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.
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, 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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.
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, 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.
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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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
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
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 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 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 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 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, 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. 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 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, 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, 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 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 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
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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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, 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 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 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 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
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,
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. 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 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 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,
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 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
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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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.
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, 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 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 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 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
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, 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 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. 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
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 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. 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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, 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, 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, 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 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
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 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 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? 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. 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