The Art of Attention Draws Attention

Posted on July 31, 2011 by brianf

Has your capacity to handle a growing number of emails, tweets and text messages grown in the past year? Has it kept pace with the volume of messages you must handle? Is a saturation point on the distant horizon or has it already arrived?

As this saturation point arises for many, workplace culture will place a higher value on the art of attention. A new system of values relating to attention may be just on the horizon.

The more we approach overload from electronic messages, the closer we come to realizing we are not capable of allocating full attention to an ever increasing load on our sensory systems.

Long before the era of digital devices, evolution provided a means for selecting the most relevant stimuli from a noisy environment. The prefrontal cortex, which we today call the executive brain, evolved to direct our attention to serve our goals. Working memory evolved as a workbench where we could temporarily store and manipulate information and create tools.

Here’s how the overload we are approaching impacts the functioning of both our working memory and our executive brain. Continue reading →

Information Overload Subject of Author Panel Discussion

Posted on June 28, 2011 by brianf

Whether the subject is information overload, loss of attention, distraction, or workplace productivity, there is a wide area of common ground among recent books on these topics.

What if five authors of such books discussed among themselves the most relevant issues and solutions related to these topics? I listened in to their discussion yesterday and heard so much insight I could barely keep up with taking notes. I’ll share their key findings with you here.

The panel was presented by the Information Overload Research Group (IORG).
IORG is a gathering of industry practitioners, academic researchers, consultants and other professionals who are dedicated to addressing the problem of information overload, an ongoing crisis that diminishes productivity and quality of life among knowledge workers worldwide

Most notable was the consensus that the problem of feeling overloaded has not subsided, but is becoming increasingly more widespread and acute. Moreover, now that some have assigned a dollar value to the problem, it is catching the attention of leaders of knowledge worker organizations. Continue reading →

Offices Where Multitasking Is A Safety Risk

Posted on June 26, 2011 by brianf

When we think of the words “High Tech Office” does a commercial airliner cockpit ever come to mind? Perhaps it should, as the amount of technology per square foot puts it near the top of the list.

The most advanced cockpit in service at the moment is in the Airbus A380. (I’m hoping to tour the new Boeing Dreamliner next month). An incident in the A380 cockpit teaches an important lesson on the limits of even highly trained multitaskers (pilots) and all of the ‘human factors’ considered in designing the technology we take for granted when we board a plane.

A set of NASA studies on the multitasking demands on flight crews can be reviewed in the book “The Multitasking Myth – Studies in Human Factors for Flight Operations.” The book predates the incident that follows by only one year.

On November 4, 2010, Qantas Flight 32 took off from Singapore bound for Sydney with 469 passengers on board. Only four minutes into the flight, an engine on the left wing exploded, piercing both the wing and fuselage with shrapnel. Continue reading →

Are We Being Rewired By Always Being Wired?

Posted on June 24, 2011 by brianf

If the internet we know today was a person, it would be the age of a teenager.

Like a teenager, its future potential and full impact are yet to be revealed.

Just as teenagers can be prone to thinking of themselves as fully grown, we may have already lost sight of how young the internet actually is, and how unknown its long-term impact on the human brain still remains.

We cannot study the long-term effects of its daily usage, by definition, before having accumulated long-term experience. But recently, the first long-term studies have been published. Time to log on, click, and take a deep breath at what we have created: an addictive device for modifying our very own personalized biological tool – our brain.

Scientific American, in its July issue, reports on a study of heavy internet users in China. Heavy users are defined here as playing online games 10 hours per day, six days a week. The study compared the subjects to those spending only two hours per day online.

Using new 3-D modeling techniques that allow statistical comparison of the density of brain tissue, the study found a shrinkage of as much as 10 to 20 percent in certain regions of the heavy users’ brains. Continue reading →

Why We Can’t Learn Overnight

Posted on June 20, 2011 by brianf

Most of us have run up against a deadline where the time on the clock to prepare and memorize new material has nearly run out. We commit ourselves to a major effort the night before, only to find new material fades quickly the following day and thereafter.

Repetition in learning may have fallen out of favor in recent times, yet new evidence shows there is a biological process set in motion by spaced repetition that facilitates committing what we learn to memory.

In cramming, we may perform many repetitions and exercise our minds like a movie actor learning new lines before shooting a scene. But soon the brief results fade and we may come to believe we are just not good at learning, or that a certain type of material is “too hard” to learn.

The new evidence points to a different type of repetition as being most effective. One distributed over time or “spaced” as opposed to “crammed.” Why would this make a difference? Continue reading →

High Definition Attention

Posted on June 15, 2011 by brianf

Imagine yourself with a group of friends or family, gathered in a circle around a campfire. Maybe you have a canvas back chair, or maybe you’re sitting on a log or even the ground. As twilight progresses, the sky darkens; you’re surrounded by darkness and the thoughts that normally occupy your mind slip away into that darkness. We find ourselves captivated by a fire; the glowing embers, the dancing flames, and the wisps of smoke rising into the night.

Imagine now that someone’s phone is vibrating, signaling an incoming text message. Now the brightness of a screen intrudes on the darkness. Someone else looks at their phone to see if they too have a message. Another person turns on a tablet device and begins to watch a movie, now the fire is no longer the collective center of attention. More and more the brightness of a screen has replaced the brightness from a fire. Can simply spending time in front of a fire improve your focus and attention? Continue reading →

McKinsey & Co. Report Multitasking Is Killing Productivity

Posted on June 15, 2011 by brianf

Are the productivity gains we’ve realized through information technology becoming an endangered species?

Numerous studies cite information overload and multitasking as having an adverse impact on knowledge worker productivity. But when the message is carried by heavyweight consulting firms such as McKinsey & Co., you know it’s time to pay serious attention!

The message from the January 2011 McKinsey Quarterly is brief and blunt: “Multitasking is a terrible coping mechanism….. If we want to be effective leaders, we need to stop.”

Creativity and innovation in particular are lessened by multitasking. A Harvard Business School study of 9,000 workers found that creativity is higher when people focus on a single activity for a significant part of their day and collaborate with only one other person. Highly fragmented days have a significant negative impact on creativity.

Three practices are recommended to increase a leaders’ effectiveness: Continue reading →

Do Office Environments Impact Cognition?

Posted on June 12, 2011 by brianf

Do you think there’s a better way to design office space? Will office design progress beyond a Dilbertian maze of cubicles?

Last month I attended a presentation by Richard Louv, author of The Nature Principle. He writes of the High-Performance workplace and cites evidence of employees who sit near a window being more productive, of lower absenteeism; all quantifiable money-saving ideas.

Perhaps the office of the future can be glimpsed in the new headquarters of office furniture designer and manufacturer Herman Miller. The design includes abundant natural light, indoor plants, and outdoor views of restored wetlands and prairie. 38 percent of workers surveyed said their job satisfaction had improved after moving into the new building.

“Green Design” is truly about more than environmental benefits. It’s about creating an atmosphere that energizes employees and returns green dollars to the bottom line. Carnegie Mellon University has studied the impact of restorative workplaces and found reductions in lost work time, absenteeism, and even turnover rate. Their study cites a cost savings of $25,000 for every reduction in employee turnover.

Numerous researchers are studying methods of improving the ROI of human capital. Companies at the leading edge are finding that savings can be realized not merely by investing in new programs or initiatives, but by taking a more restorative or ‘biophilic’ approach to the design of the office environment. In the case of knowledge workers, who are paid to think, it pays to restore the work environment to one more conducive to thinking.

Neuroscience Investigates Decision Making

Posted on June 12, 2011 by brianf

As neuroscience grows and its tools become more accurate, the fields it investigates are becoming more specialized. An example is a new field call Neural Decision Making. 2011 is only the second year in which experts from this field will gather in a symposium to share their findings.

Researchers are investigating fields that include marketing, consumer behavior and economics. These may not be the first applications that come to mind when one thinks of neuroscience, but it can be taken as an indicator of how researchers are seeking to tie findings about brain activity (neural correlates) to ever more specific human behaviors.

What practical purpose will this serve? Marketers for one are always interested in what drives human behavior. A new window on how consumers make choices and react to product offerings can bring new evidence into the process of designing improved ways of reaching consumers. Possibly even a 21st Century version of what Vance Packard called “The Hidden Persuaders” of marketing more than 50 years ago.

If this all sounds too far in the future, companies such a Hyundai, Yahoo and PepsiCo are already utilizing brain feedback to gauge the impact of new product introductions on consumers. Neuroscience – it’s not just theory anymore!

Good-bye Left-Brain / Right-Brain?

Posted on June 1, 2011 by brianf

One of the obstacles to learning new information is the unlearning of a concept that has become outdated. Some concepts continue to be popularized long after scientific research has moved on. Such is the case with the concept of left-brained or right-brained people. A convenient over-simplification destined to endure.

The idea that the brain consists of two large modules operating in either/or mode is seductive in its simplicity and known to most everyone. To say anything to the contrary is to swim against the tide.

But just last week, a new tide rolled in to sweep the sands clean and announce a new finding; our brain operates like a number of networks linking many simultaneously active regions.

Scientists at Stanford University, led by Michael Greicius, MD, mapped four distinct mental states to patterns of activity across 90 brain regions. By analyzing these patterns from fMRI activity, they were able to identify the mental state the test subject was experiencing to an accuracy level of 80 percent. To date their research has identified 15 networks associated with distinct activities.

While left and right-brain concepts have served a use in categorizing styles of thinking, they are a bridge to nowhere for solving cognitive disorders such as Alzheimer’s. In order to solve the puzzle of such diseases, science has let go of the simplified concept of large regions such as left and right.

In a time of such rapid progress, our ability to benefit from scientific research may depend on our ability to rapidly unlearn popular concepts to make way for new findings. In the world of discoveries of how the brain operates, it is now high tide.

When Technology Overtakes Biology

Brain Science for Overloaded Knowledge Workers