Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff Works dot com. Hey wasn't stuff to blow your mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Julie Douglas. Julie, do you have a knock knock joke? Let's have it. Knock knock? Who's there? Interrupting cow? Interrupting cow? Oh, that's a that's a that's a good one. That's Do you see that how I interrupted you? Because I was the cow interrupting. And when the cow interrupts you, its like it breaks your brain. Like for a split second, you're like, what's happening because you're messing with the flow of the joke, and then you're moving and it's just like it's like a cognitive weapon. Okay, So what does the interrupting cow have to do with what we're talking about today? It has everything to do with us multitaskers and the different ways that we interrupt ourselves and distract ourselves, and the sort of psychic toll that it takes on us. Are you a multitasker? Oh? Yeah, sure, ye oh sure. Are you good at it? No? I know, you know, of course I've thought that I was good at it. I think that At some point I thought of myself as like being like the Judo master of um of multitasking and you know, sort of like moving through space and time in the most efficient way. But as we will find out, that is a myth. We are not good at multitaskers. UM. There are a few people who are good. They're supertaskers. People talk that is the one percent we are. We will talk about those guys of supertaskers in another podcast. Though. Of course, the thing about multitasking is that, okay, you you know you're not good at multitasking, you do it anyway because it's a necessity in this life that we live. And I and I I know I'm not good at multitasking either, but I sometimes kind of trick myself into thinking I'm doing something other than multitasking. Like I think that I can have tweet that going in the background for the social media stuff, and have my email open and be listening to music and working on something and then and then having to jump to another project shortly after that, and I think that that's that it's working for me. And a lot of people that are actually they actually believe that they are good at multitasking at least in some instances, like they think that it's totally cool to study for an exam while watching Safe by the Belt or whatever the kids watch these days, Okay, And and there have been some studies into it, particularly Zing Wang So, the lead author of a study and assistant professor of communications at Ohio State University, and and Uh, Zing was very interested in exactly how this plays out and why people are so confident in their ability to do something that they're not good at. Yeah. I mean most everyone thinks that they're a great multitasker. Yeah, even if you you may ask somebody in your life, maybe you may ask them, hey, are you a great multitasker? And they'll say, uh, you know, no, I'm not really, but they still think that they can they can do some of these things such as the classic uh talk on the phone while driving or God help us text while doing some driving. Yeah. And again we'll talk more about that in the next podcast. But what I think that zing Wang was trying to get at is why do we do this? What what compels why are yeah, why do we think that we're doing a great job here? Because really it is an illusion. Um, you know, when you're multitasking, you feel really productive. Um. But there was this this one great psychiatrist who said his name is Edward M. Holloway. He said that we think that we're multitasking, but really not. It's like playing tennis with three balls. Okay um, And so zing Win got at the bottom of this by recording the students media use and other activities for twenty eight days, including why they use these very various media sources and what they got out of it. And he said that they seem to be misperceiving the positive feelings they get from their multitasking. They are not being more more productive, they just feel more emotionally satisfied from their work. So she had said studying for exam and watching Saved by the Bell, I guess I mean that's I never did that, but I certainly would try to combine studying and watching TV. It's kind of a you know, the a spoonful of sugar makes the medicine go downcome right right, um. And he said that they felt satisfied not because they were effective at studying, but because the additional or the addition of TV made the studying entertaining. So they were entertaining themselves. While they were studying, which I think is really interesting. Um, and he's saying that this combination of activities accounts for the good feelings that were obtained. Okay. The problem here is that when you were studying and when you're doing this, when we're trying to do a deep dive into something and recall the information later, Uh, what you find is that you have a very low level of of retaining that information. Yeah. All you can picture is screech, and you know, like, that's not it. I need the theorem. I was studying and all I can picture of screech. And again, this is something we'll go into a bit more in terms of of what multitasking does to short term and long term memory. But for the purposes of the study, zang Wang was just saying, I feel like everybody should sing Wang tonight. By the way, Yeah, I had to say it. Um. Anyone was really just trying to say, look, it's not it's not effective. Yeah. The problem is that it is emotionally fulfilling. And that's the key here is that when you're doing it, when you're when you're cooking and also, um, you know, studying for an exam and watching TV and maybe you know, doing a little jing on the side. You're you're doing all these things, and in the heat of the moment, it probably feels pretty awesome. You're like, wow, I am just totally ruling here. I'm reaganting like like like hardcore, just to succeeding at every task set before me. And then afterwards you've wind up to realize that the the mix you're working on is horrible, the food is burned, you didn't understand what you were studying, and you're really confused on the plot for the plot of the show you're watching on TV. You end up not doing really good at any of the task you where you do everything poorly, but emotionally you at least for a few seconds there you were. You were floating on air. You really felt like you were you were succeeding. You had figured it out. Um, you're basking. The glory of multitasking. Yeah, it reminds me. There's a bit on The Simpsons where Bart goes to the park where all the old men are playing chess and there's this little montage of him playing three different games of chess at three different tables, and you it's setting it up like it's gonna be this child prodigy thing where he's he's just totally ruling in each of these games, but then he's it's a checkmate, like just a turn or two on each one, and he ends up losing each one really bad. And that's I think a pretty good model for multitasking and the illusion of multitasking. So do you think that there are any exceptions? Are there? Are there any times that we can multitask? You can do it well, yes, I mean according to the studies it and you have to define well, like there's there, for instance, proficiently proficient like with for instance, with driving, Yes, there are things you can do while driving and not die but most of the time, but it doesn't mean you should do them. But generally it comes down to are you combining two visual tasks because that's not gonna work, for instance, looking at a tech screen while driving, watching a TV while also trying to watch the dinner you're cooking, or are you combining an auditory in a visual task. Are you cooking while listening to the radio, Are you, uh like in my case, are you researching a topic while listening to music? Or are you doing some sort of And it also it comes down to how much cognitive power is involved. Like I don't really listen to audio podcasts with words in them anymore, But I used to do more of that when I had a borning newspaper job and I was like building pages on a screen. There's a mind was task. So I had the cognitive room to fill up with a whole bunch of podcasts and NPR radio shows and stuff. Well, um, I'm thinking even more sort of wrote activities like walking and chewing gum, because when it comes to that, you know, the more simplistic activities that don't take up a lot of mental energy. Yeah, we can do them right, especially if there are things that we've done over and over again. Um, But can we walk and talk at the same time and still multitask well? Some would say that perhaps not um in a study be him in at all. In two thousand nine, people talking on their cell phones while walking ran into people more often. That's not a surprise, I think, and didn't know didn't notice what was going on around them. The researchers this is my favorite part. The researchers had someone in a clown suit ride a unicycle. The people talking on a cell phone were much less likely to notice or remember the clowns. So even something as simplistic as that, um, you can see that that our attention is bifurcated. We can't necessarily pay attention to the degree that we really need to. Your brain, it turns out, can only do one thing at a time. Well, yeah, so whatever else you're doing right now, stop it. Just listen to this podcast unless it's driving, you know, don't stop driving. Pull Over, pull over podcast, pull over. Listen to the rest of it. Underneath the overpass. Okay, but the question becomes, to what degree is this self sabotage? What I mean, how much do we interrupt ourselves in this multitasking and distract ourselves. We are going to try to attempt to answer this question right after this message. Okay, we're back. Now, let's think about some typical multitask game, particularly at the office, because this is where we we tend to multitask a lot. When you're sedentary and your brain is buzzing, you tend to try to figure out as many ways to accomplish tasks as possible. Right, right, So, I've got my cell phone, I've got my email open tweet deck may have the Facebook page open separately. I've got one or two windows open from my documents. I've got my iTunes playing, and like sixteen windows in Firefox. Okay, let's also out on that. Maybe you have you're on a telephone conference call and you have on mute okay, because they come to hear anybody chewing gum while while they're conducting a teleconference. Um, chewing gum. Two. There you go. Right. So there's a two thousand and five study and it's called No Task Left Behind, examining the nature of fragmented work, and it found that people were interrupted and moved from one project to another about every eleven minutes, and each time it took about twenty five minutes to circle back to that same project. Now that's pretty amazing, right. They were interrupted either by themselves they did something, or maybe someone stopped by, or I don't know, maybe um, someone was clipping their nails in the office, because that that can be interrupting. Sorry about that. They grow really, I mean they're just really hard and hard to cut. Well yeah, I mean, and your hair grows pretty fast. I get it, I get it. Um, they need to be maintained. Actually, it wasn't outing you, but that seems to be the case. But in case, there are tons of interruptions. Um, but every eleven minutes, how do we get things done? I mean, I guess at a very slow pace. I mean because you also have to count in go into the bathroom drinking water and coffee, which then ups the amount of times you have to go to the bathroom. And on the plus side, if you're like me and you can't really set still for very long, you do get a lot of pacing in, so it's a good exercise. But but yeah, I I have found myself, you know, working on a project something I needed to get done, and then I either I go to check in on social media and I'm not talking about private social media, but like work social media another work task, and uh, and you kind of go down the rabbit hole there and then you come back around it's like, oh, well, half hours passed, and now I'm finally getting back to the task that I am working on today. And now the thing though, is that it seems, um, it seems so easy to vanquish this problem. If you had only one thing you were working on, it wouldn't take you twenty five minutes to get back to that, right, because you wouldn't go bouncing around the five different things that you are working on summy teamlessly. But of course that's just I think in this day and age, something that we're not going to do because the most part because if you know, it's one thing to like say cut, shut down tweet deck and say all right, I'm done social media for the day, not opening that until I get done with this task. But if you close out your work email, you're like, it's there's a lot want to be a fire drill. I mean not a literal fire drill, but there's gonna be somebody to shoot you an important email and then they're gonna they're gonna wonder where you went, what happened to you? Um, So are our jobs increasingly uh and and it's one of these papers pointed out, especially when you look at at the businesses that have scaled down that have combined positions. Um, everyone's doing six or seven different things, so by necessity, they have various tasks that have to be completed and they end up overlapping. It's true, and you're right, it's just part of the environment. UM. Gloria Mark is a professor of informa informatics at the University of California, Irvine and co author of the study the Cost of interrupted work, more speed and Stress, and she says that people were um in this study as likely to self interrupt as to be interrupted by someone else. So again, I think that it speaks to this behavior. It's not just an outside force acting honest, it's something internal that doesn't allow us to necessarily concentrate for for large chunks of time. She said that observe as observers will watch and then after every twelve minutes or so, for no apparent reasons, someone working on a document will turn and call someone or email. She thinks that the increasingly shorter attention span probably has something to do with it. Yeah, I mean, and you can definitely see internet and gadgets of being a part of that. Because used to if you're going to be distracted by the book you're reading, you're distracted by a book you had with you, or maybe you know the two or three books you had on you. If you're distracted by music, I mean, how much music could you have on hand at your desk in any given time, and how much research material could you possibly have? But today I mean, we have kindles with potentially every book ever on it. When you start factoring in the cloud, same deal with your with your music, and then the the the internet is just a never ending pit of random questions and facts. Well, isn't it kind of like a feedback loop too? Right? I mean, we're conditioning ourselves to make these twelve eleven twelve minute breaks just because we've gotten used to it, and so for you know, it was it was very hard to do the research actually on this podcast and the next one that we're about to do, because I really became hyper aware of my own behavior. I don't know if you felt that way when you were doing research. In the various ways that we self interrupt or um or go about things. It was it was kind of odd to have all of this in mind as I was doing the research and then watch my movements. Um. Alright, So what Mark says and what other cognitive psychologists say, is that what we're seeing is this attentional residue occur. So it's not just the cognitive cost of associated with context switching, something called resumption lag, or the potential for errors something again we'll talk about the next podcast. UM that the actual residue of the interruption of event working memory impairment. That's we're talking about on a subsequent task. When tasks are left unfinished and as we know task that we haven't closed the loop on, we have become problematic because we talked about holes in our head basically in our in our in our minds, and our in our perception of the world around us and our willpower right, because we're spending a lot of mental energy on trying to uh check off these boxes in our minds, and we keep returning to the same open loops and if we don't close them, then we're gonna sit there and figure out, Okay, well how do I get to do that when I also have five different things open on my screen right now and I have to do these things. And I think that comes back around to why multitasking is emotionally pleasing while we're doing it, because we have that feeling that we're closing like three or four loops at once, even if we're barely closing those loops or closing them really poorly, or closing them by just failing them, you know, because because like, let's see, what do I have to do today? I have to have to cook dinner, finish that mix, watch that TV show that's kind of the thing I want to do, and then I need to study for that test. But look at me, I'm doing all four at once. Super loop closer right, I feel like the Judo master. Um So, time of day is also a factor. It turns out that this is the same study that Gloria Mark did that the time of day is really important because the earlier it is, the more someone is distracted. Really, and as as time creeps on, the less that they will self distract or engage in other distractions. Uh. And she's saying this is uh, possibly because we're more likely to get into the flow of activity later in the day. Or you might say, hey, only have X amount of hours last Oh yeah, that's true. You get you get down to the deadline, you're gonna be extremely motivated. Yeah, that's true. I have a little uh sign in my in my cubicle list says and I cannot say what that means in English, but it basically says like, don't mess around, okay, focus. Yeah, And for our Italian listeners, I do apologize for whatever Julie just said. Yeah, And I apologize for the way that I just pronounced it. All right, Well, there you go. We uh dipped our toe into the world of multitasking, and we'll be back to talk about that in a future episode. Yeah, and we'll take a much deeper dive into that. All right, Well, let's call the robe it over to some quick listener mail. Alright, we heard from Tara. Tara right soon and says, Hi, Robert and Julie, I was listening to your Labyrinth episode and you mentioned, uh, the Goofy, uh, the Goofy cartoons, the how Two cartoons, And I just want to let you know that this series of cartoons were made because at the time they did not have a voice actor for Goofy, as the man who was doing it had quit. I believe last year I had the privilege to speak to the current voice of Goofy, and these cartoons came up, uh, and this was a way to keep Goofy's cartoons going without having to worry about his voice. Keep up the great work, smiley face. And we also heard heard from Josh Harding who wrote in and Josh Harding says, Dear Robert and Julie, I just listened to your Labyrinth episode and it reminded me of a personal experience of mine. Last summer, I spent some time volunteering with the nonprofit group Earthwatch, which landed me in the Cloud Forest of Ecuador. The hike up to the top was excruciating, even for someone who is in fairly decent physical condition. Something like a two thousand meter long trail with an eight hundred meter climb and vira crawl. Correctly, that's about one and a fourth mile long and a in a one half mile climb. That may not seem like much, but consider that I live at sea level then he met humidity was one of percent, and the climb started at about one mile in elevation. Needless to say, I was out of breath for a majority of the hike. When the group reached the top, we were allowed to drop our gear and explore the surrounding trails, which I did. I quickly found myself on a winding path that was naturally carved away by rainwater. There were no forks and it was a gradual slope. The trail had walls of mud between one and two ms tall that were covered in moss, ferns, and orchids. Also, there was the occasional fallen tree overhanging the path. As soon as I began walking down the path, I felt a noticeable dipth in timvature. My heart rate dropped considerably, and the cramping and my legs disappeared. Now, thanks to your podcast, I can shed a little light on what was happening to me. I walked that path every afternoon, right after our work and before dinner. It had the same effect every time. It is now my go to place that I escaped to in my head when I get stressed out at work. Thanks you guys for an awesome podcast. Josh And included a really cool picture to show that path through the cloud forest. I like how that's something that he that experience of walking that path is something that he invoked in his mind, and then that that's an experience that he can revisit again and again. Yeah, and it does remind me that the nature walks um when you have a path, I mean, it's essentially elabyrinth. You're guided on this path. You don't have to worry about how I'm going to cut through the forest because this is the pathway through the forest, you know, and you're communing with nature in the whole process. So there you go. If you don't have a true labyrinth, you can always see to point out and apart like setting cloud for us. All right, So, if you guys would like to reach out to us see what we're up to find out about upcoming podcast episodes, you can find us on Facebook and you can find us on tumbler um we are stuff to blow your mind on both of those and on Twitter we go by the handle blow the Mind, and those are all great things to follow too. 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Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff Works dot com. Hey wasn't stuff to blow your mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Julie Douglas. Julie, do you have a knock knock joke? Let's have it. Knock knock? Who's there? Interrupting cow? Interrupting cow? Oh, that's a that's a that's a good one. That's Do you see that how I interrupted you? Because I was the cow interrupting. And when the cow interrupts you, its like it breaks your brain. Like for a split second, you're like, what's happening because you're messing with the flow of the joke, and then you're moving and it's just like it's like a cognitive weapon. Okay, So what does the interrupting cow have to do with what we're talking about today? It has everything to do with us multitaskers and the different ways that we interrupt ourselves and distract ourselves, and the sort of psychic toll that it takes on us. Are you a multitasker? Oh? Yeah, sure, ye oh sure. Are you good at it? No? I know, you know, of course I've thought that I was good at it. I think that At some point I thought of myself as like being like the Judo master of um of multitasking and you know, sort of like moving through space and time in the most efficient way. But as we will find out, that is a myth. We are not good at multitaskers. UM. There are a few people who are good. They're supertaskers. People talk that is the one percent we are. We will talk about those guys of supertaskers in another podcast. Though. Of course, the thing about multitasking is that, okay, you you know you're not good at multitasking, you do it anyway because it's a necessity in this life that we live. And I and I I know I'm not good at multitasking either, but I sometimes kind of trick myself into thinking I'm doing something other than multitasking. Like I think that I can have tweet that going in the background for the social media stuff, and have my email open and be listening to music and working on something and then and then having to jump to another project shortly after that, and I think that that's that it's working for me. And a lot of people that are actually they actually believe that they are good at multitasking at least in some instances, like they think that it's totally cool to study for an exam while watching Safe by the Belt or whatever the kids watch these days, Okay, And and there have been some studies into it, particularly Zing Wang So, the lead author of a study and assistant professor of communications at Ohio State University, and and Uh, Zing was very interested in exactly how this plays out and why people are so confident in their ability to do something that they're not good at. Yeah. I mean most everyone thinks that they're a great multitasker. Yeah, even if you you may ask somebody in your life, maybe you may ask them, hey, are you a great multitasker? And they'll say, uh, you know, no, I'm not really, but they still think that they can they can do some of these things such as the classic uh talk on the phone while driving or God help us text while doing some driving. Yeah. And again we'll talk more about that in the next podcast. But what I think that zing Wang was trying to get at is why do we do this? What what compels why are yeah, why do we think that we're doing a great job here? Because really it is an illusion. Um, you know, when you're multitasking, you feel really productive. Um. But there was this this one great psychiatrist who said his name is Edward M. Holloway. He said that we think that we're multitasking, but really not. It's like playing tennis with three balls. Okay um, And so zing Win got at the bottom of this by recording the students media use and other activities for twenty eight days, including why they use these very various media sources and what they got out of it. And he said that they seem to be misperceiving the positive feelings they get from their multitasking. They are not being more more productive, they just feel more emotionally satisfied from their work. So she had said studying for exam and watching Saved by the Bell, I guess I mean that's I never did that, but I certainly would try to combine studying and watching TV. It's kind of a you know, the a spoonful of sugar makes the medicine go downcome right right, um. And he said that they felt satisfied not because they were effective at studying, but because the additional or the addition of TV made the studying entertaining. So they were entertaining themselves. While they were studying, which I think is really interesting. Um, and he's saying that this combination of activities accounts for the good feelings that were obtained. Okay. The problem here is that when you were studying and when you're doing this, when we're trying to do a deep dive into something and recall the information later, Uh, what you find is that you have a very low level of of retaining that information. Yeah. All you can picture is screech, and you know, like, that's not it. I need the theorem. I was studying and all I can picture of screech. And again, this is something we'll go into a bit more in terms of of what multitasking does to short term and long term memory. But for the purposes of the study, zang Wang was just saying, I feel like everybody should sing Wang tonight. By the way, Yeah, I had to say it. Um. Anyone was really just trying to say, look, it's not it's not effective. Yeah. The problem is that it is emotionally fulfilling. And that's the key here is that when you're doing it, when you're when you're cooking and also, um, you know, studying for an exam and watching TV and maybe you know, doing a little jing on the side. You're you're doing all these things, and in the heat of the moment, it probably feels pretty awesome. You're like, wow, I am just totally ruling here. I'm reaganting like like like hardcore, just to succeeding at every task set before me. And then afterwards you've wind up to realize that the the mix you're working on is horrible, the food is burned, you didn't understand what you were studying, and you're really confused on the plot for the plot of the show you're watching on TV. You end up not doing really good at any of the task you where you do everything poorly, but emotionally you at least for a few seconds there you were. You were floating on air. You really felt like you were you were succeeding. You had figured it out. Um, you're basking. The glory of multitasking. Yeah, it reminds me. There's a bit on The Simpsons where Bart goes to the park where all the old men are playing chess and there's this little montage of him playing three different games of chess at three different tables, and you it's setting it up like it's gonna be this child prodigy thing where he's he's just totally ruling in each of these games, but then he's it's a checkmate, like just a turn or two on each one, and he ends up losing each one really bad. And that's I think a pretty good model for multitasking and the illusion of multitasking. So do you think that there are any exceptions? Are there? Are there any times that we can multitask? You can do it well, yes, I mean according to the studies it and you have to define well, like there's there, for instance, proficiently proficient like with for instance, with driving, Yes, there are things you can do while driving and not die but most of the time, but it doesn't mean you should do them. But generally it comes down to are you combining two visual tasks because that's not gonna work, for instance, looking at a tech screen while driving, watching a TV while also trying to watch the dinner you're cooking, or are you combining an auditory in a visual task. Are you cooking while listening to the radio, Are you, uh like in my case, are you researching a topic while listening to music? Or are you doing some sort of And it also it comes down to how much cognitive power is involved. Like I don't really listen to audio podcasts with words in them anymore, But I used to do more of that when I had a borning newspaper job and I was like building pages on a screen. There's a mind was task. So I had the cognitive room to fill up with a whole bunch of podcasts and NPR radio shows and stuff. Well, um, I'm thinking even more sort of wrote activities like walking and chewing gum, because when it comes to that, you know, the more simplistic activities that don't take up a lot of mental energy. Yeah, we can do them right, especially if there are things that we've done over and over again. Um, But can we walk and talk at the same time and still multitask well? Some would say that perhaps not um in a study be him in at all. In two thousand nine, people talking on their cell phones while walking ran into people more often. That's not a surprise, I think, and didn't know didn't notice what was going on around them. The researchers this is my favorite part. The researchers had someone in a clown suit ride a unicycle. The people talking on a cell phone were much less likely to notice or remember the clowns. So even something as simplistic as that, um, you can see that that our attention is bifurcated. We can't necessarily pay attention to the degree that we really need to. Your brain, it turns out, can only do one thing at a time. Well, yeah, so whatever else you're doing right now, stop it. Just listen to this podcast unless it's driving, you know, don't stop driving. Pull Over, pull over podcast, pull over. Listen to the rest of it. Underneath the overpass. Okay, but the question becomes, to what degree is this self sabotage? What I mean, how much do we interrupt ourselves in this multitasking and distract ourselves. We are going to try to attempt to answer this question right after this message. Okay, we're back. Now, let's think about some typical multitask game, particularly at the office, because this is where we we tend to multitask a lot. When you're sedentary and your brain is buzzing, you tend to try to figure out as many ways to accomplish tasks as possible. Right, right, So, I've got my cell phone, I've got my email open tweet deck may have the Facebook page open separately. I've got one or two windows open from my documents. I've got my iTunes playing, and like sixteen windows in Firefox. Okay, let's also out on that. Maybe you have you're on a telephone conference call and you have on mute okay, because they come to hear anybody chewing gum while while they're conducting a teleconference. Um, chewing gum. Two. There you go. Right. So there's a two thousand and five study and it's called No Task Left Behind, examining the nature of fragmented work, and it found that people were interrupted and moved from one project to another about every eleven minutes, and each time it took about twenty five minutes to circle back to that same project. Now that's pretty amazing, right. They were interrupted either by themselves they did something, or maybe someone stopped by, or I don't know, maybe um, someone was clipping their nails in the office, because that that can be interrupting. Sorry about that. They grow really, I mean they're just really hard and hard to cut. Well yeah, I mean, and your hair grows pretty fast. I get it, I get it. Um, they need to be maintained. Actually, it wasn't outing you, but that seems to be the case. But in case, there are tons of interruptions. Um, but every eleven minutes, how do we get things done? I mean, I guess at a very slow pace. I mean because you also have to count in go into the bathroom drinking water and coffee, which then ups the amount of times you have to go to the bathroom. And on the plus side, if you're like me and you can't really set still for very long, you do get a lot of pacing in, so it's a good exercise. But but yeah, I I have found myself, you know, working on a project something I needed to get done, and then I either I go to check in on social media and I'm not talking about private social media, but like work social media another work task, and uh, and you kind of go down the rabbit hole there and then you come back around it's like, oh, well, half hours passed, and now I'm finally getting back to the task that I am working on today. And now the thing though, is that it seems, um, it seems so easy to vanquish this problem. If you had only one thing you were working on, it wouldn't take you twenty five minutes to get back to that, right, because you wouldn't go bouncing around the five different things that you are working on summy teamlessly. But of course that's just I think in this day and age, something that we're not going to do because the most part because if you know, it's one thing to like say cut, shut down tweet deck and say all right, I'm done social media for the day, not opening that until I get done with this task. But if you close out your work email, you're like, it's there's a lot want to be a fire drill. I mean not a literal fire drill, but there's gonna be somebody to shoot you an important email and then they're gonna they're gonna wonder where you went, what happened to you? Um, So are our jobs increasingly uh and and it's one of these papers pointed out, especially when you look at at the businesses that have scaled down that have combined positions. Um, everyone's doing six or seven different things, so by necessity, they have various tasks that have to be completed and they end up overlapping. It's true, and you're right, it's just part of the environment. UM. Gloria Mark is a professor of informa informatics at the University of California, Irvine and co author of the study the Cost of interrupted work, more speed and Stress, and she says that people were um in this study as likely to self interrupt as to be interrupted by someone else. So again, I think that it speaks to this behavior. It's not just an outside force acting honest, it's something internal that doesn't allow us to necessarily concentrate for for large chunks of time. She said that observe as observers will watch and then after every twelve minutes or so, for no apparent reasons, someone working on a document will turn and call someone or email. She thinks that the increasingly shorter attention span probably has something to do with it. Yeah, I mean, and you can definitely see internet and gadgets of being a part of that. Because used to if you're going to be distracted by the book you're reading, you're distracted by a book you had with you, or maybe you know the two or three books you had on you. If you're distracted by music, I mean, how much music could you have on hand at your desk in any given time, and how much research material could you possibly have? But today I mean, we have kindles with potentially every book ever on it. When you start factoring in the cloud, same deal with your with your music, and then the the the internet is just a never ending pit of random questions and facts. Well, isn't it kind of like a feedback loop too? Right? I mean, we're conditioning ourselves to make these twelve eleven twelve minute breaks just because we've gotten used to it, and so for you know, it was it was very hard to do the research actually on this podcast and the next one that we're about to do, because I really became hyper aware of my own behavior. I don't know if you felt that way when you were doing research. In the various ways that we self interrupt or um or go about things. It was it was kind of odd to have all of this in mind as I was doing the research and then watch my movements. Um. Alright, So what Mark says and what other cognitive psychologists say, is that what we're seeing is this attentional residue occur. So it's not just the cognitive cost of associated with context switching, something called resumption lag, or the potential for errors something again we'll talk about the next podcast. UM that the actual residue of the interruption of event working memory impairment. That's we're talking about on a subsequent task. When tasks are left unfinished and as we know task that we haven't closed the loop on, we have become problematic because we talked about holes in our head basically in our in our in our minds, and our in our perception of the world around us and our willpower right, because we're spending a lot of mental energy on trying to uh check off these boxes in our minds, and we keep returning to the same open loops and if we don't close them, then we're gonna sit there and figure out, Okay, well how do I get to do that when I also have five different things open on my screen right now and I have to do these things. And I think that comes back around to why multitasking is emotionally pleasing while we're doing it, because we have that feeling that we're closing like three or four loops at once, even if we're barely closing those loops or closing them really poorly, or closing them by just failing them, you know, because because like, let's see, what do I have to do today? I have to have to cook dinner, finish that mix, watch that TV show that's kind of the thing I want to do, and then I need to study for that test. But look at me, I'm doing all four at once. Super loop closer right, I feel like the Judo master. Um So, time of day is also a factor. It turns out that this is the same study that Gloria Mark did that the time of day is really important because the earlier it is, the more someone is distracted. Really, and as as time creeps on, the less that they will self distract or engage in other distractions. Uh. And she's saying this is uh, possibly because we're more likely to get into the flow of activity later in the day. Or you might say, hey, only have X amount of hours last Oh yeah, that's true. You get you get down to the deadline, you're gonna be extremely motivated. Yeah, that's true. I have a little uh sign in my in my cubicle list says and I cannot say what that means in English, but it basically says like, don't mess around, okay, focus. Yeah, And for our Italian listeners, I do apologize for whatever Julie just said. Yeah, And I apologize for the way that I just pronounced it. All right, Well, there you go. We uh dipped our toe into the world of multitasking, and we'll be back to talk about that in a future episode. Yeah, and we'll take a much deeper dive into that. All right, Well, let's call the robe it over to some quick listener mail. Alright, we heard from Tara. Tara right soon and says, Hi, Robert and Julie, I was listening to your Labyrinth episode and you mentioned, uh, the Goofy, uh, the Goofy cartoons, the how Two cartoons, And I just want to let you know that this series of cartoons were made because at the time they did not have a voice actor for Goofy, as the man who was doing it had quit. I believe last year I had the privilege to speak to the current voice of Goofy, and these cartoons came up, uh, and this was a way to keep Goofy's cartoons going without having to worry about his voice. Keep up the great work, smiley face. And we also heard heard from Josh Harding who wrote in and Josh Harding says, Dear Robert and Julie, I just listened to your Labyrinth episode and it reminded me of a personal experience of mine. Last summer, I spent some time volunteering with the nonprofit group Earthwatch, which landed me in the Cloud Forest of Ecuador. The hike up to the top was excruciating, even for someone who is in fairly decent physical condition. Something like a two thousand meter long trail with an eight hundred meter climb and vira crawl. Correctly, that's about one and a fourth mile long and a in a one half mile climb. That may not seem like much, but consider that I live at sea level then he met humidity was one of percent, and the climb started at about one mile in elevation. Needless to say, I was out of breath for a majority of the hike. When the group reached the top, we were allowed to drop our gear and explore the surrounding trails, which I did. I quickly found myself on a winding path that was naturally carved away by rainwater. There were no forks and it was a gradual slope. The trail had walls of mud between one and two ms tall that were covered in moss, ferns, and orchids. Also, there was the occasional fallen tree overhanging the path. As soon as I began walking down the path, I felt a noticeable dipth in timvature. My heart rate dropped considerably, and the cramping and my legs disappeared. Now, thanks to your podcast, I can shed a little light on what was happening to me. I walked that path every afternoon, right after our work and before dinner. It had the same effect every time. It is now my go to place that I escaped to in my head when I get stressed out at work. Thanks you guys for an awesome podcast. Josh And included a really cool picture to show that path through the cloud forest. I like how that's something that he that experience of walking that path is something that he invoked in his mind, and then that that's an experience that he can revisit again and again. Yeah, and it does remind me that the nature walks um when you have a path, I mean, it's essentially elabyrinth. You're guided on this path. You don't have to worry about how I'm going to cut through the forest because this is the pathway through the forest, you know, and you're communing with nature in the whole process. So there you go. If you don't have a true labyrinth, you can always see to point out and apart like setting cloud for us. All right, So, if you guys would like to reach out to us see what we're up to find out about upcoming podcast episodes, you can find us on Facebook and you can find us on tumbler um we are stuff to blow your mind on both of those and on Twitter we go by the handle blow the Mind, and those are all great things to follow too. 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