Exploring the Crossroads of Attention and Memory in the Aging Brain: Views from the Inside

this program is a presentation of uctv for educational and non-commercial use only check out our youtube original channel uctv prime at youtube.com uctv prime subscribe today to get new programs every week thank you everyone for coming on a thursday night here we are really in for a treat tonight we are very lucky to hear adam gazzali the title of the talk is exploring the crossroads of attention and memory in the aging brain views from the inside and he gets to the inside things that are brain activity that's very hard to measure in in many different ways so he has an amazing program of research that we're going to hear about he was born and raised in new york city he got his md and phd from mount sinai in new york and his did his residency in neurology at university of pennsylvania and then he traveled across to our coast and did his post-doc at berkeley and we're very lucky that he landed here at ucsf he's the director of the neuroscience imaging center at ucsf and is an associate professor in neurology physiology and psychiatry he runs a very exciting big lab and trains many young scientists and he won the ucsf mentoring award recently he's also very committed to translation of science to the public and i'm i'm just dizzy looking at the list of of different media outlets where where he has spent time translating his science for everyone he studies top-down modulation of neural networks perception attention and memory and how these are altered with aging and with disease states and lastly how to improve them through video games and other techniques that we'll hear about today he has authored over 60 original scientific articles given much over 200 talks it was hard to get him tonight we're happy he said yes um and and has won many awards so i'll let you hear from him directly thank you for coming so thank you very much for the invitation it's exciting to be here i love this program i think it's really important and i'm excited to be a part of it so we're going to spend some time now and talk about this topic of interest of mine and hopefully you'll find it interesting as well i'm going to tell it from a lot of different perspectives this is a sort of talk that it builds off a lot of my own research from my lab but also a lot of what people in the field have been studying so i'll take it from there and let you uh explore it with me so yes it's funny how sometimes this slide just speaks to an audience and i i don't have to say much but uh for those of you that are fortunate enough to not know what's going on here this is the frustration that you feel when uh after after having left the couch minute seconds ago you arrive at the refrigerator with no idea of what you uh intended to go there for some people refer to this as a classic example of the senior moment but uh i've learned over the last years of talking about this this is a moment that most people can share it's certainly not senior uh selective but although it does change as we get older um it raises some fascinating questions you might in this particular case be holding one single item in mind and only five seven seconds later can't remember it right we know that the ability to remember an item is within the capacity of all of us so how is it possible that our memory is so fragile that we can forget something that we had in mind even a single item and that's something that we're going to explore today how how this happens in the brain how does it let us down on these uh seemingly pretty straightforward memory tasks before we move on and talk about how this happens i just want to pause and talk about how remarkable the brain is it's capable of incredible rapid processing parallel processing of information which enables us to interpret complex stimuli in our environment within a tenth of a second it has a massive storage capacity by some estimates over the course of our lives we remember one billion bits of information which is fifty thousand times the text stored in the library of congress also although it seems very small the brain is a massive structure so also estimates place the number of neurons in the brain at the sort of in the ballpark of stars in the core of our milky way galaxy around 100 billion but what's even more impressive is not the number of neurons the primary principle brain cells but the connections between them hundreds of trillions of connections really creating a network of staggering complexity um but i don't have to tell you a lot of cool facts about the brand for you to appreciate it right every action every thought you have every sensation every emotion you experience your very sense of identity all emerges from the functioning of your brain despite the strength of our brain it has some very distinct weaknesses which leads to that problem that i started the lecture with i just want to highlight three of them one is attention the limitation of attention the second i'm going to talk about is something known as working memory and the third thing is speed of processing so let's just step through these three things really briefly attention you know based on your own experiences that you can't just distribute your attention everywhere at the same time you have to make choices you have to be selective about your attention attention has been referred to as a spotlight it's something that you direct and move around a really classic famous example of this is the cocktail party effect so you're at a party you're facing someone you're having a conversation with them you might not be terribly interested but instead of just turning around you can actually direct your attention what you're hearing to other places in the room right so maybe that's not being overtly rude but at least it's something that our attention allows us to do and that's an example of covert attention your ability to direct your attention without even moving you can even do it with your vision so attention although it's amazing we have an incredible ability to focus our attention it's a limitation in terms of how widely it can be distributed speed limitations so we process information incredibly rapidly as i mentioned before if you especially if you look down at the level of the neuron but as i mentioned the brain is a network of areas interacting with each other so when you have very complex cognitive tasks when you're doing something very complicated with all these communications going on processing speed actually becomes a factor so all these operations keep adding up like a domino effect so we see some limitations in how fast we could process information the third thing is working memory for those of you that don't know what working memory is it's the ability to hold information online in your minds just for very short periods of time in order to guide your behavior so a classic example of it is the is the phone number right you you don't you're unlikely to remember a phone number that someone tells you the next day you sort of just remember it long enough to get it into the phone uh all this is sort of changed with you know cell phone digital phones where you don't actually get any phone numbers they just appear on your phone but there's some urban myths that even the the seven digit telephone number exists because that's close to our span so there are very distinct capacity limitations of working memory but it changes depending on the information so for things like digits it's true that it's around seven with a little bit of an error and variation across people but as information becomes more complex as you move to words five as you move to objects three or four and then for things like faces only two or even one item that you can actually hold in mind for short periods of time so so working memory uh again despite being an amazing capacity of our brain still has limitations these limitations come together and give our brains a sensitivity to interference so i'm going to define what i mean by interference we've been building a framework a categorical framework of what interference is in our lab based often on experiences of people that feel encumbered by it so if you try to think right now on your own experiences of what happens in that brief period of time right everyone laugh when i put the site up you that's happened to you so think about what happens in that time that short time period when you knew what you wanted until you got there and didn't remember it and what we found over the years that if you ask people this question they almost they describe many different things but they all fall into the category of what i would describe of as interference something interfered with that memory and so interference i have now placed in in our research into two categories that it can occur internally or externally so let's start with external interference and this is all based on really personal descriptions and then what we do is we use this framework and take it into the lab and try to figure out how these things work are they really different from each other so i break external interference and internal interference into two different types based on goals the first would be what i call distractions some people call this all distractions but if you use the same term for everything it gets complicated so i call distractions the distractions of something very specific to me they mean external information that's irrelevant to your goals and you're trying to ignore it right you know that if you're at a restaurant having a conversation all that noise around you is just preventing you from engaging deeply in what you're talking about and to remember it so that is a distraction you're really your goal is to shut it out you could have that same information and have a secondary goal and i call that interruptions or multitasking so it's similar it could be the same thing you could be at a restaurant having a conversation but now you're also trying to listen to the waiter uh tell the dinner specials at the next table right so you're trying to multitask it's the same information but instead of ignoring it you're trying to attend it and attend to it in either case they're both interference in your primary goal of the conversation and i'll show you a lot about how these are different and how they impact us differently as we get older all this presumably happens internally although it's less rigorously studied because it's it's hard to study internal distractions uh largely because external distractions are easy we could just distract you and see what happens in your brain while you're being distracted but internal distractions arise spontaneously so again i break it into two different types here so i think of internal distractions as mind wandering right your goals are to have a conversation but yet your mind leaves you remember some argument you had with your significant other or were you going to have dinner later that night and you you didn't mean to you weren't trying to a matter of fact you were trying not to you're trying to hold your focus but your mind wanted it was an internal distraction but you could multitask internally too right so you could be watching this lecture for example and still trying to decide where you can have dinner later right so then you're doing two tasks at the same time and and so you're making an internal decision to think about something else while doing something right almost all of us drive under these type of circumstances um for good or for bad we'll come back to driving a little bit but um so anyway so this is the framework of how i view interference almost universally when when i ask someone why they think they forgot that one item when they arrived at the refrigerator they described one of these or multiple of them so they'll say well the phone rang and i picked it up and then i couldn't remember what i was doing which would be an example of an interruption or i started thinking about what i was going to do later on and that would be an internal intrusion potentially but it's usually interference people very frequently infrequently described that nothing happened they just got there and they forgot if they think hard enough they'll remember being interrupted so we know just based on that classic example of the senior moment that it is interference based and that's what i'm going to show you that a lot of this is really not about memory per se but about interference and attention so i want to just do a slight departure i want to start with what i just told you about the sensitivity of your brain to interference and ask what you think would happen when you take your brain and expose it to this right so probably most of you could recognize these elements uh around here and i'm sure a lot of you engage in them and uh before i go further i just would like to say that i am not immune to this this is myself preparing the original version of this election you could see i have two very large monitors i have my cell phone in hand i'm listening to music i'm checking my email you know i also engage in a lot of this media and just to pause on the media because it's hard to have a discussion about distraction and multitasking and attention and memory and not realize that the exposure to interference in our environment seems to be increasing and studies are showing that we know there's an explosion of the type of media that that transmits and stores information uh in our lives a lot of these are very new and more so than that the devices that are used to transmit them have increased and a lot of them have become portable so not only is there more of it but it's likely sitting in your pocket or somewhere close to you right now right so um but what's even more impressive is not the type of media and the devices that deliver it but the way in which we seem to use it so as i showed you my own personal example there's now an incredible amount of information that people are multitasking their media more frequently creating even more interference so let's just take a little sample who in this room has ever checked their email while they're working on a document listening to music okay pretty high how about this one have you been watching television while searching the internet and receiving texts okay hi some of this differs based on age although i'm seeing that seem to disappear when i started having uh giving versions of this talk a couple years ago it did seem that some of it was based on the age of the audience was speaking to i don't actually detect that anymore it seems that it's just be spreading more and more across society in general and some data is is definitely showing that but there's no doubt that it's more prevalent in younger children and you probably have children you see it yourself and there was a really fascinating report by the kaiser family foundation that did a report on this is now several years old they did a report on media use in children and teenagers and they found some shocking things that i'm not going to go into and you could certainly pull that report online but what they found that was most surprising was how much multitasking of the media was taking place so they went back and did a whole other study just focused on media multitasking and it's really interesting i mean almost 95 of all people report multitasking sometimes using more than one form of media a third of their day and the children sometimes it's off the charts how many things they use simultaneously i just like these descriptions here so this is a 17 year old boy that says i multitask every second i am online at this very moment i'm watching tv checking my email every two minutes reading a news group about who shot jfk burning some music to a cd and writing this message this 15 year old girl writes i'm always talking to people through instant messenger and then i'll be checking email doing homework and playing games and talking on the phone at the same time so these these are not some rare reports right this is basically what's what's going on in terms of of how we are interacting with our environment more and more so in a top of all that there's another change that's less documented but we all know about it and it's the change in expectations right so now that we have this constant access to our information people expect responsiveness and almost continuous productivity so you might be on vacation and you check email does anyone do that in this room has anyone ever been been guilty of that right so there was a time probably when vacation was considered a place that you don't check work email but now that's almost seems invisible uh the distinction between them and likewise you get a text from someone and although you're engaged in something else there's this feeling that if i don't respond back maybe they'll think i'm ignoring them it happens with emails too so there's also this pressure for engagement that i think increases the type of interference that we feel um so one of the things that that we're exploring in in some way not directly necessarily but at least by contact with other labs and looking at the literature is that you know this is the variety and accessibility of electronic media the expectations for responsiveness are causing increased interference and this is having an impact on cognition and other aspects of our lives and maybe you know even impacting the quality or the effectiveness of our lives so i'm going to explore some of that so given all that right how do we function at all how are we just not paralyzed by all of this multiple streams of information that we can ignore on our brains that are so fragile and sensitive to interference so how we do it is through this process of cognitive control so there's a term from our field that i'm going to tell you a little about perception right how we perceive the world around this is not a passive process the world just does not flood into our brains we shape how we perceive the world based on attention really two types of attention influence perception one is external stimulus driven attention so this is how the environment imposes itself upon how you perceive it an example would be if you hear your name even quietly you pay attention more so than if you heard another name if there's a flash of light a loud sound anything very salient or very novel demands your attention independent of your goals the other type of attention and this is another way another term used for this is bottom up attention bottom up coming in from the environment the other type of attention is internal goal directed attention what you're doing now you're focusing your cognitive resources on what you're hearing and what you're seeing because you choose to and this is also referred to as top-down top-down control top-down modulation all of our perception is influenced by these two sources of attention that pull it in different directions and one interesting thing that we now appreciate more and more is that these influences on your perception then go and sculpt how you remember things both in the very short term and the long term and this is really what we study in our lab how your goals compete with the environment to dictate how you perceive things and then how you remember them and then how that changes as we get older okay so let me give you an example of this so here's a scene random scene i did not sculpt the scene i found it searching on google but it's interesting the more i looked at it the more i found uh really uh saline examples of what i'm talking about so let's say that the focus of this story is this young gentleman here he's sitting at a table in this busy restaurant and he's having a glass of wine with these other three people and if he has any hope of remembering the details of that conversation he would be paying attention right we all could know that but you see he's not right because there's some type of bottom-up influence here right something in the environment maybe it's a fight or an argument it's it's it's loud enough or or strong enough to pull his attention away from his goals and strong enough to attract the attention of three other people in the room but there's another interesting thing here is that this woman is so engaged in her text message that even though she's physically closest to this she seems like totally oblivious to it and it raises some interesting questions that we take very seriously and have been looking at for a while what is going on here is this an example of successful focus and failed focus which it might seem at first or is this successful ignoring and failed ignoring over here now a lot of us think that that would be the same thing i basically just said the same thing twice if you pay attention better of course you're ignoring better and basically it's this that people for a long time and i think a lot of people still feel intuitively that focusing and ignoring are two sides of the same coin they travel together they're they're attached well we don't think they're attached at all we have lots of data from our lab showing that focusing and ignoring are two totally separate things driven by separate systems and they change differently and you could be focusing just fine and failing to ignore they can dissociate i'm going to show you some examples of that let's talk about what's happening inside the brain so this is a picture of the brain this is the front of the brain here this is the back of the brain your eyeballs would be here your ears would be here and what i'm showing you here this red is the occipital part the visual part of your brain so when you process visual information in the world around you when you're looking at something it goes through your eyes and it travels through structures and winds up at the back part of your brain where it's processed in its most fundamental way so you basically take a part of seeing the the elements of the scene like the direction of lines and colors and orientations and movement the simple parts in this back part of your brain and then it travels along these streams forward in your brain and the attributes of your environment become integrated together and this gives you the complete view this complete representation of your world so this is bottom up and top down influences occur through the front part of your brain your prefrontal cortex this is i'm going to talk about this more in a second but we now know that there are projections from this part of the brain the cortex these axons are sort of like the highways in the brain that send an influence to the visual parts of your brain or the sound part of your brain the smell part of your brain all the senses have representations in what we call the primary cortices then their activity is modulated that's why sometimes require top-down modulation the activity is modulated by these connections and they're either more represented or less represented not based on anything in the environment but based on your goals does that make sense so that's how you shape how you perceive things is that these connections modulate the activity either up or down depending on your goals relevant or irrelevant in the sensory areas of the brain the prefrontal cortex is the part of our brain that is most human i i it is what gives us our control and you could see here the difference in not just the size of the brain so this is not actually how big a squirrel's monkey's brain is next to a human this the point here is not the overall size of the brain it's the part of the brain that's occupied by the prefrontal the frontal part of the brain it's you could see how small it is getting bigger even in a chimpanzee compared to a human so it is really the part of our brain that's evolved the most and not just in terms of size actually size has even its relation in size is not really the most amazing part but it's the connectivity of this part of the brain through these networks to the rest of the brain that gives us this amazing control this top down control the ability to direct how we perceive and act in the world based on our goals opposed to based on what we are just reflexively uh responding to in our environment so these animals are much more goal-direct they're much more bottom-up driven than goal-directed right we know that if you have pets you can see them respond in a way that's very sensitive to the environment and not so goal directed there's another creature that has this issue with uh poorly developed prefrontal cortex it's also bottom-up driven do you know what that creature is right children right so now now it seems obvious right so if we look at the development of the brain starting from five years old to 20 years old so this is a a study that compiled uh longitudinally mri scans and looked at the development and the maturity of the cortex the mature cortex being the cooler colors like the purples and the blues and the reds and yellows being the immature cortex so obviously the five-year-old's brain has a lot of a long way to go but what's interesting is that even the teenager's brain has some way to go in the prefrontal cortex you can see here even in 20 year olds not fully matured compared to you know a 40 year old cortex so this is probably apparent to you if you interact with even teenagers right they might have a goal but they are very sensitive to an influence from the environment and so you can see it especially in younger children right pointed in a certain direction they look really dedicated on accomplishing something and you show them you know some candy or something else and they just have a whole new goal just like that respond right to the environment and so that is you know an example of how our prefrontal cortex controls how we perceive things and it's this control that allows us somewhat to deal with interference because we have choices that we can make i'm going to come back to that we're going to now ask the question what happens when cognitive control is exceeded right because it does get exceeded well what happens is that there appears to be a very broad impact on our lives across many different things i study the impact of this on cognition but that is only tip of the iceberg it's only a piece of it i know it the best it's what we study in our lab it's what i'm going to talk about the most today but as i started thinking about this topic and reading about it more and talking to other scientists to study it from different perspectives you could see that it has a really broad impact on our lives it's not just memory that's impacted by interference it's probably almost everything i'm going to give you little quick examples of these other things but i'm going to really focus now on my research on cognition so my lab is here at ucsf i work on the mission bay campus on the other side of town and i'm going to give you just a quick overview of how our lab works i look at research in a lab as occurring in three different streams so the first is basic mechanisms of the brain how does it work and we use three primary tools for that we use functional mri which allows us to you're probably very familiar with mri scans which are largely to look at the structure of the brain but if you have the exact same tool and you use a different sequence just the sequencing of it the software really you can look at activity in the brain now it's not neural activity it's blood flow but the blood flow relates to neural activity so it lets us see which parts of your brain are being used more when you're doing something so we create experiments on computer screens and we're clever figured out clever ways to get that inside the mri scanner and you do these experiments just like you would almost play a video game or do a psychology experiment but while you're doing that in real time with a delay we're looking at what's happening in your brain so we can understand how the human brain functions while engaged in a task eeg allows us to do basically the same thing it's a little more comfortable you just put a cap on eeg has the advantage of seeing electrical activity in the brain so it lets us see when are vents are occurring in real time down to the millisecond level eeg though you can't tell exactly where it's coming from fmr you could tell very well where it's coming from but it's delayed so we use both of these tools the strength and weaknesses are complementary transcranial magnetic stimulation is a way to stimulate the brain using a magnetic field to see what happens when you stimulate it what does that part of the brain really do not just in terms of a correlation with something but in terms of causality what happens when it's perturbed so this is another tool that we use once we understand these basic mechanisms as best we can we then use the same tools and the same paradigms which are the programs that we create to study the brain to look at how it changes the way the population that we study most in our lab are healthy older adults usually 60 to 80 year olds now we're dipping lower and now we're starting to look across the whole life span so that is the population that we study the most in our lab and compare those brain activity those patterns of brain activity to the patterns we see usually in 20 to 35 year olds so those are the groups that we tend to study the most but these tools are used by labs to study every type of population healthy populations and every disease you can imagine we then ask can we improve these abilities through the knowledge that we gained on these left two streams right we know we think we have an idea how it works as best we can we think we understand what's changing can we use that information on our tools to create interventions to drive the neural processes back to a more optimal state and improve the behavior along with it that's our idea we have collaborations with pharmaceutical companies looking at drugs that change neurotransmitter receptors which are the main chemicals that communicate between nerve cells these are the same drugs that are used to treat many psychiatric and neurological conditions we look at how they work in improving interference resolution the type of things i already started telling you about and we also look to see how brain training programs some of which are developed commercially and a lot recently are being developed in our own lab based on our experiments might selectively improve these abilities and we use our brain recording tools and the measurements that we found out here to see are they actually working and if not can we use this information to design better interventions so that's how our lab works i'm going to give you a little taste of it um one of the the main questions we ask is and this is related to what i already told you but how attention and memory interact with each other so for a long history of psychology attention and memory were often viewed as separate operations separate functions or separate textbooks about them but we know based on experience alone that they interact very strongly right so if i was going to ask you who's going to remember the details of this event this young woman quietly reading this book or the gentleman that we already talked about in the restaurant everyone would say this person we know that your memory does not occur in a bubble it's influenced by your ability to attend and the context of what's going on around you i found this really beautiful quote it's the earliest quote i could find about this topic it's not by a scientist a psychologist a neuroscientist it's by samuel johnson a british author but it really summarizes exactly what i'm talking about so i just want to read it so he says that the true art of memory is the art of attention that no man will read with much advantage who is not able at pleasure to evacuate his mind back in those days everyone was men apparently but uh obviously it's meant more broadly now if the repositories of thought already full what can they receive and if the mind is employed on the past or the future the book will be held before the eyes in vain and it's amazingly insightful quote i think there's an entire career worth of research experiments in here and we are starting to do some of them so let me uh return to the main focus of our work which is really working memory really an experiment that's driven by this observation holding very few items in mind for a very short time what happens i'm going to tell you experiments both about distractions and interruptions but i'm going to start with distractions okay so how most experiments in our lab and i already described this a little bit we look at healthy younger and older adults and we do lots of tests to ensure that they're healthy we're trying to understand how the brain is functioning in as healthy state as it can be as it can be in the populations that we can find and we do both fmri here's an example of our scanner which is located right across the street over here on parnassus and here's our eeg rig that's located at the mission bay campus you see a cap on there there's a little view of what our data looks like and then we go ahead and we have our participants enter either the scan or put the cap on and they do an experiment so i'm going to have you do one experiment right now i'll have you do a couple of them so at least you can get an idea of what it feels like so in this experiment you're going to see four pictures two faces and two natural scenes nature scenes and your goal is to remember the faces there's two of them so remember both of them and ignore the scenes we're not going to test you on the scenes then there's going to be an x on the screen a little crosshair and that's your period of time to hold that in mind like you just left the couch and you're trying to get to the refrigerator hold those faces in mind then we're going to show you another picture and you have to say whether it matches that or it's a new one okay remember the faces ignore the scenes they're gonna be fast okay so prepare yourself okay here we go was that the face it was not the face right now if you're thinking it was a face do not be alarmed it doesn't mean that there's anything wrong with you you don't have to make a clinic appointment it takes practice to do this um and people practice for quite a bit they go in and still then even then people make errors which is the interesting part and when you make an error what we're really interested is what's going on when you're looking at the pictures and not just the picture that was relevant but the scenes that were irrelevant so we can do an experiment like this this is another view of the experiment where this is the one that you did right remember the faces and ignore the scenes we could do another version so you might do this many times and we test you so you see what it looks like the two faces come up the scenes came up time is going this way and then you're tested or we could do a flip side now the scenes are relevant the faces are irrelevant and now you have to say if this scene match one of the two scenes that you already saw or we could do a third version of this test where you have no goals to remember you just look at the faces and scenes and then you press the direction of an arrow at the end of the period of time and then what we ask is how does activity in the brain change in the visual parts of the brain that are selective for that information it's an amazing finding but we now know that the visual areas of your brain have selectivity so you could find an area that selectively represents a scene it doesn't mean that they're only represented there but they're more represented there than other information and you can find a face area in your brain that selectively represents faces so we use that information we find that first in a different experiment and then we ask how does activity so for scenes example how do scenes change in activity in this area when you remember them compared to when they're just passive when you're just looking at them compared to when you're ignoring them which is what you should have been doing in that experiment because your goal was to remember the faces so we can look within this area and so this is top-down modulation right you're seeing the same number of scenes in all of these different trials the only thing that's different is your goals to remember them ignore them or just pay no attention just passively view them and so if we look at the brain of most 20 and 30 year olds almost every one we see the same thing and so this is what we see this is the part of your brain that's responsive to scenes we see that there's a lot this is one single person's activity this is across a whole population of 20 20 year olds and you could see that there's lots of activity and if you look at the scene area when they are ignoring scenes they're seeing the same number of scenes there's much less activity and a very big difference across the population and every person shows the same pattern if you take a look at what happens in the passive condition it really falls in the middle in most people what this gives us is what we call a measure of enhancement and suppression enhancement is how much more activity you can have in the visual part of your brain when something is relevant to you as opposed to just passive and and suppression is how much less activity there is when it's actually irrelevant to your goals as opposed to just passive and we see that most almost all young adults have this suppression and enhancement value so they're they're modulating like i said earlier the activity in this part of the brain based on their goals around this baseline where they're not doing anything they're not paying attention and they're not ignoring so this is the data i just showed you so let's take a look at older adults does anyone know know this finding okay it's been a while now that we published this um it's it i think it's starting to permeate um as a as a finding and we've replicated it many times and a lot of other labs have shown it in different ways but what we find for those of you that do not know is that the older adults enhance which is sort of the other way of saying focus uh as if they're 20 years old there's no difference at all and we've replicated that many times what is different is the suppression which as a population is not occurring at all in this group of 60 to 80 year olds they're not suppressing the information below the levels of passive view as a population but we learn something more interesting when we look at all the individuals in the experiment because it's a very heterogeneous population it's not true of every older adult we see this is the memory performance on the face task we see that a popular subpopulation of them perform very well within one standard deviation so very close to the younger adults we even have this participant that did 100 on it very few younger adults did 100 so we see this really big difference then we see some of our older adults all of which are very healthy they went through this very rigorous screening cognitive screening as well we see a group that perform more than two standard deviations from the younger adults meaning that sort of statistically they're impaired from the younger population on the memory test then we can ask the distraction the suppression value how does it differ between these groups compared to younger adults and we find that it's only the lower performing older adults on the memory test that have the significant suppression deficit this group although numerically it's a little lower is not different than younger adults so what this means and there's actually a correlation between them so that those older adults that are better suppressing the scenes are remembering the faces better so and we've shown this now many times in younger adults too on experiments that are a little harder than this with moving dots and colors that the biggest influence on your ability to remember in this short period of time is not focus it's not that you don't need to focus it's just that people focus really well of all age groups and continuously across time the thing that varies with age and even younger adults from trial to trial is their ability to ignore that has the strongest impact on your ability to perform the memory task there's another interesting finding after the experiment is over we do a surprise experiment which just endears our patients after having spent an hour and a half in the scanner and what we do in this experiment is that we show them all the pictures that they saw on the scanner and a equal number of new ones and we asked them did you see this picture before rate it i definitely didn't see it i definitely saw it or i'm not sure but i think i'm not sure but i think not and everyone feels this is a total waste of time because they're not really sure about a lot of them but the reality is it's not a waste of time at all that the ones they saw on the scanner they rate infinitely more statistically significant that they saw it than the ones that they did not see that's very very strong finding but that's not so interesting what's interesting is how they rate seeing the stimuli that were irrelevant like the scenes that you saw that were that you were ignoring how well do you remember that scene right you shouldn't remember it right i mean it was not part of the test but when we compare the higher memory elder adults on this short term test to the lower performing we find that the lower working memory performing older adults remember the scenes that were irrelevant better and they remember them better than the younger adults so they have better memory for things they should not have remembered right so it shows you how complicated memory is right you can't just say they have a memory problem the memory looks really good over here it looks like better than 20 year olds but it's an example that this information is not just getting processed and affecting their working memory in the short term but it's sticking inside their long-term memory now in all fairness some people look at this as an advantage of aging that because you accept more information and you have a larger knowledge base of things around you and that there might be advantages in terms of things like creativity in general i think having a suppression problem is a is a deficit because it impacts your immediate goals uh but there are certainly different views on this i'm giving you both sides of it but this is definitely a change that occurs as we get older for good of that we did another experiment where we asked how quickly does this occur so a second which is how long those pictures up for is a long time in the brain right events occurring on the millisecond level that's a thousandth of a second so since events occurred a long time we have a lot of processing that goes and we're asking the quote we asked the question when does this happen so to look at that we use eeg which i already told you has very high what we call timing resolution and allows us to see when things are occurring and i'm not going to show you the data for the sake of time here but i do want to tell you that what we found was that younger adults are suppressing their relevant information in the first tenth of a second that it appears which is amazing a tenth of a second after it's up they already have less activity than they do in the past review the older adults are not but if you look later in the second the younger and older adults look the same so we interpret this is that it's not that with aging the ability to suppress is gone it's just delayed but with irrelevant information if you let it in the the problem is there already the interference has been created you could try to get it out but it's never going to be as effective at least that's our interpretation is that you have to stop it at the gate you can't allow it in this irrelevant information so even just the delay of a half a second is associated and the correlation is here too that this delay is associated with poor working memory i'm just holding those two items in mind so this is an example of distraction a relevant information that's getting in against your will and interfering with your ability to hold just a couple items okay we just completed a set of four studies that i'm going to tell you about because they're all quick and related to one another but asking the same question how does distraction impact long-term memory not working memory right so holding things for a longer period of time so this is the experiment we did we had our participants take a look at a hundred 168 pictures you could see them here so what they had to do was answer questions if they could carry them and other questions about them and you could see here there are three crowns and four couches and four vacuum cleaners i think they're statue of liberties every time but they're poor vacuum cleaners it's the new yorker in may and you have to answer these questions about them but what you don't know is that after an hour you do another experiment you know you have to do an experiment you don't know what it is but what the experiment is is a memory experiment of how many items were in each of those pictures so you hear you hear one of the names it might be crowned and you have to say three right everyone reports using mental imagery to do this you probably know what mental imagery is it's it's a commonly used term for those of you that don't it's your ability to create a representation in your brain of something in the world that's not actually in front of you right so you can imagine these vacuum cleaners and picture and then essentially count them and try to see how many they were this is the tool we don't tell people to do this this is what everyone does for very visual things this is a very effective form of memory is to use mental imagery the interesting thing about this experiment is that we did it on the three conditions with their eyes open looking at a gray screen their eyes shut or their eyes open looking at a busy visual picture that more mimics what you might see around you in the real world so it's a very simple manipulation and what we found was that if you look at the detailed memory not the familiarity but the detailed recollection of how many items there were the memory drops with the visual distractor versus the gray screen and when your eyes are shut so your memory is actually better when your eyes are closed it's amazing that this experiment had not been done you don't need an fmri scanner to do this but your memory and a lot of you might even have that experience that you remember things better there's some data related to it so for example if later i tried to do this experiment with an audience and it failed miserably so i'm not going to do it but you could do it yourself so go home and over the next couple days talk to a friend look them in the face and ask them to tell you with some detail what they had for dinner the day before and what you're going to see is that they look away from you when they try to do it you can probably almost feel yourself trying to do it right now to look away the problem with an audience is that people don't like to look at people they don't know it i figured that out once i tried to make people do that and you have to be looking at someone to see this this effect there's actually a study that showed that people the more you look away actually helps your memory it's very similar to this finding that the but they don't say why and we show here and i'm going to show you quickly some neural data that shows that it is the distraction it's the representing of this irrelevant information that decreases your ability to recall from memory what you were trying to find so you might ask okay well this is a busy visual picture that i'm looking at and i'm trying to recall this visual memory so maybe it's because it's a visual memory and a visual picture so we did the exact same experiment to look at that but here what we did was we always kept your eyes open looking at a gray screen but we manipulated what you heard so it's either silence um white noise like shh or restaurant noise we went into a restaurant we just tape the normal chatter that occurs in a restaurant and did the exact same experiment and what we found was exactly the same thing no interaction basically looks like visual even though this is now an auditory distraction it has the same impact on you recalling the visual memories right so this is not meant to be a public service message that you should be walking around with blindfolds on and earplugs in right it's just meant as an example to show how sensitive your long-term memory is even to the normal environmental stimuli around you the visual and auditory decreases the quality the detailed recollection of those memories um i won't go into this but we find there's a brain network as i've been talking about between the front part of your brain the control part of your brain the hippocampus these areas of your brain on both sides that are involved in forming memories and also retrieving memories and the back part of your brain and this network is fragile and when you open your eyes this network decreases and the relationship between this network falling apart is associated with you not remembering those items so we are we're beginning to understand what's occurring in the brain while uh while this happens and while you're distracted okay what happens as you get older so this was just published i think a couple weeks ago uh we did this experiment you probably could guess the answer to this it's always sad to have to deliver the bad news but uh this is an index the higher it is the more distraction there is and you could see that older adults doing that exact same experiment the visual experiment um have a bigger disruption on their ability to recall the memories than than the younger adults and this is controlled for overall memory memory performance okay that's distraction and its impact on on working memory and long-term memory i'm now going to show you a little bit about interruptions so here's a new experiment okay so in this experiment you're going to remember a face hold it in mind for just seven seconds and then you're going to see another face and you just have to say if it's a match yes i saw the face or not really easy one phase okay here we go okay very good that's correct okay we're going to do it again this time is a little catch you're gonna it's gonna be the exact same experiment except in that period in the middle another face is gonna come up for that face that comes up you have to make a decision about it you have to decide whether it's a male over 20 or under 20. but then you go about the original business of trying to remember that first face right so it's multitasking so same thing remember a face but it's like you're getting a phone call in the middle you're going to have to make a decision you don't have to say it out loud and then at the end you have to make the memory decision for the first phase does everyone get it okay so give it a shot it was did that feel harder it's actually it's actually a little harder um it's subtle but it's consistent across people and it's not just older adults it's younger adults that also have a little have have an impact on this so this is the no interference condition this is the interruption condition where you make the decision about a face there's actually a third condition we actually studied distraction in this too there a face pops up in the middle and you don't have to do anything with it you just have to ignore it and what we find is that younger adults if you look at their working memory their ability to remember their face it drops significantly subtly but significantly meaning that it's consistent small drop from person to person which is what was meaningful to us with just having an irrelevant face pop up in the middle and then a bigger drop when you have to remember what when you have to make a decision about that face which is something we see again interruptions are more disruptive than distractions right the actual going to it that other task is more so this is what it looks like for our healthy older adults right so they show overall low working memory so it's not only related to interference unfortunately would be good to have only one thing to deal with here but um distraction this is what i already showed you before right the distraction effect here's the interruption effect the interruption effect is even larger than the distraction effect behaviorally so then we did an experiment where we looked inside the doing fmri what's happening inside their brains in terms of those networks between the front part of the brain and the visual parts of the brain so here's the network that we found between the front part the prefrontal cortex and the part that represents scenes in this experiment it's a little different than the one i just showed you you have to remember scenes and then the faces interrupt you but it's basically the same idea and we can ask how the connection stays as you go from the encoding period that's when you're trying to when you first see it to the period when you're holding it in mind to the period that you're interrupted or distracted and then to the period where you're holding it in mind after that okay and we can look across the three tasks and this is what it looks like in the no interference task so there's a high connectivity we actually find the connectivity that's highest over here and then just see what happens and you can see it pretty much stays flat it looks like there's a little divot here it's not significant it might be real it it's been shown that your memory trace even without being interrupted fades a little bit and we know that before this is the pretty much the same period of time that you wait before you're going to be tested again there's usually a boost where you anticipate that you're going to be tested so maybe this is real it wasn't significant but generally we're really interested in how it differs from the other tasks here's what it looks like with distraction so first of all i should point out these these are the younger adults right so these are the the 20 to 30 year olds and we see it looks exactly the same which is what we find what distraction is how you resist distraction is you hold the activity the connectivity in the brain that was there beforehand you just resist it by not letting go you maintain the connection you resist the impact of it on that memory connection that you're holding in mind this is what it looks like in the younger adults when they're interrupted does that make sense so what you're seeing here is that this connection looks the same over here then the interruption occurs they make the decision about the face and it drops significantly it's actually not significantly above zero here but it comes back up to the same level before the stimulus is even bought before you even test it just in that delay period two we can see we call this reactivation the network is re-established after you're interrupted that's how a young adult performs this test how our older adults that have the bigger inter the bigger effects of it this is what their pattern looks like so you could see what's happening it looks everything looks the same until after the interruption is gone and then it does not come up to the same point so interestingly enough what we found here was that the impact of distraction and interruption in older adults are due to two different things distraction is caused by over attention to irrelevant information interruption is not over attention to the interrupting information the amount of attention to the interrupting information looks exactly the same across younger adults in every way we can measure it what's different is how the memory network is reactivated after the interruption does that make sense there's another piece of the puzzle here if we look at the connection between the front part of the brain and the face part of the brain the the information that's interrupting we find this so this is what it looks like in younger adults so it starts low because there are scenes over here it only goes up in the condition where you make the decision about the face when the when there's no face which is the yellow or the face is a distractor it stays flat and then after so now this network only comes up when you make a decision about the face and then just disappears right goes back to the baseline level older adults look like this so does everyone see what's going on here the difference again is after the interruption it's not just that they're the participants in the study are not reactivating the face they're not letting go of of the they're not just reactivating the scene they're not letting go of the face they're not disengaging from it it's a problem that we've seen in other studies now we call it like a stickiness of processing sort of the just sort of stuck in processing it too long whether or not one is causing the other we're not really sure but we now see in more and more um of our experiments that there is a problem with letting go of information after it's no longer relevant and this might prevent re-engaging okay so let me give you a couple cartoons to summarize this so for distraction the prefrontal cortex acts as a bouncer right sort of scary-looking balancer deciding exactly what information is on the guest list that's what gets in it does this through its connection that it maintains with the visual parts of the brain so the visual parts brain has a limited capacity it is way smaller than this picture i'm having trouble finding a picture of just four people at a party but that's really what we're talking about here right it's a very small capacity depending on the information and it prevents more information from getting in when it fails you have an impact on your performance because the information that's let in interferes with the information that you're trying to hold that's how distraction is mediated multitasking is different but it's the same part of the brain the prefrontal cortex and there's lots of parts of the prefrontal cortex this is way more complicated because different parts do different things but i'm trying to give you at least a simplified overview of generally how this works here the prefrontal cortex is the flight controller it's deciding what is the priority right now right so it does that also through connection so you can see here this insane bicycle messenger in new york is texting while riding a bike next to a cab and his brain is telling him to focus on the traffic right now maybe they're approaching a turn but then it's a okay focus on the text but what it doesn't do is that right it doesn't actually have simultaneous streams of information for complicated processing right this is often referred to as a bottleneck the central bottleneck it's what leads people to consider multitasking to be a myth that when you're dealing with complex processing it's not really multitasking it's switching and that's what we saw in our experiment right when you when even when the young adults when they processed that face that interrupted they left the memory task only to return to it and so that is what cause what happens with each of these switches you have a cost sometimes called a switching cost this is a delay you come back it's not at the same level of fidelity all these things contribute to a decrease in performance which is now well appreciated for when you multitask and when you're distracted they drop the level of performance compared to doing a single thing at a time we're now starting to extend this out and say well is this about being 60 and 80 compared to 20 30 what happens to all those years in between does it just stay steady and then decline in your later years we just complete experiment this is unpublished data we used a totally different task i'm not going to go into it here it's not a memory task it's a perceptual task and a motor task but we did it in 180 people from 20 to 80 years old and tried to look at what the multi-tasking costs might be what we mean by cost is how much worse you do when you do two things as opposed to one thing this is a detection discrimination task so if it's zero it means that the same means that there is no cost and we could do this for uh distraction and multitasking and so this is what it looks like this is the distraction line this is the multi-testing line you could see it's not that they're flat and then get worse when you get older they really start dropping especially for interruption which is already significantly different from 20 year olds at 30 year old so they drop through the entire lifespan and distraction seems to have a little bit later but still significantly dropped by 40 years old so um this is not entirely unknown it's unknown for distraction and multitasking as far as i can find and we're excited about this finding but for these type of abilities what we call fluid cognitive abilities things that demand a lot of dynamic processing like working memory being one of them processing speed in general decision making inhibition these things decline early in life unlike the more static uh memories like episodic memory memory vocabulary and information which tends to decline later so at least when you're thinking about it from this point of view aging is not something that's related to being 60 or 70 like aging is not being 23 years old essentially it's something that starts early and is a lifelong process that we can all enjoy together so it's um it's i i think that the the concept of it is changing drastically sometimes i give i give public talks and if the topic is aging and i look around and the audience is like full of 30 year olds and 40 year olds and they're like we're aging and they're right you know they recognize already a difference in their performance uh compared to when they were younger and there's a lot of attention on performance right now for good or for bad and um you know people can notice these changes so it's interesting to see that how early they can occur okay i'm just going to give you a little brief tour of other types of consequences of distraction and multitasking so that this is not just solely about memory impact on safety this is from a colleague of mine david strayer's work um he has shown some really shocking consequences of of these type of behaviors while driving you're probably already familiar with this but driving a cell phone using a cell phone while driving increases your risk of a traffic accident by fourfold so this is not subtle it's a massive increase it's illegal to drive in many places because of it and it's even illegal to text now in a lot of places including california which if you didn't know that's a good piece of information to know because i know three people that have gotten tickets from that interestingly enough it's not alleviated by talking hands-free right because the problem is that it's not that your eyes are off the road that's a problem certainly but your eyes could be on the road but your brain might not be on the road and your brain can easily be off the road when you're having a conversation even if you're not holding the phone so hands-free talking is legal but it certainly does not alleviate the problem you might ask well should i even be talking to the person sitting next to me that does not cause the problem this has been studied the impact is is when you're having a phone conversation and not having a conversation with the person next to you i mean and it makes sense right the person next to you is involved in the whole driving experience right there is invested in the safety of the road as much as you are they see when something when you're changing lanes when something's occurring and they might pause the conversation unlike the person on the cell phone who's not part of the situation is actually sort of frustrated when you stop talking tries to pull you back so there's a very different scenario between having a conversation with someone in the car with someone out of the car another piece of data is that uh produced by this lab shows that it's even more dangerous than drunk driving um at the levels of alcohol that were just at the level of legal intoxication again not like advice to drink and drive but it's certainly a shocking piece of news at how powerful the impact of this type of multitasking is when you're doing something that feels automatic like driving and a d driving is automatic until something changes that's unexpected and that's where all the problem comes in when someone shops stops sharp in front of you that's when when when you need to have all those resources driving and texting we already talked about that this is a really interesting case does everyone know about this northwest airlines jet with 140 people on board lost contact for an hour it was out of contact for an hour flight control was going crazy where is this plane why isn't it landed before it landed in minneapolis it overshot its destination by 150 miles does everyone know why this occurred the pilots were on a laptop doing uh learning about a new scheduling program and unable to drive at the same time so you know this this has really really serious consequences um this is a piece by a friend of mine now matt richtel from the new york times who wrote a piece um actually i think i helped him with this title in in our conversations and uh but he uncovered some amazing evidence and i think was 2008 over 1 000 reports to emergency room of people hurting themselves while walking and texting because they tripped into some they tripped or they walked into a pole which was double from the year before and double from the year before that i don't know what the data looks like now but there are some hilarious and scary youtube videos out there of people falling into fountains and other type of activities so it's certainly even things that feel incredibly automatic are not right you need your resources and this type of impact is very real this is a increasingly interesting and important topic about the impact of it on on education in children especially this study found that the amount of time that college students spent instant messaging significantly related to higher rates of distractibility on academic tasks notably reading and it's a correlational study it doesn't have causality but it raises interesting questions is this because they it just displaced reading right because they spent a lot of time texting so they just did not read as much in those instances and they had poor performance or is it is it because they actually changed their style of interacting with their environment and this has been raised that it's not just that it displace reading but the way that they interact with texting is much more quickly right it's quick little burst it's not sustained and maybe this type of interaction is changing the style and the ability to actually sustain attention for long periods of time which is what you need to do to read so it's intriguing and scary but it's certainly something to at least think about lots of other work going on on how the impact of media might um and multitasking instead of actually engaging in face-to-face conversations might change development uh there's a lot of interesting data coming out with tween girls showing that their ability to engage i don't think this is published but their ability to engage with each other is being impacted because they're not learning the normal cues that you get from face-to-face interaction so certainly lots of interesting things haven't seen data on this but lots of anecdotes of people sitting around the table and no one's actually present everyone's in another place communicating through the phones interesting implications of this work there's some interesting data um here's a study uh in 2004 on it workers an observational study where they watched these workers for weeks so much that the the observers just sort of blended into the background after time and what they find is that people engage in a project defined as one unified task one goal for around 12 minutes and after that 12 minutes they switch to a new project only to switch back to another project after 12 minutes and this is how they go through the day not really sustaining a project for very long what's even more shocking is that each of these points were interrupted every three minutes by an email an internet event or a phone event just as frequently um introduced internally than externally so not always a phone call just like time to check email it's been three minutes so this fragmented style is is really really shocking and um has been analyzed by the firm basics of business uh from saying that the cost to the u.s economy is 650 billion dollars a year in lost economy so obviously this is very hard to uh to determine for sure if that's what it is but um it's recognized by a lot of people as a very serious impact on productivity which is a flip to the anecdotes of not not very long ago when employers were saying looking on cvs and looking to see if you list multitasking as a skill how well do you multitask you know so you know it's potentially changing how we've how we view it clive thompson of the new york times had this really nice anecdote he says our that our attention must skip like a stone across water all day long touching down only periodically that our level of intentional engagement is just so much more superficial because it's being turned on and off so frequently so why do we do it right we have a vast amount of data accumulating from different fields that there is a detriment and a negative impact of at least the multitasking uh part of it well here are some ideas right it's very hard to find data on why we do it um at least in my ability to find it but you hear these things when you talk about it and and a lot of them i i think are quite obvious so it gives us the sense of flexibility you have a fresh perspective when you switch around increased variety enables us very often to use downtime more productivity more productively but in general it seems that it's more fun and this is probably related to the fact that it might actually have a higher reward value such that we know one very important part of our of our evolution is the seeking out of novel events right we're novelty seeking creatures and we get these rewards these dopamine increases when we switch to something novel so it is possible that this reward structure that the amount of novel time when multitasking is greater than unit tasking and that this might give us these little bursts of reward as you switch back and forth it's hard to find really hard data on that but i think it's sort of at least raises the possibility if you look at other data about how our brain responds to novelty and reward some have gone so far as to say that this type of reinforcement could create almost like an addiction where you feel uncomfortable when you're not multitasking even though you recognize it's negative which is sort of a hallmark of addiction it doesn't have to actually be pleasurable you could know it's destructive and still engage in it and so it's interesting um and certainly an important topic of research distraction is another interesting thing people frequently go to coffee shops to study or to do work you see it all the time some people here might do it i find it's less as people get older and that's probably because of the recognized impact of that distracting environment trying to do something like reading but if you go into a coffee shop you will see people working away laptops open and it raises the interesting question i mean other things like music even more complicated but it raises the interesting question of why do people seek out these environments is it just that they're more enjoyable or is there a possible benefit of distraction on productivity in some people and we're actually doing research in our lab right now to figure out if that's true or if it everyone pays the price but you just like it so you're willing to put up with it but it's an interesting question because people do put themselves in distracting environments frequently okay what can we do about it so the way i look at it we have two choices here we could change our behavior or we could change our brains maybe not in this totally terrifying way but uh but certainly there are things we can do uh on both sides of these so from changing our behavior i would say um i'm frequently asked to give advice on how you deal with this and i certainly do not want to become like a self-help guru that is the last thing i want i want to be a scientist but i have actually changed my behavior a little bit after studying this for the last several years and so i won't tell you what to do but i'll tell you what i do so you can have rules right um you can decide make certain decisions right just because all this amazing technology exists doesn't mean that you have to use it all at the same time so what i do is that when i have important tasks that really demand attention because they demand high quality and they might have a time stamp on them then i try to do one thing at a time i'll quit my email because just knowing that my email is open actually makes me want to check it that's my own personal thing you might find that yourself the fact that i have to go to open it makes me makes it easier for me not to check it because i also feel the pull to check the email i turn my phone off i close my door this is what i do when i have something important to do that really has to have a high level of attention and i'll tell you what when you do it for a while you find it can actually be very satisfying to sustain your attention over hours without doing something else but i multitask for periods of time when i'm doing things that are less critical that are boring because i know that i can never get through that unless i do them all at the same time and just switch between them so i don't i don't i think technology is wonderful i don't think that mulder testing is a bad thing i think that just like everything else in terms of nutrition and anything that has an impact on your health or your quality of life it's all about choices and deciding when you want to do them when you don't and how much you want to do so at least that's what i do in terms of dealing with this type of influence so what can we do to change our brain can we actually change our ability to process information in multiple streams and distraction and i would say yes you can um there's some data from other labs that show that this can occur that with practice you can actually get better at it because sometimes you have to multitask you have to deal with multiple streams of information you have to be in distracting environments right you're not going to not go to restaurants anymore and have conversations just because it's noisy it would be great to be able to control these and that's what we're studying in our lab right now can we train individuals through adaptive type of practice to improve these abilities so that they're not encumbered by them and hopefully it'll have transfer and have if you learn how to deal better with interference in this situation that we've created for you maybe it'll go to other aspects of your life that's at least the hope so we designed this video game with uh video game professionals in the bay area who are friends of mine and were willing to participate in this research experiment this is an early view of what it looked like it's a very primitive video game at least it's actually developed a lot more now it's a car that you're driving on a laptop and you're pressing the button when certain signs come up so green sign only a green circle only not a green pentagon and so you're doing two tasks at once you're both driving which is really hard to keep yourself on the road and you're doing the sign task and we could actually look at your performance when you're doing driving alone or sign alone and then look at how what happens when you put them together that's actually the data that i presented across the livestream was people playing this game and we think that if you play this and the game keeps getting harder as you get better you'll develop the ability to do both of these things at the same time and hopefully that'll lead to other abilities and so we bring you into the lab our participants we just completed the study it took two years and it was funded by the robert johnson foundation it had 60 older adults in it healthy older adults and they came into the lab we did eeg recordings with an experimental version of this game and a whole and two days of cognitive testing then they go home with laptops and they play the game for 12 hours single hour sessions so one hour session over the course of a month so you play it three times a week for uh for four weeks um so it's a good amount of exposure but you know modest people play video games for a lot more than that um our participants found it pretty fun i think that the game could be more fun it's actually a big goal of ours now is to make it fun we're looking at ipads as a new new medium and so you take these laptops home and and while you play the game at home um it sends your data how you're performing on the game to a dropbox account and right to our lab server so you could see your performance in real time in our lab while you're at home and then you come back into the lab and we look at how your brain has changed how your performance has changed on this game and we now are looking into having eeg caps at home so you could put this cap home on play the game and record your brain activity it sends it bluetooth right to the laptop right to the lab so we just move our lab right out of ucsf right into your home that's that's the goal and then we're looking at fmri before and after um so i didn't i'm not going to show you any of that data it's all coming out now i think it'll be all very exciting and i'll share with you another time when we pull together the full story so i just want to conclude and tell you that um you know i think that this type of research at least understanding it might improve our ability to deal with distraction and multitasking and how it impacts our memory maybe help prevent fragile you know moments like this um that might not be very serious but more serious things that might occur on the road or in the office at the very least i think an understanding of how our brain interacts with our environment will allow us to make better decisions hopefully that'll lead to healthier more effective higher quality lives thank you so the question was that women are better multitaskers men are better at linear thinking first of all i'll say that it's really hard to believe that looking at data i know it exists there's lots of things that exist we spent a long time in the scientific literature there are examples of it there are examples the other way it's not entirely convincing from the scientific data at least not my view of it in our own experiment we found no gender differences there were some things that were subtle we might we might not have had enough participants to have the power to look for those effects so i i can't answer but the fact that we didn't find anything so the question was since uh these type of dense media experiences that i described are newer potentially children that are digital natives that are growing up with it right now have a different wired brain to deal with it um most certainly they do i mean our brain is constantly rewiring itself so even throughout your lifespan that's how our brain works that's plasticity our brains change and structure and function in response to the environment that's just how they work so most assuredly if they're interacting with a very different type of environment their brains are wired differently before it i think that's true it doesn't mean it's bad or good but you know all brains are different based on your experiences but whether it's good or not or how it affects them if it if they're better at that but there are consequences likely that that's the case this is unclear there's some data out of stanford a couple of years ago that looked at college students and and gave them a questionnaire about how they use media looking for multitasking use of it and then they split them into the heavy media multitaskers and the low medium multitaskers and what they found was that when they brought them into the lab and did a series of cognitive tests that are related to multitasking like distraction um and task switching tests that the heavy medium multitaskers were worse at it right but this is correlational data right so it has that chicken and egg problem that you don't know whether or not it made them more distractible uh maybe it had benefits and maybe distractibility is one of the consequences that could very well be or if people that were like this were the people that tended to multitask more so it's interesting um and provocative i think but it doesn't answer all the questions and we're actually doing studies along those lines in our lab now we have colleagues now that that uh focus on attention deficit disorder as a condition and children that we're collaborating with and we're even looking at adult adhd you know a lot of this rings of attention deficit i understand why you asked that question i get that question a lot um you know there are different criteria that you use clinically to diagnose it than we do in our lab none of these are clinical criteria um but it's interesting to me and it's definitely something that we're going to look at the question is can silence be a distraction um yes so we actually have a grant to study that right now there that that actually is my hypothesis with that um there is an equally prevalent world of internal turmoil and distraction and multi-testing that's going on here that i didn't talk about since i introduced them but we know that this is a massive imp has a massive impact on our behavior sometimes it could be pathological like in cases of ptsd and traumatic brain injury um where or obsessive compulsive disorder for sure where people are ruminating on internal thoughts internal distractions in a way that uh that prevent them from from uh attending to their goals and then even outside of pathological conditions a lot of people feel the impact of internal distraction and one of the questions that that we or one of the hypotheses that we think that people might go to distracting environments to work is that if you're in silence like a library that quiet allows this internal distraction to take place which can be very disruptive and that potentially putting yourself in an externally distracting environment engages the suppression system and quiets the internal noise and then allows you to focus it's just an idea but it's something that we're looking at i'm glad i'm glad people agree with that now we'll figure it out we have two years to figure that out who didn't ask a question back there so the question is is this evolutionarily driven our our our apparent desire to multitask a lot i think i i don't know for sure but my intuition is that yes and that's sort of what i was talking about that there is an evolutionary drive i believe to not just seek but but to to explore right we know we have this exploration drive we seek out novelty we switch it's what allows us to find new environments it probably has a survival advantage which is why we have it and i think some of that experience is there in multitasking too so i don't know if it has survival advantage anymore but it doesn't matter right because if it did during uh our formative stages of our brain we can have it vestigially and it could even be negative in modern society and we would still have it so yeah i mean i i don't know that for sure i'd love to talk to an evolutionary biologist about it but my intuition is that that makes sense research on the effects of meditation on memory and these things so that the grant that i told you about with the internal distraction what i call the coffee shop experiment the second part of that grant was to see if meditation which is large there's lots of different types of meditation but concentrated meditation is really about this at least my reading of it is that you uh focus on something like your breath you keep yourself aware of when you're internally distracted you recognize it and then you return to your focus that sounds very much like what we're talking about here so the second part of that grant is to look at at meditation um in a sort of video game that i created to try to push it to push it hard especially people that are naive to meditation to see if we can teach people how to self-regulate internal distraction that's the idea is there like an optimal age given that i showed that uh peak and i would say 23. from looking at the data it looks like you got one good year is anyone 23 right there these are your good old days right now pay attention to them next year you're already going to be disappointed somewhere somewhere around there um so why why do people have breakthroughs very early i mean you know that's it differs from by specialty uh where people's main sweet spot is and um you know i i don't i don't know all the the data on why that is but you know a lot of advances do happen later in life i mean the one thing that doesn't decline there's a couple things that don't decline but one thing that's well noted to not decline is wisdom which actually increases like you're taking your experience and your intelligence bringing it together and having better decision-making abilities and that's something that uh grows with age so you know i think that some people have their breakthroughs older in life depending on you know the things that they're doing but things that demand high focus and very uh intact fluid processing are stronger really young so you know i think it probably has something to do with the type of abilities where they peak and how that relates to what you're doing so the question is what why why does this happen what happens as we get older um to cause this and that is an entirely other long lecture i will i will throw a couple out there yes that is one of our major questions too i didn't even touch on that but obviously right we want to know why there are lots of changes first of all the changes that occur in every organ system you're probably familiar with that of your body besides just your brain right so degeneration of systems across every species is is built into our genetic code this is what happens with life it starts it goes through a decay you know goes through a process and lots of things change the amount of chemicals the neurotransmitters in your brain change uh the connections between the brain cells the axons are often damaged with age that's something that's very common uh the brain shrinks in size but interestingly enough holds most of its neurons we used to think that you lost a lot of brain cells as you got older we don't think that as much anymore a lot of the brain cells are there but they're smaller the branching is smaller so there are lots of changes that occur in the brain with age that are associated with these changes in cognition but the brain is still plastic right and that's the good part if it wasn't for plasticity this would be a lot less interesting of a field to research but because the brain retains its plasticity which is reduced from younger age it's capable of still reforming and reshaping itself to stimuli in the environment so this is what drives the idea that with the right type of of uh decisions and how and what you do in your life you can maintain a lot of these abilities or at least better than you can if you don't oh thank you you

Channel: University of California Television (UCTV)

Views: 500,923

Rating: 4.7891355 out of 5

Keywords: memory, attention, cognitive neuroscience, aging brain

Id: FRVrvpJOztw

Length: 88min 38sec (5318 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 28 2012