Hey there, it's Stephen Dubner with an announcement.
On Thursday evening, September 26th, I will be doing a live show in New York City with my friend PJ Vogt from the podcast Search Engine.
The event is called A Questionable Evening, a strategic interrogation from two people who ask questions for a living.
So come see us Thursday, September 26th at the Bell House in Brooklyn.
Doors open 6 .30, show at 7, you have to be 21 to attend, tickets available at thebellhouseny .com or eventbrite .com.
You can also find the link in our show notes.
Hope to see you there.
And now, today's episode.
I have a question. What are you doing right now?
That's easy. You are listening to this podcast.
At least you're partially listening.
If you're like most people, you're probably doing something else at the same time, walking your dog maybe, doing some housework or desk work, or maybe coding, could be running a table saw.
We all know what this is called, multitasking, a name taken from the early computing era and now applied to humans.
It is almost a philosophy.
This is who we are, and this is what we do.
But there are some other things to be said about multitasking, things that are not widely known.
It's known within academic circles, but I guess we have failed to bring it out into the general public.
And so on today's episode of Freakonomics Radio, which you were kind of listening to, we will tell you what the academics have failed to tell you.
There is some surprising science on multitasking.
It tells us something about the basic architecture of our brains.
Most important, we'll hear whether multitasking works and we'll hear from someone who opposes multitasking and yet helps sell a product that promotes it.
Yeah, I think it's a reasonable paradox to present.
Welcome back, everybody.
Hope you had a good summer.
I'm happy to be back.
The new season commences now.
This is Freakonomics Radio, the podcast that explores the hidden side of everything with your host, Stephen Dubner.
Olivia Grace is a well -educated, well -established professional born in southeast England and now living in San Francisco.
When she was in her 20s trying to decide on a career, she took a series of tests to become an air traffic controller.
Effectively, what you're doing is you're sat at a computer and they're like, hey, the main screen is going to show you simple math.
And they made it clear that there's going to be multiple tasks.
And so they're not just judging you on the speed at which you do simple math.
They're judging you on the speed and accuracy with which you do simple math, whilst also judging you on the speed and accuracy with which you do other tasks.
You start at two plus two is four, three times three is nine.
Yeah, I'm doing it.
It's going great. And then they're like, okay, every time this light is red, push the other button.
You're like, okay, two plus two is four, light is red, push the button.
Two plus two is four, light is red, push the button.
And then they're like, okay, the last one, and this is the most important one, is there's a third area of the screen where two dots are going to fly across a square.
Like imagine Pong, but without the paddles.
Or imagine being an air traffic controller and you're looking for planes on your screen.
Yeah, the two dots are effectively planes.
And if they are going to collide, push the button.
If they are not going to collide, do not push the button.
If you get it wrong and they do collide, very bad, very bad.
Looking back on the experience, would you say that they were essentially testing for the ability to multitask?
I would say that they were essentially testing for the ability to prioritize rather than the ability to multitask.
That seems to be the conventional wisdom right now, at least, is saying that actually you're doing things in sequence.
And so the piece that was really crux was in that earlier example, don't let the two dots touch.
If the math isn't quite perfect or you'd miss a red light, that's less important, but don't let those dots touch.
I know there were several rounds of this testing.
I gather you did not get cut in the first round.
I did not get cut in round one.
Congratulations. Thank you.
I was proud of myself at the time.
And yet you're not an air traffic controller today, so.
No, my air traffic control career was cut short in round three.
Olivia Grace did go on to other jobs.
Yeah, absolutely. I went airshow organization, video game influencer, commercial value add asset management, World of Warcraft podcaster, straight through that into World of Warcraft video podcasting, gaming journalism.
And then, of course, just like everyone else, product management.
I went to a game company called Blizzard that makes video games, and I went to a company called Twitch that is live streaming.
I went and hung out at Instagram for a while and now I'm here.
We'll tell you later where Olivia Grace works today.
It is relevant to our story.
But let's first examine something important, she said, that the air traffic controller test wasn't really about multitasking, about doing two or three things simultaneously.
Remember what she said.
The conventional wisdom right now, at least, is that you're actually doing things in sequence.
Now, Grace is not a scientist or a multitasking scholar, but we found someone who is.
And according to him, Olivia Grace was exactly right.
For most of us, what we're really doing is switching our attention between task one and task two and task one and task two.
When you're doing task one, you're not paying attention to task two, and there's a switch cost involved in switching the mental architecture from one task to the next.
That is David Strayer.
I'm a professor in the psychology department in the University of Utah.
And how would you describe your research interests or particular focus?
My research is really focused on various aspects of attention, selectively processing some of the environment, attention in multitasking, attention in real world contexts like driving, aviation, and so forth.
We have spoken with David Strayer before, episode 548.
It's called Why is the US so good at killing pedestrians?
The four things that are killing people are speeding, alcohol and intoxication, fatigue, and distraction.
Distraction has been prevalent for a long time, but increasing quite rapidly.
And we think that that's one of the major reasons for the increase in the number of roadway fatalities.
Strayer knows much of what he knows because of the experiments he runs at his applied cognition laboratory in Salt Lake City.
Often he measures how people perform one task once they're given a second task.
We think about multitasking as trying to do two separate cognitively based tasks at the same time.
A classic example, one that just about everybody attempts to do, is drive a car and talk on a cell phone.
We don't do that well.
And more and more people have these gadgets in the car they bring with them, or the car itself becomes a platform for multitasking.
And we don't do it well.
So it's probably a big source for the injuries and fatalities and crashes on the road.
Now, it would seem obvious, at least to me, maybe I'm wrong, that not all multitasking is either difficult and certainly not as dangerous as driving in a car and trying to do something else that's cognitively and or physically demanding.
Can you give me some examples of what you see as benign or in fact productive multitasking?
I would actually just say that even the simplest things like walking and talking, which you'd think would be pretty automatic, turn out to be tasks that compete.
So if you're walking without talking, as soon as you start talking, you'll see that the pace of your walk changes and you may be more likely to trip.
Anything that is depending on attention to be able to process the world is susceptible to dual task interference or problems associated with multitasking.
A simple example we give is saying the letters of the alphabet, A, B, C, D, E, or counting, one, two, three, four, five.
Those are easy. But if you try and combine them and do something like A1, B2, C3, D4, you'll quickly find that that becomes difficult.
You start to forget where you are.
And those are two super well -learned tasks that you can do by themselves.
But when you try and mix them together, you get all jumbled.
As soon as you start to multitask, performance on both of the tasks start to degrade.
Now, how much of that is a function of attempting to multitask versus the fact that we learn habits and patterns and memorize things that become rote that we don't need to engage our cognitive process at all?
You can become automatic at certain aspects of performance.
When your performance is habitual or automatic, it is less dependent on attention.
So a lot of things kind of just happen without consciously thinking about them.
But new things, new activities or new environments demand you to pay attention, to allocate the prefrontal cortex to process some of that information that's new and novel.
That's the real problem is that if you're always in a situation where everything's exactly routine, you're not stressing the parts of the brain that are responsible for multitasking.
But as soon as you have some novel activity like talking, like driving a car, riding a bicycle, you have to pay attention to what you're doing.
You have to engage the prefrontal executive attentional networks.
Do you know anything or think much about multitasking and multitasking failures in other high stakes settings beyond driving, whether it's military decisions or political decisions, business decisions?
So we've looked in the medical domain, medical human factors.
You can see it in terms of, say, delivery of medicine at a pharmacy.
If the pharmacist is constantly being interrupted with calls, they're going to fill the prescription incorrectly.
If an anesthesiologist or a surgeon is distracted by the technology in the operating room, that can create a problem.
In the operating room, it's not just the phone, although that's sometimes present, but you have all the displays and technology.
Each one of those are creating alarms.
It creates this whirl of noise and alerts and distractions that compete for the anesthesiologist and the surgeon's attention.
So I've been reading about how the modern worker, let's say, in the U .S., they could be in marketing, they could be at a nonprofit, could be in finance, whatever, that if you're working with a computer, which describes many, many, many, many of us now, obviously, that one big change in the last 15 or 20
years is how many pieces of software and how many platforms are, I don't want to say fighting for your attention necessarily.
It sounds a little more pejorative than I mean it to be.
But how in the course of your workday, you need to switch and switch and switch and switch.
We all may have multiple pieces of communication software, multiple pieces of productivity software and so on.
Can you talk about that, what seems to be a relatively low stakes environment, the workplace in a marketing firm or whatever, but how our attention is being carved up during the course of the day?
I mean, the research shows that you have a loss of productivity when you're trying to multitask, just the opposite of what you think.
So you may think, if I'm multitasking, I'm going to get a lot more things done.
But what happens is a big chunk of our day is lost as we're switching from one task to the other to the other.
What they find is that the best way to be productive in the office is to try and focus on one task at a time, focus on just sending that memo out, writing that email, doing whatever that operation is for a short period of time, then take a break and then come back to it.
Don't try and juggle back and forth because you'll get confused, you get lost, you'll be this where was I kind of switch cost.
I was pleased to learn from David Strayer that most of us are really not capable of multitasking.
I've been thinking about this topic for a while now, although I wouldn't call myself a neutral observer.
I have come to believe that most of us are being asked to pay more and more attention to a variety of alerts and notifications of the digital and analog varieties, and that we try to satisfy this demand, but usually fail.
But then we pretend that our failure is still some kind of victory because we're getting two things done at once because we are allegedly being more productive.
As for me, I have come to see things a bit differently.
I have come to believe that attention is a scarce and valuable resource and that distraction is common and cheap, and distraction, therefore, usually wins out.
For anyone who even occasionally tries to do what is called deep work, you will know what I'm talking about.
The work might be coding or crafting something, reading or writing something, thinking through a big problem.
There are approximately one billion podcasts and books that tell you how to create the environment to do deep work.
That alone tells us how distracting many of our environments have become.
Now, this is hardly a new problem.
I love the story of the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer living in 19th century Germany and complaining about the noisy horse traffic on the streets outside his window.
This distraction, he wrote, paralyzes the brain and murders thought.
Now, it could be that I am a bad sample.
It could be that I am someone who gets distracted too easily.
I am the kind of person who disables as many notifications as possible from as many pieces of software and hardware as I can.
I also decline digital calendar invitations because I don't find them at all inviting.
I find that they harass you into compliance.
Also, when I've met someone and they're giving me their email address or phone number to type into my phone and they keep talking while I'm trying to do that, I have to say, hey, give me a minute.
I really can't type and listen to you at the same time.
So, yeah, that's me.
Is multitasking as hard for others as it is for me?
Does it feel as costly to others as it does for me?
That's what I wanted to find out.
As I mentioned at the beginning of this episode, the word multitasking originated with computers, but I've also read that even computers don't actually multitask.
They're operating systems, direct programs to toggle between tasks, but at such fast speeds that we think they're happening simultaneously.
And now that so many of us are trying to act like computers, I thought it made sense to talk to someone who knows about that.
My name is Gloria Mark.
I'm a professor at University of California, Irvine.
I study human -computer interaction.
Mark trained as a psychologist.
My interest is primarily in attention and cognition.
What happens when a person is interacting with a computer?
How does it affect their ability to focus?
When are they distracted?
Why are they distracted?
She started doing this research back in the early 2000s with a research assistant and a stopwatch.
We were able to get access to companies and we would shadow information workers.
These are people whose primary task is dealing with digital information.
Can you name a firm or two or at least a type of firm?
I can't give you the name because they prefer to be anonymous.
One was a financial services company.
Another was a medical device firm.
And the third was a tech firm.
The work was cognitively demanding.
People had to answer emails.
They had to do analyses using Excel spreadsheets.
Some people had to write reports.
Managers did whatever managers do and we would shadow people.
And every time people switch their attention to do something else, we would click that stopwatch.
That person opens a Word document start time.
They switch to email.
Stop time for the Word document, start time for the email.
And we did that throughout the day.
And help me understand you and or like there are two of you, you and your grad student researcher.
Yes. I'm just trying to draw the picture in my mind.
The two of you are going into these firms in a real work situation and you're kind of standing around or maybe standing near people or looking over their shoulders with stopwatches.
Yes. That's right. Look, I love that you're getting up close and personal because the data sounds like it could be deliciously robust.
On the other hand, what about the observer effect?
These people know that you're standing there.
How do you account for that?
Do you hope that they just get used to you or how does that work?
It was definitely something we were concerned about.
So we always threw out the first like half day of data with the assumption that people were going to be posturing.
But when you observe people in a real workplace, you discover very quickly that people have to react to the demands of the workplace.
So they might try to posture.
There might be things that they wouldn't do if they see an observer looking over their shoulder.
But by and large, they just have to.
