than a person who interprets spoken language on only one side of the brain? My point here is not to argue that doing so will enhance total cognitive performance. I'm just thinking that something about how people reason about reality (e.g. whether they tend to think spatially or whether they tend to connect melodies to textual memories) will be different if they use both versus one side of the brain to interpret language.
Also, if more of the mind is used to process language then that raises the possibility that less of the mind is available for other purposes. Whatever area of the right temporal lobe that processes language sounds in Mandarin speakers is not available to do whatever that part of the brain tends to do in English speakers. Did this create an extra selective pressure in evolution among Chinese that caused some other part of the brain to be bigger to accomodate the greater need for brain area to do language processing?