0:00

This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedanta.

0:03

Many years ago, when Gloria Mark

0:05

was visiting family in Austria, she

0:08

found it difficult to get a reliable

0:10

internet connection. My mother-in-law,

0:13

who lived in a very small Austrian

0:15

town, she didn't have

0:17

wifi and I couldn't

0:19

stay away from internet that

0:22

long. And so what I

0:24

did one day was walk

0:26

around the neighborhood with my

0:28

laptop open, looking at the

0:30

bars on my computer to see when

0:32

I might find a hotspot. And

0:35

sure enough, I did find

0:37

one and I sat

0:39

down on the edge of the

0:41

front lawn of the house and

0:44

I was doing my email. In

0:48

a little while, Gloria looked up to see

0:50

she had company. Two

0:54

elderly gentlemen came

0:57

out of the house. They brought lawn

0:59

chairs and they sat down

1:01

right in front of me and

1:04

they didn't say a word and I didn't

1:06

say anything to them. And

1:08

I just wanted to get

1:10

through my email. That was

1:12

my goal. And I was

1:14

certain they were going to ask me to leave.

1:16

And they did not look very friendly, so I

1:19

didn't think it was going to be a friendly

1:21

ask. And they just

1:23

kept watching me. Gloria

1:29

tried to think of a way to explain herself

1:32

across the language barrier. After

1:35

a while, I pointed to

1:37

myself and I said, California.

1:40

And all of a sudden they started

1:43

laughing and they

1:45

said, Schwarzenegger, because

1:47

at the time their Austrian

1:50

son, actor turned

1:53

governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger was

1:55

the governor of California. And

1:58

then I knew I had their approval. and

2:01

I could continue sitting there and I was

2:03

able to finish my email. Those

2:10

were innocent times. In

2:13

a few years, Gloria was to discover

2:15

the opposite problem. The internet

2:17

wasn't difficult to access. It

2:20

was difficult to escape. With

2:24

the advent of smartphones, we now get

2:26

our email, news feeds and social media

2:28

24 hours a day, 7 days a week. It

2:34

can be difficult nowadays to have a

2:36

conversation with someone without being constantly interrupted

2:38

by text messages, email alerts

2:40

and other notifications. This

2:44

week on Hidden Brain, we examine the

2:46

effects of being constantly online on our

2:49

minds, our growing tendency to

2:51

be distracted and ways

2:53

to recapture our focus and attention.

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Limitations apply. Whether

4:41

it's the laptop on our desks, the

4:43

cell phones in our hands, or the

4:45

smart watches on our wrists, we

4:48

spend a lot of our lives looking at screens.

4:51

Technology has made it possible for us to do remarkable

4:53

things. We can stay in touch

4:55

with friends and family who are hundreds of

4:58

miles away and collaborate with colleagues who live

5:00

in other states and countries. But

5:03

what are the effects of all the screen time on

5:05

our minds? At the University

5:08

of California, Irvine, psychologist Gloria Mark

5:10

studies how our capacity for focus

5:12

is changing and how we

5:14

can achieve greater harmony as we deal

5:16

with many competing demands on our attention.

5:19

Gloria Mark, welcome to Hidden Brain. Thank

5:22

you so much for having me. Gloria,

5:25

at the start of your career, you spent

5:27

time working in Germany.

5:29

I understand that lunch was an

5:31

important part of your workday. What

5:34

happened at lunchtime? That's

5:36

right. In Germany, the main

5:38

meal of the day occurs

5:41

at lunchtime, and

5:43

it's called mitagassen. So

5:46

the typical practice was for

5:48

one colleague to walk

5:51

around, you know, close to noon,

5:53

gather up people, and then

5:55

we would all go as a group to

5:57

lunch. We would have our nice, long-term

5:59

workday. warm meal, we would

6:02

have conversations, sometimes

6:05

we would gossip. And

6:08

even though we might have been talking

6:10

about things very different than our project

6:12

at hand, I would

6:14

say these conversations got

6:17

the wheels of our minds churning

6:21

and boosted our creativity. Plus,

6:24

it helped us bond with

6:26

our colleagues. Gloria

6:28

left Germany in 2000 to join the

6:30

faculty at the University of California, Irvine.

6:33

One of the first things she noticed in her new job

6:36

was the difference at lunchtime. So,

6:40

you know, when I came back to the

6:42

U.S., you know, I had a heavy

6:45

teaching load as an assistant professor, and

6:47

I had meetings, and I had, you

6:49

know, a lot of different work. Lunch

6:53

was pretty much a break

6:55

between classes to run

6:57

to the cafeteria, grab

6:59

takeaway food, and

7:02

then I would race back to my office,

7:05

would go down a long hallway, and

7:07

all my colleagues had their doors open. And

7:10

as I was racing down the hallway, I

7:12

would look in at their different offices,

7:15

see them sitting in front of

7:17

their computers eating their sandwiches, and

7:20

then I would slide into my office

7:22

in front of my computer and

7:24

do exactly the same thing. It

7:27

wasn't just about lunch. Gloria found

7:29

herself constantly sprinting from one thing

7:31

to the next. There

7:34

were so many things that changed when I

7:36

came back to the U.S. I

7:38

had classes I had to teach.

7:40

I had multiple research projects, had

7:43

to write grants, sit on committees,

7:45

meet with students. I

7:48

had to do service work. There were so

7:50

many different things, and I

7:52

just found my attention being yanked

7:54

from one thing to another, and

7:57

it was very hard for me to stay

7:59

focused on anything. one thing. You

8:06

once found yourself double booked at two

8:09

teleconferences at the same time. Tell me

8:11

the story of what happened. Both

8:14

of them were very important and

8:16

I was too embarrassed to

8:19

cancel either one of those conferences.

8:22

So what I did is I sat there and

8:24

I happened to be in a restaurant because

8:26

I remember there was a lot of background noise

8:29

and I had one earbud for one conference

8:32

plugged into my computer and

8:35

into my right ear and then

8:37

the other earbud was plugged

8:39

into my phone and then into

8:42

my left ear and I

8:44

was trying to pay attention to

8:46

both of these conferences and

8:48

every so often my name

8:50

would be called and every

8:53

time I would hear my name called

8:55

there there's something called the cocktail party

8:57

phenomenon that if you hear your name

8:59

all of a sudden you attend to it.

9:03

So I was being asked to respond

9:05

to something and of course I couldn't

9:09

hear what they were asking and

9:11

especially with the background noise in the

9:13

restaurant made it really difficult and

9:15

so I would cringe and have

9:18

to ask them to repeat the

9:20

question and then I

9:22

would put the other earbud back in my

9:24

ear and go back to trying to shift

9:27

my attention back and forth to each of

9:30

these conferences and of course

9:32

my performance was terrible. I didn't do

9:34

well in either one of these

9:37

conferences. There

9:42

was another time you were at a

9:44

conference and a colleague of yours had

9:46

his computer networked to the main display

9:49

and it gave you and everyone else

9:51

a window into how many of us

9:53

interact with our devices. Paint me a

9:56

picture of what happened Gloria. what's

10:00

called a program committee meeting.

10:03

And this is where a group of people

10:05

come together, discuss papers

10:08

that have been reviewed, and the

10:10

committee makes a decision as

10:13

to which papers should be accepted

10:15

and which ones not. So

10:18

for everyone to keep track of the

10:20

list of papers, one

10:22

person's computer is

10:24

networked to a large public display.

10:27

So everyone can see this list of papers

10:29

as we go through them. This

10:32

person whose computer was plugged

10:34

into the display kept

10:37

checking his email. So he

10:39

kept, you know, changing the display,

10:41

checking the email. My

10:44

guess is that it was so

10:46

habitual for him to check his

10:48

email that he probably just forgot

10:51

that his computer was on public

10:53

view for everyone to see. So in 2009, you

10:57

thought what you say was a

11:00

wake-up call. What happened?

11:02

What was this wake-up call? I

11:04

received a diagnosis of

11:07

stage three colon cancer.

11:10

And it was shocking because I

11:13

thought I was the healthiest person I

11:15

knew. I jogged, I

11:18

ate healthy, I kept my weight

11:20

down. But suddenly

11:22

I was told that I had a

11:25

69% five-year

11:27

survival rate. This was

11:29

shocking. But I was very

11:31

determined to be in that 69% group. And

11:35

I'm very happy to say that

11:38

I was in that group and

11:40

have been cancer-free since. But

11:43

the cause of the cancer was not known, as

11:46

many causes of cancer

11:48

are just not known. They

11:50

couldn't find anything genetic to

11:53

explain it. But

11:55

I can say that the years

11:57

leading up to that diagnosis I

12:00

was undergoing just a tremendous

12:02

amount of stress. And

12:04

I remember at the time, I kept

12:06

thinking, I'm gonna pay the price for

12:09

all this stress. Now, I

12:12

can't attribute my cancer

12:14

diagnosis directly to

12:16

stress, and I can't attribute it directly

12:19

to screen time. But

12:21

I can say that this cancer

12:24

diagnosis was a wake-up call for

12:26

me. And it made

12:28

me realize that time is finite.

12:31

And being stressed

12:33

is just not a good way

12:36

for us to be spending our

12:38

time, living our life. And

12:41

so this health scare

12:43

just made me very deeply aware that

12:46

we need to rethink how

12:49

we use our devices and

12:52

how we need to really

12:54

control our stress so

12:56

that we can really focus on health

12:58

and well-being. That's the most important thing. When

13:05

we come back, why paying sustained attention

13:08

is so valuable and so difficult?

13:12

You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar

13:14

Vedanta. Support

13:21

for Hidden Brain comes from Honey Nut Cheerios. We

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a change of heart to your shopping cart. This

13:55

is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedanta. Gloria

13:58

Mark. is a

14:00

psychologist at the University of California, Irvine.

14:03

She studies how we pay attention and when

14:05

we get distracted. Gloria,

14:07

you once heard an unusual story

14:09

from your doctor about his desperate

14:12

efforts to battle the distractions of

14:14

the internet. What did he tell you?

14:17

My doctor knew about my

14:19

research, and so he volunteered

14:22

to me that when he had to

14:24

write a grant, he

14:26

would book himself a round-trip

14:28

ticket from California to Washington,

14:30

D.C. Now why

14:33

did he do this? And he said because

14:35

on an airplane, you don't have

14:37

Wi-Fi. At least you

14:40

have the opportunity to not have

14:42

Wi-Fi. And

14:44

I said to him, but on an

14:46

airplane there are so many other kinds

14:48

of distractions. People are

14:50

talking and walking by and babies

14:52

are crying. And he said,

14:54

no, no, those don't distract me. It's

14:57

the internet. And I

14:59

said, isn't it easier to just stay at home

15:01

and turn off the internet? And

15:04

he said he can't. He

15:06

actually had to physically change

15:08

his environment to prevent

15:11

himself from getting on the internet.

15:14

Was the doctor who told you the story an

15:16

aberration? Have you heard sort of similar things

15:18

from other people, Gloria? Yes, and

15:20

so every so often I'll

15:22

get emails from people who

15:25

tell me about the difficulties they

15:28

have with distractions. And

15:30

one email in particular really

15:33

struck me as very characteristic.

15:36

This person wrote, trying

15:38

to articulate the difficulty

15:40

with workplace distractions is

15:42

like chasing a greased pig. I

15:45

feel like every day my work is

15:47

to definitely navigate the complexities of

15:50

this shop with the accuracy while

15:52

being bombarded with emails, personal

15:55

appearances by fellow co-workers, phone

15:57

calls and texts. I

15:59

Leave Home. During. Ugly.

16:01

But mentally I did has these

16:04

devices that I think we are

16:06

all slaves to. To

16:11

get a grasp on the extent of

16:14

the problem of workplace distractions, Gloria and

16:16

her colleagues began to track people as

16:18

they sat before the computers at work.

16:21

I'm trained in psychology and

16:23

typically what psychologists do? They

16:26

bring people into a laboratory.

16:29

And they will create an

16:31

artificial model of the world

16:33

so you can focus on

16:35

a particular variable to measure.

16:38

But you know, or. Use

16:40

of devices, art, computers, or

16:43

phones. It's so embedded in

16:45

our lives. That it's

16:48

really hard to separate. The

16:50

rest of people slides from their use of

16:53

their. Devices. So.

16:55

I thought it was more important

16:57

to go where people are. And

17:00

so I created what I

17:02

called Living Laboratories so that

17:04

I could study pupils use

17:07

of their devices in their

17:09

natural environments. And to do

17:11

this, we originally started out.

17:14

Shadowing. People with stopwatches.

17:16

so every time people

17:18

switch, there's green. We.

17:21

Wind click, stop time

17:23

note the time, start

17:25

time for the new

17:27

screen or the new

17:29

activity and then around

17:31

twenty eleven. We. Started

17:34

using. Software. Logging.

17:36

So we could look at

17:38

people screen switching. Unobtrusively

17:41

and automatically without having

17:43

someone behind them shadowing

17:45

them. and we also

17:47

would have people were

17:49

heart rate monitors, which

17:51

gives a measure of

17:53

what's called heart rate

17:55

variability. Which. Is a measure

17:57

of stress. We. were to

17:59

us have

18:01

people answer very short question

18:04

which gives their subjective

18:06

perception about what they're

18:08

experiencing. And what you do

18:11

is you put all of these different

18:13

measures together in time

18:16

so that at any point in time you have

18:18

a pretty comprehensive idea of

18:22

what people are experiencing as they're

18:24

using their devices. I'm

18:26

wondering what you've observed in your many hours

18:28

of observation as you watch people at work.

18:30

What do you pick up, Gloria? So

18:33

one of the things

18:35

we've observed and I've been doing this

18:38

for about 20 years is

18:40

that the amount of attention

18:43

duration on any one

18:45

screen has decreased over

18:48

time. So when

18:50

we first started studying this

18:52

back in 2004 we

18:54

found that people's average

18:57

attention on any screen was

18:59

about two and a half minutes. And

19:02

then in 2012 this

19:06

went down to about 75 seconds

19:09

on average. And

19:12

then from about 2016 through 2020,

19:17

this was like right before

19:19

the pandemic started, we

19:21

found the average attention to be 47

19:24

seconds. So

19:27

it was diminishing over time. It was

19:29

diminishing over time and others have

19:31

replicated it. So people

19:33

found 44 seconds, 50 seconds, we

19:38

found 47 seconds, but the average of

19:40

all these studies comes to

19:42

47 seconds on average.

19:51

Are you taking into account that people might be

19:53

on the same screen but switching between apps? So

19:55

in other words they're on one screen but they're

19:57

in fact doing many different things on that one

19:59

screen. That's exactly what

20:01

we are measuring. So the

20:03

idea is that whatever

20:06

window is in the foreground is

20:08

what people are paying attention to.

20:11

So even though a person is just

20:13

on one computer screen, if you're

20:15

clicking on email, it's the email

20:18

application that appears on your screen. If

20:21

you click to work on a

20:24

Word document, it's the Word document that

20:26

appears on your screen. And click

20:29

to social media, it's the social

20:31

media. So that's what we're measuring,

20:33

is the amount of time that

20:36

people are spending on these different

20:38

screens as the screens are

20:40

switching. There

20:48

are other intersecting lines of evidence

20:50

that suggest our capacity for sustained

20:53

attention is diminishing. One

20:55

interesting piece of evidence comes from another

20:57

type of screen that we watch incessantly,

21:00

our TV screens. Yeah,

21:03

when TV and film first

21:05

started out, shot

21:07

lengths were much longer than they

21:09

are now. And

21:12

shot lengths have also decreased

21:14

over time, and they now average about

21:17

four seconds. Now a

21:19

way to see this very clearly is to

21:22

look at your TV and turn the

21:24

volume completely down. And

21:26

then you really notice the fast

21:29

shot changes. If

21:31

you watch a blockbuster film

21:33

like The Transformers, shot

21:36

lengths change about every two seconds

21:38

or so. So

21:40

some editors and directors

21:43

designed these fast shot

21:45

lengths to keep us

21:47

engaged in these films. The

21:49

idea is that if they're changing rapidly,

21:52

we're not going to get bored. And

21:55

I'm wondering if the relationship here is bidirectional

21:58

with what's happening inside minds.

22:00

In other words, we actually have

22:02

shorter attention spans, and so the movies

22:04

and television shows are catering to that,

22:06

but the fact that movies and television

22:09

shows now have so many shot changes

22:11

also changes how our minds are working.

22:14

I do think it's bidirectional. We

22:16

can't say what is causing what, and

22:20

it could also be that

22:22

film editors and film directors

22:24

are influenced by their own

22:26

short attention spans, and

22:28

so they're designing these short shot lengths

22:31

based on what they perceive to

22:34

be interesting. In

22:40

the workplace, Gloria finds that instead of focusing

22:42

on one thing at a time, people

22:44

rapidly cycle between activities, but

22:47

much of this activity has a circular feel to

22:49

it. Like restless animals pacing

22:51

in a cage, many of us

22:54

return incessantly to the same apps

22:56

over and over with not much

22:58

to show for it. We

23:01

found that people check email on average

23:03

77 times a day. These were information

23:08

workers. We measured them during

23:10

the workday. The previous

23:12

study we had done a couple of

23:14

years earlier, we found 74 times

23:17

a day on average, and that's

23:19

on average, which means that some people might

23:21

be even more than 77 times a

23:23

day. Yes, one person on

23:25

our sample checked over 400 times a day. My

23:27

God. So you

23:33

know, when I'm working, I often tell

23:35

myself, you know, I'm working on something, but

23:37

then I say I'll attend to some other

23:39

thing for just a second. I tell myself

23:41

there'll only be a second, but

23:43

then as I'm attending to the new thing, something else

23:45

pops up, and I tell myself I

23:47

look at that for just a second. You know,

23:49

now I'm on task number three. Can

23:52

you talk about the idea of

23:54

nested interruptions and how long it takes

23:56

people to return to their original

23:58

tasks? Yes. Because that's

24:00

a really interesting thing that we

24:02

noticed is that people

24:05

generally think you're interrupted and then you

24:07

go right back to the task that

24:09

you were interrupted from. But

24:12

that's not the typical pattern of behavior.

24:15

The typical pattern is that a person

24:17

is interrupted and then

24:19

they're interrupted from that interruption

24:22

and then they're interrupted again and then

24:25

they go back to the original task. That's

24:28

the general pattern of behavior. We

24:31

find that people average about 10 and a

24:33

half minutes working in

24:35

a project before they're interrupted and

24:38

move to something else. Keep

24:40

in mind within each project there's

24:42

lots of switching. So

24:45

the difficulty is

24:47

that when you're interrupted, it's not

24:49

just a single interruption, but

24:52

you're continually being interrupted again and

24:54

again. And so it's really

24:56

hard to go back and reorient to

24:59

the original task. Does

25:01

the data tell us how long it takes us on

25:04

average to get back to task number one? It

25:07

takes on average about 25 and a half minutes. Wow.

25:12

So those interruptions are not just, I'll check

25:14

something for one second. It never is a

25:16

second. It's never a

25:18

second. Remember, we're talking about looking

25:21

at the level of a project. We're

25:23

working a project interrupted from that,

25:26

moving to another project and

25:29

to another project, starting to

25:31

work on another project and

25:33

then going back. So

25:35

many of us complain about getting

25:38

distracted by others, by bosses, by

25:40

friends, by coworkers, but

25:42

you found that we have become

25:45

so conditioned to expect frequent distractions

25:47

that if the outside world doesn't

25:49

interrupt us, we just

25:51

interrupt ourselves? This

25:53

was one of the most surprising things

25:56

that we found in our research. Going

25:58

back to when we were young. shadowing people and

26:01

observing them for no apparent

26:03

reason. Someone would suddenly stop

26:05

in the middle of, say, working on

26:07

a Word document, and then

26:09

they would check email, or they would

26:11

pick up their phone. And

26:14

there was no external stimulus that

26:16

was triggering them to make

26:18

that switch. There was something

26:21

inside themselves. And I've

26:23

thought about this quite a bit, and

26:25

I realize for myself

26:27

how often I self-interrupt. And

26:30

I might have an urge to

26:32

do something. And we've asked people,

26:35

why do you self-interrupt? Well,

26:37

because people have memories of

26:39

something they forgot to do,

26:42

or they're cued to some information

26:44

in the current task to do

26:47

something else. So there's

26:49

lots of reasons. Or because they're bored,

26:52

and then their attention wanders. What

26:59

I'm almost hearing, Gloria, is that we have

27:01

something of an internal clock in our heads.

27:03

And after we've worked on something for a

27:05

little while, we're so used to getting interrupted,

27:08

so used to switching between tasks, that that

27:10

little clock goes off, and the alarm goes

27:12

off, and we say, OK, I've been working

27:14

at this thing for five minutes. Surely I

27:16

must have to do something else right now,

27:19

since there's nothing else that's actually interrupting us, we

27:21

go ahead and do it ourselves. So

27:24

what we found in our data was we

27:27

looked at the number of

27:29

interruptions that come from some

27:31

external trigger, like a

27:33

notification or a phone

27:35

call. And then we also looked at

27:37

the number of interruptions that

27:40

come from within a person,

27:42

right? People self-interrupt. And

27:45

we find that when the

27:47

number of external interruptions goes

27:50

down in the next

27:52

hour, the number of self-interruptions

27:54

goes up. So

27:57

it's almost as if people want to

27:59

maintain. this level of

28:02

interruptions. And if you're not being interrupted

28:04

by something external to

28:07

yourself, then you self

28:09

interrupt. Can you remember a

28:11

time when you interrupted yourself, Gloria? Oh,

28:14

I interrupt myself all the time.

28:16

It's very common. So

28:19

I was reading an article about AI

28:21

and for some reason the thought

28:24

popped into my head, how

28:26

safe is it to eat

28:29

non-organic strawberries. It's just a

28:31

completely random thought. And I

28:33

simply had to look it

28:35

up. Of course. So I

28:37

self interrupted, went on

28:39

the internet and looked up to see whether

28:41

it was safe or not. So you

28:44

read up on strawberries and pesticides and

28:46

I'm guessing there were probably other rabbit holes

28:48

that you went down from there. Oh,

28:51

for sure, because then of course I

28:53

started thinking about other fruits and vegetables.

28:59

Gloria says that a central driver of

29:01

our increasing levels of distractedness is that

29:03

the human brain, which has a finite

29:06

capacity for attention, is finding

29:08

itself in a losing battle with

29:10

the avalanche of information and options

29:12

on the internet and social media.

29:15

I mean we live in an age where

29:17

we have access to

29:20

more information and more people than

29:22

ever before in history, but

29:25

ultimately the mind is

29:27

a bottleneck. The

29:29

human mind can't process all

29:31

that information. So

29:34

when we have so many friends

29:36

on say Facebook or

29:39

other social media, it's just

29:41

not possible to have any kind of meaningful

29:44

relationship with so many

29:46

people. And

29:48

there's something called the Dunbar

29:50

number. Robin Dunbar is

29:53

a British psychologist and

29:55

he found that people realistically

29:57

can have about five meters

30:00

meaningful relationships. And

30:02

they can have about 150 other relationships,

30:04

which may not be

30:08

very close or meaningful,

30:10

but at least you can say that this

30:13

is a friend. But on social

30:16

media, because it scales up so

30:18

high, it's just not

30:20

possible to conceive of having meaningful

30:22

relationships with so many people. Let's

30:30

talk a moment about multitasking. We all know it

30:32

can be difficult to do two things

30:34

at once, but you also

30:36

say that there can be hidden

30:38

costs to switching between activities. You

30:41

describe these costs using the metaphor of

30:43

a whiteboard. Describe this metaphor for me,

30:45

Gloria. So every

30:47

time we switch our attention, going from one

30:49

test to another, you can

30:52

think of it as having a whiteboard in

30:55

your mind, an internal whiteboard. And

30:58

so just like with a real

31:00

whiteboard, when you write information on

31:02

that whiteboard, and then you erase it, sometimes

31:05

you can't erase it completely. And

31:07

sometimes there is a residue. And

31:10

the same thing happens with our minds. So

31:13

let's say I'm reading the news

31:16

and I read about some horrific

31:18

story. That

31:20

creates a residue. So even though

31:22

I'm switching and I'm in a

31:24

completely different task, the

31:26

residue from that news article stays

31:28

with me and it creates interference

31:31

for my current task at hand.

31:34

So it's very difficult when we do

31:36

this attention switching. It's

31:39

hard to make a clean break, right? There's

31:42

generally going to be some kind of interference

31:45

from previous tasks. So,

31:48

Gloria, you've studied the effects

31:50

of these distractions on our propensity

31:52

to make errors, and specifically you've

31:54

looked at the domain of healthcare.

31:56

What do you find? Let

32:00

me say that there have been decades

32:02

of studies in the laboratory

32:04

that show that when people

32:07

multitask, they make more errors.

32:10

There was a study done of

32:12

physicians. The researchers

32:14

shadowed physicians in their real

32:17

work environments, and

32:19

they noted down every

32:21

time physicians were interrupted

32:23

and were multitasking. As

32:27

you can imagine, physicians are

32:29

interrupted quite frequently by

32:31

other people, by devices, by

32:34

beepers. It turns

32:36

out that the

32:38

more times that physicians multitask

32:41

and were interrupted, the more

32:44

errors they made in prescriptions.

32:48

Some of these errors were quite serious

32:50

in terms of writing down wrong

32:54

medications and wrong dosages.

32:56

So when people's attention is diverted

33:00

from what they're doing, it's very easy

33:02

to make errors. We

33:08

live in a world saturated with distractions. Imagining

33:11

that we can cut ourselves off from

33:13

these distractions can be appealing, but

33:15

is often not realistic. We

33:17

need to be able to respond to

33:20

emergencies, work collaboratively with colleagues, and allow

33:22

ourselves to learn from the inexhaustible knowledge

33:24

that is available on the Internet. When

33:29

we come back, how to find focus

33:31

in a world filled with distractions? You're

33:34

listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedanta.

33:50

This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedanta.

33:52

Gloria Mark studies the psychology

33:54

of attention. She's the

33:57

author of Attention Span, a groundbreaking

33:59

way to restore balance, happiness,

34:01

and productivity. She

34:04

says the first step to fighting distraction is

34:06

to notice it. I

34:08

realize that when we use our devices, so

34:11

many of the things we do are

34:14

unconscious. So I see my

34:16

phone next to me and

34:18

I have this automatic reaction to grab

34:21

it and swipe it open or

34:23

I might have an automatic

34:26

reaction to click on

34:28

a notification or to

34:30

self interrupt and turn

34:32

to social media. And

34:34

so I learned to

34:37

ask myself, why

34:39

do I have this urge to go to social

34:41

media? Why do I have this

34:44

urge to check my email right now? And

34:46

so what this meta-awareness

34:48

does is

34:50

that it's raising unconscious

34:53

activities to a more conscious level. And

34:56

when we can become more conscious of them,

34:59

we can be more intentional and we

35:01

can create plans. For example,

35:04

if I have an urge to go

35:06

to social media and I become

35:08

aware that I'm about to switch,

35:11

I can say, okay, Gloria,

35:13

I'm going to work 20 more minutes

35:15

and then I can reward myself with

35:17

a break. I

35:22

understand that you use this technique as you were writing

35:24

your book. Yes, I'm

35:26

a news junkie and

35:29

there was a trial

35:31

of very well-known personality.

35:35

And I knew that the results of

35:37

the trial were going to be broadcast

35:40

at any moment. And I

35:42

did see a notification on my screen

35:45

that announced that the trial

35:47

results were going to be announced.

35:51

And rather than click on it,

35:54

which I knew would distract me

35:56

for quite a long time, I

35:58

pruned myself and said, I

36:00

really need to look at that

36:02

right now and the answer is

36:04

no. So I continued working and

36:06

then I was able to look

36:08

out the results when I took

36:11

a break. In

36:15

other words, once you're actually sort of trying

36:17

to be, you're making the choice deliberately. In

36:19

some ways, the choice becomes easier to forgo

36:21

because you can say it's do I actually

36:24

want to make the choice. So much of

36:26

this is happening because it's happening unthinkingly. That's.

36:29

Right? Yes. See, you become

36:31

more in control. of your

36:33

accent. A

36:35

second wave that you have recommended to

36:37

push back against distractions has to practice

36:40

something that you call for thought the

36:42

by imagining the state you will be

36:44

an in the very near future. Can

36:46

you tell me how you use for

36:48

thought to avoid getting distracted. So.

36:51

For is about imagining our

36:53

future selves and how we

36:55

won our future selves to

36:58

be. And. I think it

37:00

makes the most sense to think of our

37:02

future selves. At the end of the

37:04

workers. And so. I.

37:07

Ask myself, what do I want

37:09

to do with the entered the

37:11

day? How do I want to

37:13

feel So I want to see

37:15

myself relaxing. May. Be watched

37:18

mates effort so. Being.

37:21

with family or friends.

37:24

How do I want to see? I

37:26

want to feel rewarded and fulfilled. And.

37:28

The. More concrete of a visualization

37:30

you can form about your future

37:33

self at the end of the

37:35

day. The. More powerful it

37:37

is to keep you in check

37:39

and keep you on task. He

37:43

in other in other words are goals are

37:45

one one way to hold off distractions.

37:47

The clear our our goals are in

37:49

our heads the easier it becomes to say

37:51

I don't want to go to down

37:53

the side alley because it's gonna keep

37:55

me from getting to Michael. Exactly.

37:58

And it's about me. Making your

38:00

goals very concrete, creating

38:03

a visualization of these

38:05

goals. And don't forget, it's

38:07

not just about thinking

38:09

of finishing the task, but it's

38:11

also about thinking how you will

38:14

feel emotionally. You'll feel relaxed. You'll

38:16

feel relieved. I

38:19

understand that you're a fan of the online

38:21

game, Pangram. Tell me about this game, Gloria,

38:23

and how it speaks to the issue of

38:25

distraction and destructibility. Pangram

38:28

is a very

38:31

easy and engaging game

38:34

making anagrams, and you reach

38:36

different levels. And

38:39

it's a way to help relax

38:41

my mind. Now, of

38:43

course, I can get stuck in

38:45

this game, and I

38:47

don't want to be playing this for long periods

38:50

of time, but

38:52

it's okay to play it for a

38:54

few minutes, especially if I just had

38:58

a very difficult meeting, or I just

39:00

need to clear my head from having done

39:03

a lot of work.

39:06

It's okay to spend a

39:08

few minutes doing something easy,

39:10

mindless, rote to

39:13

help relax yourself. But the

39:15

key thing is that you have to

39:17

make sure that it really is a short

39:19

period of time. So you

39:21

may want to set a timer, or

39:24

you may want to create what I call a hook,

39:27

which is you do this rote

39:30

activity five minutes

39:32

before you have a meeting, and you know you've got

39:34

to be at that meeting, and that's going to pull

39:37

you out. Some people

39:39

talk about doing knitting as a

39:41

rote activity. One person

39:43

told me he has this ball that he

39:46

throws on a screen in his

39:48

office, and that's his rote activity.

39:51

The great writer Maya Angelou

39:54

talked about her big mind and her

39:56

little mind, and her big mind

39:58

was used for her The plot for

40:01

for doing her writing. And

40:04

then every so often she didn't break

40:06

away. And. She'd use her

40:08

little mind, which is when she would

40:10

do crossword puzzles or other kinds of

40:12

simple activities, and she did that to

40:15

relax and clear her head. I.

40:22

Love that story because what it says is

40:24

that in fact, we have these different needs

40:27

and our minds and it's not a problem

40:29

that we have a need for distraction or

40:31

a need for wrote activity. The problem arises

40:33

when those activities carry us away and then

40:36

we are down rabbit holes and we forget

40:38

the needs of you know what Maya Angelou

40:40

would cause? Our big mind. Yes,

40:43

There is nothing wrong

40:45

with doing some simple,

40:47

mindless game like pan

40:49

cram. As long as he

40:51

put a limit on it and as

40:54

long as you know you know there's

40:56

a purpose to that. The purpose is

40:58

to help you relax, clear your head

41:00

so that you can go back and

41:02

do other things that are really important.

41:04

To do. Another

41:09

technique that you recommend is that people

41:11

check their email only twice a day.

41:14

Do you do this yourself? Not

41:16

as often as I should, but

41:18

it is saying that when I

41:21

do it it's it's very valuable

41:23

and the sand of batching email.

41:25

You know you check your email

41:27

first thing in the morning and

41:30

then you check it mid day

41:32

may be after lunch. And

41:34

then at the end of the dead. So.

41:37

Twice a day as good

41:39

as well. One thing that

41:41

I discovered is that Email

41:43

Age is very sexist. So.

41:46

You might get the most urgent

41:48

email that some you. First.

41:51

Thing in the morning and if you

41:53

don't deal with it until the end

41:55

of the day, you might discover. Oh,

41:57

the problem is already been solved. or

42:00

the person writes back and said, ah,

42:03

I got the information that I need. At

42:06

the same time, Gloria, when you don't respond to

42:08

a question that, let's say, a

42:10

coworker is asking you, at

42:12

least some of the time what happens is that

42:15

someone else might end up responding to

42:17

it. So I certainly get the appeal of

42:19

not wanting to be distracted. But

42:21

surely in collaborative work environments, our

42:24

desire to not be distracted can mean

42:26

we are implicitly asking others to

42:28

pick up the slack. That's

42:30

very true. Here's

42:33

the thing. The burden is

42:35

placed on the email recipient.

42:38

The sender is the one who

42:40

benefits. But it's always the recipient

42:43

who has to do the extra work. And

42:46

I completely agree with you

42:48

that we all need to be

42:50

good citizens and do our

42:52

part, especially if we're doing collaborative

42:54

work. How

42:57

much of what you're recommending is sort of

42:59

about individuals? And how much of it

43:01

is about the structures and organizations in

43:04

which individuals are embedded? Because when you came

43:06

back from Germany to the United States, you

43:09

came back to a very different kind of job.

43:11

And someone could say, look, you had a job

43:13

in Germany that allowed you to focus on one

43:15

or two projects. You just have

43:17

a different job right now. And yes, of

43:19

course, you might wish that the new job

43:21

had the same level of distractedness, which is

43:24

very little distractedness as your earlier job. But

43:26

this is just a different job. That's

43:29

right. It is a different job. I

43:32

do think that organizations

43:34

bear some responsibility for

43:37

helping people focus. So

43:41

some organizations institute

43:43

a quiet time during the day, usually

43:46

two or three hours during the day, where

43:49

no electronic communications are

43:51

sent and people are off

43:53

the hook from having

43:56

to answer electronic communications. And

43:58

what this does is for the people is

44:00

it helps reset expectations because

44:04

email has its own

44:06

set of norms as does Slack,

44:08

as does texting, that when you

44:11

get these messages you have to

44:13

respond fast. And

44:15

so the burden cannot just be

44:18

on the individual to pull out

44:20

but there really has to be

44:22

a collective solution that

44:24

I believe organizations need to be responsible

44:27

for. One

44:30

of the ideas that you have proposed Gloria

44:32

is that we all have fluctuations in our

44:34

capacity for attention during the day. Talk about

44:36

the idea of these attention rhythms and how

44:39

we can take advantage of them. When

44:42

most people think of attention they

44:44

think of there being two

44:46

states, you're focused or unfocused.

44:49

And as I've been

44:51

studying attention it occurred to me

44:53

that there's another variable in the

44:56

mix that's really important and

44:58

that is how much mental effort

45:00

is involved when you're paying

45:03

attention. So there's things we

45:05

do that can be very challenging like

45:07

trying to read a difficult article

45:10

and there's things we

45:12

do that are very easy like

45:14

playing solitaire or playing a pan-gram

45:17

game. So we

45:19

did a research study where

45:21

we asked people questions throughout

45:24

the day and people had

45:26

to simply respond how engaged

45:29

were you and the thing you were just

45:31

doing and how challenged were

45:33

you and the thing you were just doing.

45:36

And so people responded,

45:38

we had time stamps

45:40

and we could track their responses over the

45:42

course of the day. Turns

45:45

out that when we look at

45:47

the focused state of attention being

45:49

challenged and engaged we

45:51

see a peak rhythm which is around mid-morning

45:54

for most people and

45:56

again about mid-afternoon for most people.

45:59

There are individual differences, of

46:01

course, but we

46:03

do see that there are

46:05

these peaks and valleys, so to

46:08

speak, of attention throughout the

46:10

day. How

46:12

do we take advantage of that? So if we have

46:15

a number of tasks during the day and we know

46:17

that we have these rhythms of attention, how should we

46:19

marry the levels of our attention with the tasks that

46:21

we have to accomplish? Think

46:24

about what your peak focus times are

46:27

and think about planning to

46:29

do those tasks that require

46:32

the hardest work, the most

46:34

thought, the most creative

46:37

thinking during those times when

46:39

your attention is at its peak. And

46:42

for the times when our attention is

46:44

in a valley, that's when I do

46:47

what I call sub-board network, you know,

46:49

work that doesn't involve a lot of

46:51

thought, but, you know, simple

46:54

work that needs to get done. There

46:57

is one final idea on how we can

46:59

find distractions and it is counterintuitive.

47:02

Gloria says we can increase our capacity

47:04

for focus if we consciously

47:06

take breaks from the things we

47:08

are focusing on. There is

47:11

a Japanese expression that's

47:13

called yohaku nobi, which

47:16

means the beauty of empty space. And

47:20

there's a very well-known Japanese

47:22

garden in Kyoto, which

47:25

has the most beautiful rocks that

47:28

are very carefully positioned. And

47:30

what is as important as

47:32

the rocks themselves is

47:35

the space around the rocks, because

47:37

that space creates a

47:40

kind of dynamism that

47:43

makes these rocks more

47:46

beautiful. And we

47:48

can use that as a metaphor to

47:50

think about our workday. So,

47:53

you know, of course, we want to perform

47:55

the best that we possibly can. But

47:58

we also have to design empty space. space

48:00

into our day to

48:02

enable our work to shine because

48:05

otherwise we just get exhausted.

48:09

And what can you do during this

48:11

empty space? Take a walk,

48:13

go out in nature, that's the best break

48:16

of all. You can

48:18

meditate, you can contemplate. There's

48:20

many different ways to help

48:22

your mind refresh. I

48:25

understand that you used to be a painter before

48:27

you were an academic and when you're

48:29

a painter of course you have to pay attention not

48:31

just to what you're putting down on the canvas but

48:34

the parts of the canvas that you are not painting. That's

48:37

how I came to think about this

48:40

idea of empty space or

48:42

in painting it's called negative

48:44

space where you

48:46

have to really pay attention to

48:48

the space around the figure and

48:51

give that importance too. So

48:54

it's a holistic understanding

48:57

of the painting and that's how we have

48:59

to think about our workday in

49:02

a holistic sense. It's not just

49:04

the time we do our work

49:06

but it's also the time that

49:08

we devote to replenishing

49:10

ourselves. Gloria

49:18

Mark is a psychologist at the

49:21

University of California Irvine. She's the

49:23

author of Attention Span, a groundbreaking

49:25

way to restore balance, happiness and

49:27

productivity. Gloria, thank you for joining

49:29

me today on Hidden Brain. Oh, thank

49:32

you so much for having me. If

49:39

you have additional questions about distraction and focus

49:41

that you would like to ask Gloria Mark

49:43

and if you're willing to share those questions

49:45

with the Hidden Brain audience, please

49:47

record a voice memo on your

49:49

phone and email it to us

49:52

at ideas at hiddenbrain.org. Use

49:54

the subject line distraction. That

49:57

email address again is ideas. at

50:00

hiddenbrain.org. Hidden

50:05

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50:19

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50:21

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50:23

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