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The Myth of Monotasking
Cathy Davidson, Duke University professor and author of “Now You See It: How the Brain Science of Attention Will Transform the Way We Live, Work, and Learn.”
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An interview with Cathy Davidson, Duke University professor and author of Now You See It: How the Brain Science of Attention Will Transform the Way We Live, Work, and Learn.
SARAH GREEN: Welcome to the HBR IdeaCast from Harvard Business Review. I’m Sarah Green. I’m here today with Cathy Davidson of Duke University. She is the author, most recently, of the book Now You See It: How the Brain Science of Attention Will Transform the Way We Live, Work, and Learn. Cathy, thanks so much for coming in.
CATHY DAVIDSON: It’s my pleasure. Thank you for having me.
SARAH GREEN: So the book explores all the different implications of a phenomenon called attention blindness. This may be familiar to some of our listeners, especially if invisible gorilla or gorilla experiment means anything to. But you actually talk about a different experiment in the book, one that has some really terrifying real world implications. That’s the airline pilot experiment. Tell us about that, and what attention blindness is.
CATHY DAVIDSON: All right. The gorilla one’s funny, so people learn from that. The airline one is really pretty terrifying, ’cause it’s a way that new pilots are trained. And they’re trained in a simulator.
And there’s one thing that’s done with new pilots– it’s done fairly commonly– is you make a very difficult situation, where the descent is difficult, the atmospheric conditions are difficult, everything is happening. And then, finally, in the simulator, the pilot, the new trainee, lands the plane. And then you show them what they did, and sure enough, they negotiated everything perfectly, and they landed the plane smack on a airline carrier that’s parked cross-ways across the runway. And what that shows is the pilots are so concerned about navigating the things they see on their instruments that they breathe easily just as they’re coming into home plate. And their attention is such that they do not even see this airline carrier.
And that’s, of course, how the brain is structured. You focus your attention by excluding anything that’s irrelevant. You don’t expect this huge commercial airliner to be on the runway, so you don’t plan for it, and you don’t even see it.
There’ve been many versions of this. There’s another one I just heard about on a highway where they did the opposite. They reprised the same experiment in the opposite way where they park a big airplane on a highway, and people run into it. They’re looking for cars. They do not see this huge commercial airliner parked in the highway.
And all these experiments are great at teaching us we have to think about not only what we see, but what we’re not seeeing. And the point I make is that if we work together– because we all see selectively, but we don’t select the same things to see– so if we learn to work together, we can actually account for, and be productively working around our own individual attention blindness by seeing collaboratively in a way that compensates for that blindness.
SARAH GREEN: So it sounds like– are you saying that part of the adaptation is to shift from thinking of yourself as one person with one brain to shifting your organization to having a hive brain, if you will?
CATHY DAVIDSON: I think so. But you even have to disrupt the hive. I also think it’s about realizing how much we think in patterns, and how disruption helps us.
So for example, in the airline experiment, if somebody had come in and made a joke to the airline pilot just as he was landing the plane, he would have seen the commercial airliner across the way, because he no longer would have been so focused on landing the plane. So interesting, and it’s a little bit of a paradox. And this goes to so much of our anxiety about multitasking.
That moment that you start not paying attention fully to the task at hand, you actually start seeing other things that your attention would have missed. So multitasking– first of all, there’s no such thing as monotasking. But second, multitasking can be extremely useful for a new, expansive form of attention, whether as individuals or as groups.
SARAH GREEN: So I’m glad you brought up multitasking, because I’ve been reading more and more it seems that there’s no such thing as multitasking. There’s only switch tasking, and every time you switch a task, you lose productivity, and we have to stop multitasking. But it sounds like, actually, you refuse to be an apologist for multitasking.
CATHY DAVIDSON: Totally.
SARAH GREEN: It’s a good thing.
CATHY DAVIDSON: Because if we were able to actually pay attention in a way where we weren’t disrupted from our task, for one thing– and this is going to sound facetious, but I mean it– the world would be filled with a lot more Buddhas, because the eastern tradition of meditation is you put people in a completely calm space, no interruptions, and you ask them to get rid of the world’s cares and think mindfully about existence. And if you really succeed, you become a Buddha.
Well, it’s incredibly hard. If you do have no distraction, your mind goes crazy. Rockley out of Washington University in Saint Louis has hooked up the brain to all kinds of instruments and found out that about 80% of the brain’s energy is spent not paying attention to external distractions, or switching from email to Facebook, or whatever multitasking we’re blaming right now for our distraction, but the mind talking to itself. Any insomniac knows this, but also anyone who remembers a dream knows this, or anyone who’s tried in that meditative state to stay focused.
We also know that brain switching only takes about 5% of the brain’s energy’s. It’s pretty easy to switch between tasks. Also, there’s so many things I– for example, I left the neuroscience behind at a certain point, ’cause I felt like neuroscientists, many of them were repeating themselves, or there were so many schools of neuroscience they weren’t paying attention to each other’s work.
And I thought, whose job is on the line if somebody is or isn’t distracted? Who are the real distraction experts? So I ended up interviewing people who make direct-to-consumer prescription drug ads, because you know the FDA requires them to read the side effects. But they don’t want you to hear the side effects. They want you to go to your doctor. So I looked at Draftfcb, which makes the Cymbalta ad, which is an anti-depression– was an anti-depression medicine. Now it’s being sold as a pain medicine. But I really wanted to find out what they know about attention.
And I also talked to insurance actuaries. And the thing that I found from insurance adjusters, especially, is of course if you’re 16-year-old is texting while driving, they’re likely to have an accident. But if you really want to prevent your 16-year-old from being in an accident, take out the other seats in the car, because what’s the most distracting, multitasking thing a kid can do is be joking around with his peers, be distracted in that way.
The other thing for adults is do not get into your car after you’ve been through a traumatic divorce hearing in divorce court, after you’ve been fired, after you’ve gotten a very bad message from a doctor about an illness. Heartache and heartburn, emotional and physical trauma, are far more distracting than email, and we don’t see those as such because we’ve never counted– we tend not to think of what’s happening within our bodies as distracting, but of course it is. Anyone knows that.
Who can pay attention to anything if you just stubbed your toe? It’s very, very interesting how narrow-minded we are about our minds, and about what constitutes as external and internal parts of our mind. We need to be a lot smarter if we’re going to deal with this time of really profound change in our lives.
SARAH GREEN: I want to ask you a little bit more about multitasking and the emotional toll it may take, because I think if you think about who has to multitask for their job all the time, maybe somebody today like air traffic controllers. They have to pay attention to all the things, all the time. And they’re notoriously stressed out. And I think what you’re seeing, in the larger business world, is more people feel like that, and then stress levels rise. So what do you do– if this is the new normal, and it’s actually can be a good thing for productivity, how do you deal with the emotional part of that?
CATHY DAVIDSON: Well, there’s two things. One, first of all, the emotional part is partly about familiarity. The more you get used to new patterns, the less emotional you are about them.
A recent study of productivity, just in the last couple of weeks, showed that, in fact, people who are constantly using social networks while they’re at work, or doing Facebook while they’re at work, or switching back and forth, think they’re less productive. But actually, they’re more productive than people who think they’re monotasking who are Luddites, and who say, no, no, I don’t allow any of that. So that’s fascinating.
In other words, what you’re saying about the emotional toll is exactly right. Emotionally, we think, oh my goodness. I just spent 10 minutes on Facebook. I’m really not a very productive person.
Well, in fact, what we find is the mind can’t concentrate for 20 minutes productively. So those little breaks when you turn attention away and back are actually like refreshers for your brain. They’re like taking a glass of water for your brain, or something that just stimulates yourself in a way. Boredom is actually one of the most stressful things you can do, and one of the reasons airline traffic is so stressful is you’re constantly moving between times of waiting and times of tremendous amounts of data and data overload at the same time. And that’s extremely difficult.
And it adds to the emotional toll, too, ’cause you’re constantly fearing that you’re not as ready as you need to be, and someone’s lives are in your hand. No one’s email really has– it’s not commensurable. Nobody feels like, if I look at Facebook someone’s life– 400 people are going to die.
As long as we think multitasking is destroying our brain, as long as we think technology is ruining us, we don’t have control. As long as we say, this is a tool, and like all tools human use, we can use this better or worse, then we can take some time to really think about what we, individually or collectively, need to make this tool work for us. And that’s what I tried to do, and now you see it was– talk to people who had made the tools of our digital age work for them in really fabulous ways.
SARAH GREEN: So as we’re talking about the implications of all of this on our institutions, what I first would like your help in doing is I think when you talk about something like the education system, or the institution of work, it’s really hard to know what you’re talking about, ’cause you’re so used to seeing it around you don’t even notice it. So before we talk about what needs to change, give us a picture of how things really are now.
CATHY DAVIDSON: OK. This is another metaphor of attention blindness, ’cause we all think we know what school and work are. And we tend to think they were given to us like Moses with the tablets or something. But in fact, these are institutions that are very recent in human history.
Basically, the modern form of work– the industrial form of work– has been around 120 years. Frederick Winslow Taylor is the famous person who is the theorist of scientific management, who really was the first person who said, there should be quotas for work. He called people who fulfilled their quotas in carrying a wheelbarrow up a hill with 240 pounds of dirt soldiers for doing well, and people who didn’t fulfill their quotas were malingerers and loafers.
And this is basically in the 1890s, at the same time the educational system is trying to reshape itself from the medieval institutions of higher education, in particular for the industrial workforce. This is at the end of a 40 year period of change where compulsory schooling for first grade to two years of high school start becoming the law of the land in the United States, and again, schooling for a certain form of industrial attention.
So what’s the symbol of the school house in the 19th century? The school bell. Why? Because if you’re a farmer, you get up with the sun, and you figure out what your chores are that day. If there’s a fence that needs mending, you fix the fence. If your horse has to be shod, you shoe the horse.
In the industrial world, it doesn’t matter what time the sun rises, and it doesn’t matter if the horse needs shoeing. You do what your boss tells you. You have a place, a task, a very specific function within a larger organization. And that’s true whether it’s on the assembly line level, which is being introduced and developed throughout the 19th century into the early 20th century, but it’s also true on the corporate level.
Virtually everything about modern business and modern education get developed from a period of about 1860 to 1915. So even things we think of as ages old, like statistics– standard deviation, 1860. Things like IQ tests, 1908. Multiple choice tests– my editor, when I was writing Now You See It, says you keep whining about how antiquated the multiple choice test is. Who invented it?
Never occurred to me there was a person who invented it. And there was, and it’s a great story. His name was Frederick J. Kelly, and in 1914, he knew that we were facing a national emergency, World War I. Men are in Europe at the front. Women are working in the factories.
There’s a new law passed saying that students have to go to two years of high school. Before, high school was just for the college bound. Suddenly, everyone has to go to high school, and hundreds of thousands of immigrants are coming to America. So there’s a terrible teacher shortage.
So Kelly, writing a dissertation at what’s now Emporia State– at the time it was called Kansas State Teachers College– says, wow, if we can turn out model T’s on an assembly line, how can we standardize learning just to get people through this system during this time of crisis? And he invents the multiple choice test. If you’re a parent looking in on your kid’s end of grade required national test right now, you will see a test that looks almost identical to Frederick Kelly’s test in 1914.
Ironically, soon as the war was over, he said, woo, glad that’s over. Now we can go on to real learning, because that test–and he used a phrase that we would not like right now. He says, “this is a test only of lower order thinking for the lower orders,” quote unquote.
It’s now our gold standard. This is 1914. By 1926, he’s renounced this, and the Scholastic Aptitude Tests get formed as the college entrance board based on his test.
He was appalled. He became this Dewey-esque, learn by doing, integrated learning guy, and actually was fired from his job as president of the University of Idaho for doing it, because his faculty were into scientific management of education, which is the workforce we have today. But until we see how much our work and school is organized for an industrial age, we’re not going to be able to rethink what we need for this really different broadcast yourself, distributed work, work from home, worldwide distributed global world of work that we’re in now. We’re teaching students how to pay attention for the 20th century.
SARAH GREEN: So in this new world of attention and multitasking, one of the things that I keep coming back to that we started this conversation– you just mentioned it briefly– is you talked about the problem with being bored. And what I find in this sort of new world is that for me, I spend any time I possibly can collecting dots. I never have time to connect the dots except when I am bored. So is there any value to being bored, to zoning out any time? Does your brain need that, or am I just a bit of a relic?
CATHY DAVIDSON: No, no, no, I don’t think you’re a relic at all, and I think everybody’s different in this way. Again, one reason I spent time talking to hundreds of different people is some people get their best ideas when they’re literally racing around a racetrack. I’ve met racetrack drivers who said that’s when they get all their ideas.
Other people are better in zoning out. Other people– mind wandering is tremendously valuable. And again, one reason it’s valuable is when you’re not focused, your brain is very, very active.
Where we’re probably the least likely to come up with an idea is in a situation that is the basis of our contemporary schooling, which is the timed test. In a timed test, you’re not gonna come up with an idea. In a timed test, you’re gonna answer the test. If you’re coming up with creative ideas and connecting the dots, you’re gonna get a low score on the test, because a timed test teaches you to think by dots.
So your way– what I’m saying is, grasp that. If the best thing for you is to have some zone out time where you can connect the dots, build in zone out time into your day. In other words, what I’m against is techno determinism, where people think that technology makes you smarter or that it make you dumber, that it makes you more focused or that it makes you unfocused. What we all have to do is realize there’s tremendous variation, and we have to arrange our world for us.
Right now, our world is arranged for a fiction that no longer exists. My office looks pretty much like the office we’re in now. I can close the door and shut out distraction.
That office was made for the industrial age. I turn on my computer and the whole world comes rushing at me. We’ve done nothing yet to come up with the Emily Post etiquettes for the internet age. We’ve done nothing to figure out how we should be sorting the information that comes to us in email.
That’s crazy that I get an email, and one’s got LOL and doesn’t say, dear professor Davidson, but it’s like, hey Cat, LOL. That’s right next to the one from my boss that says, your budget is due. I have to do incredible switching not only among tasks, but among social levels and social modes, because my office, which was designed to shut out the world in the industrial age does not shut out the world on my computer screen.
And we’re 15 years into the commercialization of the internet. I’m a historian of technology. 15 years is a perfect time for institutions to start to change, because we’re starting to see a generation of kids– they don’t care about before and after, ’cause they don’t remember before.
They’re like, fix this for me now. They’re not all gaga about the new world of technology. It’s like, this is technology. Why is it so stupid? Fix this.
Nobody reads in real life the way you read on a reader. Why aren’t there page numbers? Why doesn’t it allow me to browse? In other words, you become less tolerant of technology, which means you make the technology more productive.
And that’s part of Steve Jobs’ genius is he got there before other people do. But we have to push that even further and demand more.
SARAH GREEN: I do want to ask you a little bit more about what you just mentioned, kids who are changing their environments and don’t remember a time before, because I have some friends who teach at Harvard, and they say that the students they see now cannot, or will not, read a full length book. They just won’t. And the people I know who teach there see this is a real problem. And this is Harvard, where you would think people would still read books.
CATHY DAVIDSON: Well, first of all, they need to know a little bit. The Scholastic organization that makes those Scholastic magazines for kids just did a huge study that was revealed on McSweeney’s, as literary a place as you could possibly reveal it, showing a 15-year-old today reads more books in a year– books, full length books– than their parents do, and a 15-year-old in 2011 reads more books at age 15 than their parents read when their parents were 15. So one issue may be, are the Harvard students not reading books, or are they not reading boring books?
I think a lot of books that we assign in classrooms were written for a different kind of audience, and were written for a digital age. We know those things change over time. Literature is my original field. You can pick up a book, or an article, and if you know anything about the history of the field, you can date it within five years.
I think we’re still writing is if we’re writing to other adults who grew up in a certain kind of attentional world, and students read in a different way. There’s this whole new world of young adult literature that didn’t exist even 25 or 30 years ago that’s amazing. Kids can’t get enough of it. Young people can’t get enough of it.
If you read that, though, it’s more fast-paced, but it’s also really ambiguous. It deals with incredible life issues in a way– before there was a drought. You read these dorky kids books, and then you read adult books, and there was a trough in between.
Publishers have figured out that young adults want to read books. It’s those kids that stood in line at midnight every night for Harry Potter. They are saving publishing right now.
Every young adult list is saving publishing. It’s adults who aren’t reading as much. Forget the kids. The kids are doing fine.
But writing for a new way of reading maybe hasn’t happened as much yet. Maybe we’re at a different mode of reading, and those Harvard professors, and those Duke professors, haven’t figured out yet that young people are reading in a different way. It’s not they don’t read. They’re reading differently, there’s a mismatch.
And I think that’s what happens 15 years into any new technology. You have a tension because you’re in a transitional time where there’s still certain structures, preferences, appetites, habits, tendencies, that were all cultivated by the institutions of one era, and that there’s a mismatch between those in the institutions and the new forms of attention of a new era.
SARAH GREEN: Well, Cathy, I really wish we had more time to talk about all of this stuff. I have a bunch of questions we didn’t even get to. But, unfortunately, that is all the time we have. Thank you again, so much, for coming in.
CATHY DAVIDSON: Thank you for having me. It’s just been a pleasure to talk to you. Thank you so much.
SARAH GREEN: That was Cathy Davidson. The book is Now You See It. For more HBR IdeaCast, subscribe on iTunes, or visit hbr.org.