The Distracted Mind - 19th Distinguished Lecture on Brain, Learning and Memory - Dr. Adam Gazzaley

well my name is dr. Craig stark I'm the director of the Center for the neurobiology of learning and memory and together with the UCI mind we're putting on this series here the distinguished lecture series on brain learning and memory now this is the 19th anniversary of this lecture series we've been doing it for 19 years and hopefully we get to continue doing this and bringing to you these incredible talks on neuroscience tonight's talk that we have is going to be by a dr. Adam ghazali before I do the full introduction of him I want to just give you a little bit of a orientation as to the format that we're going to have for this evening and also be able to take a moment to thank the people who actually put this helped us put this series on so in terms of the format for this evening well we're going to be having a talk and after the talk what I want to make sure that you know is that you're going to have plenty of opportunities to actually ask questions afterwards you'll see a couple of individuals in each section of the theater here with a microphone and if you have a question I'll remind you of this at the end as well if you have a question raise your hand and try to get their attention they'll bring a microphone over to you so that everybody actually can hear now in terms of our talk tonight I've mentioned that the talk is put on by two centers here at UCI that have partnered together to be able to bring you this lecture series and so I'd like to thank not only the folks at the C nln who put this on but also UCI is Institute for memory impairments and neurological disorders UCI mind as I say together we put this on we've been graciously supported over a number of years also by the executive vice chancellor and provost office at UCI and I'd like to thank them for their continued continued generous support of this series now our speaker tonight our speaker tonight this is a real treat for me to get in to introduce him I've known his work for many many years and we first actually got a chance to to meet and get to know each other about a year and a half or so ago our speaker is dr. Adam cazali dr. gazali is an associate professor of neurology physiology and psychiatry at UCSF and he's also the director the founding director of the neuroscience imaging center of at UCSF he has a both an MD and a PhD and after getting his PhD he did a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of California Berkeley and he also did his clinical residency in neurology at the University of Pennsylvania now since that time his career has well for lack of a better word exploded you take a look at his - called a CV it's really a resume for academics it goes on for well I stopped at about page 15 or so of his CV some of the sections here were in four or so columns to be able to cram all of the information in in the last ten years he's given over 250 invited scientific presentations he has over 70 publications to his credit he has awards from Pfizer and the afar innovation in aging award the Ellison foundation dues scholar award and aging and the Harold Brenner Penske early career award in neuro behavioral science he also takes a very special interest in doing things like well coming and talking to you here tonight this won't be his first time doing it that was one of the ones of about four columns or so worth of listings of things to give you a few highlights here The New York Times The Wall Street Journal time discover wired TBS NPR CNN NBC nightly Nightly News and in particular he did recently did a special on TBS called the distracted mind without dr. Adam cazali which obviously is also the title of the lecture tonight what you're going to be hearing about tonight is some of the research that he's been doing his research focuses on something that we call the field top-down modulation how it is the things like attention and working memory interact and modulate the way information is actually processed in our brain so how these kinds of things really shape the sorts of actions and the behaviors that you're actually going to be having he uses the same sorts of techniques if you remember a couple years ago I gave a talk here talking about functional neuroimaging and if you've been to a number of these you will have seen that a few times he also uses EEG where one places electrodes on the scalp to record the electrical activity and and TMS it will tell you I think a little bit about these but one of the things I think is most fascinating about his research is he tries to take these things not only as a way of understanding the fundamentals of how our brain is actually working but try to also take this one step further to say and what can we actually do with his knowledge what can we actually do for people based on what we've actually learned about how the brain works so he has a whole section of his research that's devoted to how could we actually have cognitive training tools computer games or what have you that can actually try to train our brains to get it so that we're actually helping mitigate some effects say for example of Aging or of dementia so he's going to be touching on a number of these various areas tonight and it's with great pleasure that I get a chance to introduce one of the rock stars of our field dr. Adam Goodes Ali [Applause] thank you very very much that was a incredibly generous introduction I was sitting there singing whoa I'm actually a little stressed out just by hearing all that not to really deliver all right well I was actually mentioning to Craig as I was sitting there it's so exciting for me to look around and see all of you that came out to hear about neuroscience and how the brain works and this topic of distraction that I'm going to present I think it's it's such a critical time to show how much we care about science and how we feel that it impacts our lives so it's really warming for me to see this I am going to give you a tour over the next hour of this topic of the distracted mind as Craig mentioned I recently hosted a PBS science special with this title and it should be available online maybe by the end of this month or next month so it's actually longer than the amount of information in presenting now so we'll go into some more details so with that introduction let me dive right in I like to start with this picture because it says a lot as pictures do right and just by hearing the laughter in the room I know that that you many of you appreciate it so who knows what's going on here okay this some did some young folk up there right they're raising their hands - right so for those of you that are fortunate enough to not know what's happening here this is the experience of having left the couch seven seconds ago with one item in mind only to arrive at the refrigerator and have no idea what you're doing there okay now that I explained it whose experiences supporting Alexis right and some some call this the senior moment right this is the senior moment these apparent memory glitches but what you can see I think there's a high school students here and I have given many tops for different age groups is that this is a moment that all of us can share this is nothing special and or unique about being a senior this is a thing that occurs at every age and I think that many people would think that this is an example of the memory problem right because here you are you had something in mind and now you lost it and it sounds like a memory problem what I'm going to sort of create as the thesis of this talk is that this type of event that occurs in many domains there's just one example it's really something different than that it's a problem with interference and maybe might be more classified as an attention problem so I'm going to step through this story and then come back and conclude with this slide and hopefully give you a nice view of the field from my perspective as well as a lot of our own research so I'm going to present a lot of experiments for you today and try to show you these points and and what's actually going on in the brain so let's talk about the brain for a second the brain is the most amazing structure that we know right I could say that with confidence it's the most complicated structure in the known universe it's it's capable of incredible feats its speed of processing it's so great it can it can interpret complex stimuli in our environment within a tenth of a second a lot of computer programs that are directed at interpreting the world and not that fast as our brain is it stores an incredible amount of information these are hard hard facts to come by but some estimate that the brain stores 100 a billion bits of information over the course of our lifetime and that's 50,000 times the text stored in the US Library of Congress so massive amount of information is stored and despite living in a rather small space right our heads the brain is a massive structure so there are by some estimates a hundred billion neurons in the brain this is on the order of stars in the Milky Way galaxy so if you look up in the sky that gives you some estimate of what is actually happening in terms of neurons and our brands believin quite more vast than that but what I think is even more impressive is not the number of neurons in the brain but the numbers of connections in the hundreds of trillions that why are the brain together as a network of truly staggering complexity and this is sort of the computational force of our brain is this network right but I don't really have to tell you a lot of amazing facts about the brain for you to appreciate how wonderful it is right every thought you have every sense every emotion every move you make everything your entire sense of identity is all emerge it all emerges from the functioning of our brand so I like to start the talk with saying a lot of great things about the brain because I will be bashing it for the next hour so I do what I do want to give it the proper respect that it's deserved but the brain has a number of fundamental limitations and these are not just the limitations of the human brain their limitations of all brands so I want to point out three of them the first is attention the second is something we call working memory the third is speed although I raved about how fast the brain knows I'll tell you what I mean by that let me step through each of these because I think it's important to understand the distracted mind to know about these limitations this is a one view of attention that's been very popular in psychology for a long time it's the spotlight view of attention our brains have this wonderful ability known as selective attention we could direct our attention like a spotlight we could move it around the classic example this is a cocktail party effect does anyone know what this is the cocktail party effect is this so you're standing at a party you're having a conversation with someone and maybe you're bored but you don't want to just walk away that would be rude right so instead you keep looking at the person but you move you're hearing what you're listening to over to the person to the left it's saying something more interesting and so you're looking here but listening over here and so we have this wonderful ability we could do with our eyes right you can look peripherally on the side and focus where you want we have this wonderful ability to selectively direct our attention to something that we're interested in but what we don't have the ability to do is to distribute our attention like a net everywhere at the same time can't listen to everyone in the room at the same time you know that and so I'm presenting it here is the limitation speed although each neuron in our brain brain cells function in process information at the millisecond level a thousandth of a second the brain is a vast network and so information has to travel between many regions which in the brain is very far and so you have a buildup of lags of processing lags and so for some things it takes hundreds of milliseconds like a half a second the process and that may seem very fast but when you're doing dynamics interactions with the environment when you're when you're moving fluidly through our world even 1/2 a second could be a very long time and so this is another limitation that that impacts our performance at its highest level working memory let's talk about working memory working memory and I put this picture up i i think it's an urban myth i haven't been able to verify this but what the why the phone is up there is because we have a very limited amount of information that we could store in mind sort of online memory at any given time and it changes depending on the complexity of the information so seven four digits and that's why some say that a phone number is seven digits long i can't verify that but it certainly helps when in the old days when you actually remembered phone numbers and then just have them appear in your phone when someone calls you but as you increase in complexity you can hold less and less information in mind six letters five words three or four objects only two or maybe even a single space you could hold in detail in your mind so this is a limitation working memory what does what this does these limitations come together and they give us what I refer to as a sensitivity to interference and that is what I feel underlies these type of memory glitches that we think of as a senior moment their interference if you ask people and if you think in your own experience if you try to be introspective and go back into these events where you've had these memory problems try to think about what caused them almost without a doubt you would be thinking of some type of interference that occurred during that period of time and based on that we form what we call categorical framework of how interference works and then we take this framework and bring it into the laboratory and study the brain to see it just has validity this is really how it works so this is the framework that we came up with for interference interference can occur in two domains it can occur internally and I'm going to come back to that in a second or it can be generated externally let's talk about externally there is two types of external interference and they differ based on goals one type we call distractions this is a relevant information it's things that you're trying to ignore so that you could go about your goals classic examples being at a restaurant trying to have a conversation and shut out all that noise and chatter that's going on around you but you can also decide that you want to engage in that other information as a secondary task and we call this interruptions in our lab it's also commonly called multitasking it's when you think that you might be able to do more than one thing at a time right so now let's go back to the restaurant example you're at the restaurant you already missed the waiter telling the dinner specials when they're at your table so you hear them telling it over here at the next table and you're trying to engage in your conversation so you're have one task and then you try to lift into that right so it's the same stimulus that was noise before but it's now a secondary task and this other type of interference also impacts our performance and I'm going to show you how that is all of this can happen internally as well you don't need a stimulus or some noise an outside world to be distracted right you probably are aware of that we call these intrusions of mind-wandering so your goal is to focus but yes your mind just goes away you're distracted internally by thought usually this is fairly benign but at an extreme it could be pathological things like OCD post-traumatic stress disorder types of depression and anxiety these types of intrusions are so debilitating that they prevent you from accomplishing your goals at all and then of course you can multi-task internally you might be listening to me but also thinking about something that you're going to do tomorrow and so all of this is this rich landscape of interference all of which has impact on how we interact in the world in a goal-directed way and that's what I'm really going to show you today is examples from our lab about what happens in the brain in the setting of interference so we have this wonderful brain but it has very distinct limitation and that leads to a sensitivity to interference how does our brain deal with it right so we know that the last decade is witnessed an explosion in the amount of digital media both its diversity and its accessibility right so it's not this what we have a lot of media but we have it in our pocket we have it in giant screens right so there is a tremendous amount of interference that is now available to us but it's not just the change in technology it's the change in how we use technology that I think is most interesting so just to show you that I'm not some Luddites like lecturing from from holy mountain where I am NOT also impaired by this here's a picture of myself with two giant monitors phone in hand email on one side my slides on the other side and trying to navigate this complicated world that we live in so we know that there's an incredible amount of multitasking that goes on as well as distraction and that it's probably only getting worse there's another interesting phenomena and that it's not just the change in how we use our media but changes in expectation right so what I say here is that constant access to these communications computers data has changed our expectations and expectations of society that now immediate responsiveness and continuous productivity are expected so who here checks email when they're on vacation and if some of you probably embarrassed right now but probably almost most people raise their hands to that who here feels that when they get a text they probably should check to see what it is and ideally check right back who sued who does that especially up top I bet right if you don't respond to your text what do you think that that person thinks something is wrong right there's this real demand that is constantly pulling us and creating internal interference of thinking about these demands that I'm going to come back to that as well so given all that how do we function at all right a very important question and this is what I want to introduce you to this concept that we call cognitive control so how we perceive the world around us what we call perception is not a passive event the world does not flood into your brain like you're a slave to the environment rather it's shaped by attention and two types of attention one type is external stimulus driven attention this was also known as bottom-up attention it's how the world imposes itself upon how you perceive it if there's something very novel like a flash of light or a loud sound or something very important like your name it demands your attention independent of your goals will pull you away from whatever you're doing even your name quietly said behind you this is how the environment shapes how we perceive it the other type of attention is what you're doing now I would say that this is probably the most unique feature of being human is our ability for internal goal directed attention right our decisions guide our actions and how we perceive the world we're not totally driven based on what's going on in our environment and this is also known as top-down attention we know that these two influences all every interaction you have with the environment is it is really a merging of these two forces on how you perceive the world the environment and your own goals this then goes on and shapes how we remember things either in the very short term like we said working memory holding information mind or even in longer term memory and we show a lot of examples of this I'm going to show you examples of that right now first I want to give you a more real-world example to understand cognitive control and a couple of interesting features about it so I'm going to take you through a story over here okay so the focus of our story is this gentleman sitting over here at this table with three other people having a glass of wine and let's say that his focus his top-down focus his goals are these people if he has any hopes of remembering the details of this conversation he should be directing his attention here right we all agree with that but look what happens here there is some sort of bottom-up force maybe it's an altercation I'm not clear actually just found this picture on the internet it's not really an example I just made it one that's so strong that it's drew the attention of three other people in the room that clearly want associated with it as well so it's a strong bottom-up influence that's deflecting his attention but there's another interesting feature here that you might have already noticed this woman is so engaged in this text message that she seems entirely oblivious to this you might as well be standing in a room by herself so I bring this picture up really to show to make up an important point is that it raises a question at least to raise the question and me to think about this what is going on here is this successful focus and failed focus or is this successful ignoring and failed ignoring I would say for the vast history of psychology focus and ignoring have been thought of as two sides of the same coin that if you are focusing better you're ignoring better they go together this is what it means the focus is to ignore I'm going to show you some examples and we have many more I'm not going to go into but make the point that ignoring and focusing our two coins they have different networks different neurotransmitters different one can fail one can succeed so ignoring and focusing a parts of how we have top-down control of the world but they're different they're different processes so a different way of thinking about it just like bottom-up and top-down what happens in the brain I'm going to give a very simple example that I'm going to show you data from the brand here's our brain this is the front of the brain the eyeball should be on this size right to the brain facing this way the back of the brain what I have colored in red is what we call the visual cortex information goes into your eyes travels through your brain has a couple stops along the way and then winds up there which is the first part of the cortex which covers the surface of the brain where information is processed so that's how we break apart and represent the world in our brain through these quarter States through these primary sensory cortices it doesn't end there there are projections principally from this part of the brain the prefrontal cortex that then modulates the activity in the sensory parts of our brain either up if it's relevant or down if it's irrelevant and this is how based on your goals you can modulate how you focus on things and ignore things this as I already described to you top-down control is I think clearly in my mind one of the primary features that that distinguishes us and makes us really human is that we act in a goal-directed fashion in a similar matter it's the prefrontal cortex that is the part of a brain that has evolved the most so it fits together in what we understand about the anatomy and the physiology if you look here these brains are not the scale obviously we have the largest brain of these list of animals but what's the important point is the part of our brain that's occupied by the prefrontal cortex has become you see the squirrel monkey just a very little bit dogs a little bit more monkeys more chimps a good amount but nothing compared to what the human has this is the part of our brain it's not alone in this ability it works with other areas but it is a part that's critically involved in top-down control top-down modulation our ability to focus on what our goals are and make decision there is another creature that has an underdeveloped prefrontal cortex you know what that is children right so what you're looking at here is the developing cortex as you move from five years old to 20 years old the brain is more mature it's actually a thinner cortex it seems counterintuitive but it gets thinner gets pruned away as we age as it goes from from greens and yellows to blues that's a representation that the cortex is more mature you see that there's some yellows here and all the way up here instead of teenage years right maybe not a surprise to a lot of you right so the prefrontal cortex our control part of the brain is still developing until our twenty and so if you think about the prefrontal cortexes the part of our brain that says top-down control and the flip side is bottom-up it makes sense that animals are bottom-up driven and children are as well I was recently just a couple months ago in New York and I have a year and a half nephew and I watched him charge across the room totally would seem to be goal directed to a new toy that he had and he just charged there and then my my sister his mom put on the TV and this kid loves TV and he just stopped and looked and that goal was done right the toy was non-existent he never returned to it right this is bottom up right driven by the environment they seem like they're top-down goals but they're not they're really driven by stimuli so that's what the prefrontal cortex is a part of our brain that does that what happens when all of this interference in the world exceeds our cognitive control abilities well a lot happens and this is the main topic of the entire PBS show that I did is trying to show this broad landscape of what is impacted in our lives when we exceed our ability to control it I'm not going to really talk about very many of these given the time that we have sits together today but I'm going to come back to it but what I'm going to spend most of my time is what I study in my laboratory which is cognition our ability to think and to process information I am going to put this in the context of our work in that interference impairs our ability because of this interface between attention and memory the limitations in our attention and our need or a desire to remember things if I was going to ask you just based on your experiences who's going to remember the details of this event this young woman quietly reading this book or the gentleman we talked about before you would all say this person over here right because we know that memory does not occur in a bubble it occurs in the context of what's going on and either our success or lack of success in focusing our attention and I searched for a quote about this interface from a neuroscientist or psychologist and was actually very hard to find this interface is something that's only been studied more recently but I found this really brilliant quote by Samuel Johnson who is a British author not a psychologist or a neuroscientist in the 1700s and I just want to read it to you because it really forms the hallmark and the goals of our just understand that he says that the true art of memory is the art of attention no man will read with much advantage who is not able a pleasure to evacuate his mind if the repositories of thought are 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 I think these are incredibly insightful observation from someone that has no background in this field and I think there's an entire career of research experiments here that I don't know if I'll get to all of that but I think what I'm going to do now is show you examples from our laboratories that actually hits on several of these this is how most of the experiments in our lab work and the three experiments that I'm going to show you right now we take younger healthy individuals usually university students but not exclusively between the ages of 18 and 35 and we look at how their brains and their behavior compared to healthy older adults these have been screened they are most of these individuals between 60 and 80 many of which are working they do not have dementia they are many of them feel like they're still functioning at a very very high level and we look to see what has changed in their behavior in the context of interference while they do experiments that we designed we study their brain with both functional MRI which I think you've heard from craig in previous talks is a way that we can look at how blood flow changes in the brain and blood flow changes in a way that's responsive to changes in neural activity so it gives us a window into the functioning human brain while you're engaged in an activity we could also do with EEG which is uh you could see right here these are two images from our laboratory dragging on my shirt I'll try that these are two images from a laboratory EEG allows us to look at electrical activity in the brain which allows us to see when events are occurring so EEG is really good to see when things are happening it has something we call temporal resolution very quick timing when an event occurs in the brain it changes electrical activity and we pick it up instantly but it's not very good to see where things are occurring fMRI has sort of the opposite strengths and weaknesses very good to see where things are occurring but not very good to see when so we use both of these tools and I'm going to show you examples about how you can learn something from one and then something that contributes to your understanding from the other I'll give you an example of that so I'm going to go through three experiments that have this design and we're going to start with two experiments in distraction and then we're going to do one about interruption and I'm going to have you do some of these okay so you can get an idea of what it's like so remember you would be doing this experiment laying in the scanner and your goal here is to remember the faces there's going to be four pictures that you're going to see and they're going to be pretty fast to pay attention to are going to be faces and two are going to be natural scenes like nature scenes you have to remember the faces and ignore the scenes we're not going to test you on the scenes then there's going to be a cross on the screen which is the time that you should be holding those faces in mind if you can hope to face let's try and then we're going to show you another face and you have to say whether this is a new face or an old place okay so yes I saw this face before no I did not okay memory test two faces you could do this all right okay here we go remember faces ignore the sin okay you're holding those faces was that the face now okay if you thought yes do not be all concerns and make an appointment with me to get your memory check it takes time and practice to go through this to get used to it no one usually gets 100% on them but the trick here is that what we're really interested in it's not just what went on when you were trying to remember those faces but what was happening in your brain when you were ignoring those scenes right so what happened in your brain when you're ignoring information that you knew was irrelevant you were not going to be tested on it so let me show you what happens in the brain of our younger population so this is a slice through the brain this is the visual areas over here and what we could look is how much activity there is is across many people when they're trying to remember the scene so if you were in a lab doing this experiment you would do another version where you had to remember the scenes ignore the faces and then a third version where you just look at the stimuli you passively view it you don't have to remember any of them so if you were remembering the scenes which is not the version you did you would have this nice amount of activity in an area of our brain that processes scenes in the world around us and we would see that here now if you were ignoring scenes like you just did what should be happening in your brain is that there should be a very low level of activity even though you saw the same amount of information and if you were just passively viewing the material it would be right in the middle and what this does is it gives us a marker of enhancement or focus how much more activity is there when you're paying attention trying to remember something we're just passively looking at something and suppression which is our marker of ignoring how much less activity is there when something is actually irrelevant to you like those scenes war versus passively viewing so this is what we found in younger adults and we published this finding as markers of top-down modulation I mean this every time I see this it still blows me away right this is the same information the bottom-up is system is a different level of activity in the visual part a brain is because of your goals this is what goal directed activity is you have relevance to remember it in blue and so it is more activity and then it's irrelevant to you so there's less activity let's take a look at look at what happens in the brain of our 60 to 80 year olds first what's really fascinating is that we see that it's basically the same there's no significant difference in enhancement between our younger adults and older adults but what we find with ignoring is this so I think you can all see the finding right there is no suppression so as a population they are not effectively ignoring the information that's irrelevant relative to what they did when they were passively viewing so this gives us a clue to what I described to you before focus and ignoring and not the same thing attached as two sides of a coin here you have individuals that are focusing just fine on those faces but what they were not doing was ignoring the scenes that information was being processed even though they were explicitly told that it was irrelevant and they were trying to ignore it so what are the consequences of that well remember this is a memory test right so here's the one word that you did you remember in the face was ignoring the scenes and then we could see how well you remember the face we found that there's a direct correlation across people between how well they suppress and how well they remember the information that they were trying to remember let me break that down for you those people that are better ignoring the distractors have better memory for the faces that they were trying to remember we've shown this in a half-a-dozen experiments ready not just in older adults with younger adults as well your ability to remember information over the short-term is largely impacted by how well you ignore information that's irrelevant to you that is the strongest impact there's not that much variation across the older adults and how well they attend they all seem to attend pretty much similarly there's not that much deviation in a young person going from trial to trial in the experiment in how much they focus what varies from trial to trial and across people is how much they ignore and how much they ignore impacts how much they remember information gets in and it creates interference with what they're trying to remember here's another piece of data a second in the brain is a long time as I said events take place on the order of a thousandth of the second and so we use a EEG to see when suppression is occurring in younger adults and to really see how old results lost the ability to suppress and what we found was that that was not true with EEG we could see the timing and realize that older adults still suppress the problem is is that they don't suppress within the first tenth of a second as a younger adult does so think about what that means when our younger adults in this experiment are confronted with irrelevant information within 1/10 of a second they've already started suppressing it older adults don't suppress that fast they suppress but later in the fit in the second and the point is that it's not just important to ignore irrelevant information it's important to ignore it rapidly because if it gets in it creates interference and the information that you're trying to hold in mind it's harder to delete it to not let it in through the gate so that's an example of how eg NMMI each contribute information to understanding how this works okay that was working memory let me tell you an example of the impact of distraction on long-term memory so in this experiment if you are in our laboratory doing this you would step into a room and you would see 168 pictures so this has three crowns for couches for vacuum cleaners they look like spatula breeze to me every single time and what you have to do is not remember them or at least you're not schooled to remember them you have to make decisions can you carry them all at one time can you fit them in a shoe box and after an hour you step inside the MRI scanner and you do a memory test right I'm vino see you we have you here a name like crown and you have to think did you see a crown first of all right so is it new or is it old meaning that you saw up before and if you saw a crown how many did you see right one two three or four here the correct answer is three every single person that does this experiment reports that they use visual imagery right you're all familial imagery if you close your eyes or even keep your eyes open you could picture things in your past like you could picture a house or a significant other space probably quite easily because it's very strong in your memory this is the tool without us telling that people do too they go back and they say okay crown how many were there and then they essentially count them the interesting manipulation in this experiment is that we do it three ways with their eyes closed with their eyes open looking at a great screen or their eyes open looking at a busy visual picture which is similar to what you're looking at right now right the busy world around us and we ask how is memory impacted in these three conditions and what we found is that the detailed recollection right the details the number of items was not different when their eyes were shut or their eyes open looking at a great picture but dropped significantly subtly but consistently when their eyes were open and they were looking at a busy visual picture just the mere fact of having their eyes open decrease the details of their memory I want to show you oh so this rates a question so if they're interference in the imagery area in the visual part of the brain so we call it a visual sketchpad when you do imagery or or working memory you you draw a picture in your mind of things you're trying to remember is that picture harder to draw when the sketchpad is noisy because you're looking at things or is it that you can't bring the prefrontal cortex in line to actually create the imagery in the first place and so we put an interesting way of pulling them apart would be to have it as a visual memory experiment but have the distraction the irrelevant information come in the form of things you hear so we did an auditory distraction experiment in this experiment your eyes are always open looking at a great screen but now it could be silent you have headphones on it's white noise like Shh or you're listening to restaurant chatter we went into a restaurant and we recorded all the noise that's around you in the restaurant and we did the same exact experiment this one's done out of the scanner and we said what happens to memory visual memory in the setting of auditory distraction of the noise that we hear all the time and what we find is this the same thing right it doesn't matter whether the distraction is visual auditory it impairs your memory in the same way now I don't want this to be a message that you should walk around with blindfold in your plugs in but it is I think a really powerful example of how exquisitely sensitive even our memory is to just the normal environmental stimuli that exist around us and you can imagine what happens when you add in the details of how we actually interact in the world remember this is totally irrelevant information this is not multitasking so now I want to give you an example of what multitasking is like so here is interruptions I'm going to have you do another experiment I'm going to show you your face you have to remember this face for seven seconds and then you'll see another face and you have to say whether it matches or not very simple one face okay here we go let's try that okay correct now there's going to be a little twist in this experiment it's the same see if they is to remember it respond but in the middle there's going to be another face that comes up right in the middle and you have to make a decision about the face you don't have to say it out loud what your decision is is it a male over 20 or under 20 and then you go about the business of remembering that first face then you respond just like you did before so it's multi test you have a memory test and you have a little decision in the middle it would be like going from the couch to the refrigerator and having a phone call on the way right okay so let's try it out here we go remember to say that's the decision phase and that's the memory test do you remember that yes did it feel harder it's harder right it's subtle but it's very consistent so if yours I don't know how old are up top is but if you're in your twenties so this is what the experiment looks like this is the one you did that's how we show experiments in the lab you see a face you hold it in mind this is the first one you did this is the second one you did the multitasking one we also have a distraction version which you didn't do a face pops up in the middle and before you even do this you know that if face is going to pop up in the middle and you just have to ignore it it's like walking to the other room and just hearing noise or seeing an envelope on the table you just have to ignore everything and just get to your job of remembering if this face match and if you're in your 20s your memory and again it's subtle but very consistent so this is no interference distraction multitasking your memory drops with distraction and it drops more when you multitask what happens if you're in your 60s or 70s this is what happens so it all gets a little worse that's the sad news sorry but distraction which we've been studying for years is not nearly as impactful as multitasking if you actually leave that test you even get a bigger impact beyond what younger adults get this is what we call two-way interaction and and you could see that multitasking is even more impactful than distraction so we think that this type of interference these examples of what underlies these impacts on your memory and other types of performance and we did a lot all these experiments are performed in the scanner and if I had as much time as I wanted I'll show you exactly what's happening in the brain to lead to those problems but I don't have time for that so I'm just going to show you a cartoon for distraction and multi tasking of what happens in your brain so in the setting of distraction the prefrontal cortex acts as a bouncer right this is quite a scary looking bouncer I don't know if it's that scary it gets sort of depends on who you are but what the bouncers job is to say exactly what information is on the guest list and then through what we call a neural network its connection with visual parts of the brain it lets information in or not now here I'm picturing this as a nightclub in the visual cortex but it's not really like that right there's only six items in this club right it's like an exclusive restaurant with only six people at a table if this bond is not held strongly by the prefrontal cortex information gets in that's irrelevant and disrupts the whole event right you have interference and that leads to a cost what we call cost and your performance drops in the setting of distraction if you're not successful in blocking it out for multitasking the prefrontal cortex is again the area that's doing the important job here but this case it's not acting as a bouncer it's acting as a flight controller essentially determining what information is the priority right now and this is based on data from my lab and others I'm not taking you through that I'm just giving you the summary but what it does is it directs the processing depending on what's relevant so this is a crazy picture of a messenger in New York riding a bicycle next to a taxi while texting if you can't see all that's going on there I didn't take this picture I'm certainly don't advocate this type of behavior but his brain is saying okay focus on traffic maybe there's a change in the road and he's focusing on that and then it might say okay text but what it doesn't do is this it doesn't run these at the same time if you have two tasks that really demand attentional processing there is a bottleneck they can't both be done at the same time you have a switch between them and this is what leads some to call multitasking actually omit that in most cases you're really switching between these and with these switches there are time delays and another impact on performance the system has to disengage it has to switch over something else has to be engaged that has to disengage and it's something else has to be re-engaged and that's what we look at in our experiment how that switch takes place and showing did that switch gets harder as we get older and that's why you have trouble with multitasking as you get older and so what I just showed you were examples of the accused impact of interference distraction multitasking on our performance on our memory in particular what I have not talked about is the chronic impact of engaging in multitasking or it highly distracting environment and we know very little about that we know a lot more about what happens in the moment acutely there is one paper so this act of multitasking is just phenomenal around 95% of people multitask at some point during the day by some reports a third of your day is taken up by more than one task for school-aged children this could be as many as nine different activities of being multitask it's really truly phenomenal some of the reports and what does this mean well there's one study out of Stanford several years ago that compared through questionnaires heavy media multitaskers versus light media multitaskers based on how much media these college students reported using simultaneously then they brought them into the lab and they had them do a series of tests like the type of test that I just showed you distraction tests and task switching and what they found was that the heavy multitaskers were more susceptible to distraction and less effective at task switching so it's very interesting data does it mean that multitasking makes you more distractible maybe but maybe not right the data's correlational and so maybe people that are more distractible tend to multitask more so it's provocative I think it's interesting I think we need a lot more data about what it's chronic impact of what it means to grow up in the modern world in terms of how your brain works and we don't know yet but at least this is some interesting data that's starting to emerge there are so many other consequences I don't have time to go through all these today I really wanted to give you a tour of what's closest to me because we studied in our lab but just to like highlight a couple things you're probably well aware of the impact of texting on driving the impact is therefore talking on the phone when driving it's been shown that talking mobile phone inge leads to four times increased risk in accidents versus not that the impact is not necessarily mitigated by not using your hands hands-free has most of the same impact and that's one study even showed that the impact on accident are equivalent to what would be called drum driving at least certainly the lower level so it's really very very powerful and I'm not talking about texting texting is a whole other world because you're actually removing your eyes from the road what about education there is an accumulation of studies now I can't go through them all there's one study that I read I guess from 2009 that showed the amount of time instant messaging by college students was directly related to an impact by distraction on school related tasks notably reading whether or not this is an actual displacement of it I mean you don't have time to read if you're texting all day or if it's actually a change in the style by which you engage in your information processing that you just tend to go rapidly between tasks and reading lends itself to sustained activity those are still open-ended with very important questions the workplace some interesting observational studies show that people at work tend to only do a project for 11 to 12 minutes before switching to a new project but each project is interrupted every three minutes by an event an email a phone or an Internet being most frequently that it just says routinely engaged in apparently internally than being sort of stimulated from the outside so our world's them incredibly fragmented and some report that this is a cost of hundreds of billions of dollars in lost productivity by people engaging in this behavior in the workplace although I still hear reports and I get emails of someone saying my I applied for a job and they asked why I didn't last list multitasking as a skill on my CV and so apparently people want their employees to multitask because they think it improves Croesus productivity but I just showed you the impact on on quality that we think is occurring so why do we do it well some climate gives you a fresh perspective like having a delay in returning to something might have some value and that might be true productivity it's true productivity might be increased to some degree but presumably at the cost of quality so it sort of depends whether or not that's a good thing so there's some reports that distract distracting environments and the ability to move between things might aid and creativity does FOMO does everyone know what this is the fear of missing out this is a big deal this probably drives most of it right is not knowing what's going on and your friends life on Facebook and certainly there's many reports of this creating essentially like an anxiety of needing to know what's going on but I think mostly multitasking is more fun I think we are I mean oh that we had novelty seeking creatures it's part of our evolutionary drive and I would say that the novelty load is greater when you're moving between tasks than when you're sustaining activity I think it takes time to understand the sustained activity can also be rewarding and even enjoyable you sort of have to get over a hump I would say sort of when you start running it's mostly just painful and not very fun but there's a point where for those that engage in it long enough that it becomes enjoyable so I think that for the most part the fun factor on just moving between things is very powerful because reward with each of these switches and I think it perpetuates itself but most of these are really my perspective and not based on a lot of literature there's actually not a ton of literature on why we do it but at least that's sort of my perspective on it so what can we do about it well it seems to me that there are two things we could change our behavior or we could change our brains hopefully not in this terrifying way as depicted in this picture all right let's talk about behavior well one way to change behaviors to establish rules right so since I've been researching this I've established rules and how I engage in the world based on what I understand about how the brain works so I would not say that multitasking is always bad I feel like many times some pigeonholes into trying to say that like I'll get a call from the media and they'll want me to say that because they were looking for that view and I don't really have that view I think that we base our decisions based on information and everything has Goods and Bad's and positives and negatives and I would say that when you're engaged in something that's really demanding and demands high quality especially if it has pine pressure on it you're going to do a better job if you do one thing at a time and that's what I do I have certain things that I need to be done very well I need to be done quickly and I'll close my door I'll quit my email program I'll turn my phone off I have gotten better at doing one thing at a time for certain periods of time and then there might be other things that are more boring less critical easier and then I'll multiply tasks away I'll say to the next three hours I'm just going to multitask and just do all these things because if I try to do them one at a time I would never ever finish them right so I think you can make decisions based you know needs not necessarily apply to you but at least there ways that I've I think that I manage this massive flow of information a little better now of course when our behavior fails through rule setting we can establish laws laws already exist notice this sign I probably should not have been taking this picture but up next big ticket one hundred and fifty nine dollars I also let you to point out like it's right on a very curvy part of the road but putting that part aside that this was probably more distracting than texting I think it's worth noting that when this behavior impacts society we even established laws so let's talk about changing our brain I have a whole extra just devoted to this I am NOT going to go into all of these ways now we've developed medications largely for things like ADHD and Alzheimer's disease that try to improve our focus education at its finest should be improving cognition and many other ways of impacting the brain but one interesting way that has yielded itself recently or revealed itself in the scientific literature or action video games and that's a whole detailed discussion about what that means these are the games that most people find most horrible at least most adults first-person shooter game probably some people are smiling up at the top that I'm talking positively about action video games but believe it or not does say he's smiling believe it or not history believe it or not there's a lot of data that show that children young adults that play action video games largely they're males when you bring them into a laboratory and have them do tests of attention and and other processing demands that they do off-the-charts they're very very good at this clearly there's something about these games I'm not going to go into detail that we train these abilities in a very fine way I'm not saying they're not without their own negative impacts and consequences but there is something that does improve processing in the brain so we decided to build a videogame in our lab actually one that doesn't have violence in it to see if we could train the ability of older adults to multitask and to see if we can improve their memory as a consequence since we know that interference it decreases the ability to have memories have detailed members so this game we call neuro eraser it is a game that you're driving tried to maintain your car on the road and signs come up so the red sign you would ignore the green sign the green circles you respond to but not green so only green circles but not green Pentagon's it comes up here so you're doing two tasks at one time you're driving and you're responding to science in our world we call this a perceptual discrimination task and a visual motor tracking tasks in the game we call it navigating and shooting and we want to see can we have people come into the lab look at what happens inside their brain have them take home a laptop we now have an iPad version of this game that we use have them practice this game in an adaptive version meaning that as you get better it gets harder and harder keeps pushing you and then look to see what happens in their brain after they get better we did two things before we had this game in training mode two experiments we first looked to see what happens in your brain using EEG while you multitask and what we found is so here is someone playing this game what we found is that there is an oscillation of vibration of electrical activity in the front part of your brain we call it midline frontal theta and what we find is that and others have found this as well that this activity in your brain is associated with your prefrontal cortex being engaged in attack the more it's active the higher the more the power of this the better you do at a task and if you look at younger adults while they're playing the game when a sign comes up they get this burst of midline frontal sleep data you see here I have a color coded that's yellow level so a high level what happens we're not 60 to 80 year olds play the game is that we get a lower level and that's probably not so surprising after all that I told you the prefrontal cortex is not engaged as much by our older adults and this seems to be related to their performance okay there's another diagnostic that the game gives us which is a performance diagnostic diagnostic how good are you at multitasking and we use a very simple equation for this we ask how well are you at doing the sine task alone how much does your performance drop when you do the sine task and also driving and we put it over the baseline side task performance so we normalize it to how good you are at this task to start with so if an older adult is not quite as good as the scientists are not penalized for it it forms what we call a baseline and so if you had no performance cost no cost you would have 0% it means that you do the sine task as well when you do it alone as as when you're also driving at the same time now when we brought 20 year olds into our lab they thought that they would be amazing at this right 20 year-olds think they're great at multi tests and this has been documented they actually really do have great pride in their multitasking ability but we see that they stuff for 27 percent drop in performance when they engage in the driving test at the same time as the science half if we look at our seven-year olds I don't have to show you that they're less than 20 year olds right you believe me already but just to show you where they are there's a 63% drop in their performance what happens in between do we hold disability at this level right up people 69 years of age and then just plummet right you know that's not true but what's most interesting is that this is what happens it is what we call a linear change that means with every passing decade it drops right so it's really not maintained and then drops a matter of fact our data shows us that the biggest difference between two decades are between 20 year olds and 30 year olds so there's a lot of changes that occur in the brain with aging as a lifelong process I just changed this slide right before I came over here to show you some data that we have not published under this just it is actually just in the process of being published now I'm so it's hot off the presses what happened for eight to twelve year olds so this is still not that many people but I did want to give you a glimpse of it does anyone want to guess where they are right so this shouldn't be overly surprising to you right the prefrontal cortex that's involved in cognitive control is still developing in eight to twelve year olds a matter of fact if you look really carefully I'd say that you probably have one good week at around 23 years old which is the peak and that's it that's it I mean if you could know when that week was think about how special it would be because it's just going to go in a long slope down from that but this is a little gives you a little a little view of what multitasking looks like over the lifespan okay let's train this so we brought another group of older adults back and found the same finding and then we train them they played this game at home there's a whole bunch of control groups which I'm going to skip over that I just want to show you what happens to the multitasking ability after playing this game for 12 hours over the course of a month they played one-hour session three times a week they were able to pick their schedule they did it for a month they came back in the lab and this is what their multitasking ability looked like 13% significantly better than even the 20 year olds only came in one and better than other control groups that show that this is a selective effect for this type of training when we bring them back six months later after not playing the game we find that disability has not declined significantly so it's trending down but it's not significant this value is now no longer different than 20 year old still impressive six months of not having played it leading us to believe that something fundamentally has changed about how they multitask more evidence for that is what's happening in the brain so I already show you the midline frontal theta for younger adults for older adults before training what do they look like after training is that so you can see it's only at red level and this is what happens in the brain when that sign comes up while multitasking so there's this really what I think of as a fundamental change in how they bring on their prefrontal cortex after practicing in this setting well it's probably most important what happens on tasks that they did not practice on and so we found that there is what we call transfer of learning this is the holy grail of all training the think to find and that's hoping to find it here because interference is such a fundamental process that if you gets better at it hopefully your ability to have cognitive control in general will be improved and I won't go through the data but we found an improvement in both working memory and what we call sustained attention the ability to hold your attention selectively for something that's rare and boring so it's actually very different task of a train and it gives us great excitement so we might be onto something here there's still a lot of work to do but I think it is very interesting to say we now have many other training experiments in the lab to look at this very complicated world of distraction for example we have this experiment we call east meets west it's a concentrative meditation iPad game so basically we took the concept of meditation and incorporated them into a game-like environment which is adaptivity and feedback this experiment is still underway but its idea is to train internal distraction can you keep your mind quiet when you want to even if there's nothing in the outside world that's distracting you so I don't have any data on this yet but it gives you an example some people get very quiet very concentrated on the tap that other people kind of lose it yeah so you know this is a really complicated domain and and the question is really hitting at what we call individual variability it's in some ways the most interesting part I didn't share a lot of it with you a little bit showing you how some people have different a lot of patterns of improvement but really if you look at the data there's so much variability and how people deal with interference some people are trained to be interferences experts in a lot of ways like air traffic controllers their ability to sustain their attention is unbelievable athletes as well and other people are just really bad in these type of settings so you know what I show you a population data there were generalizations that are supported by statistics but the reality is that there's so much variability across any population across genders across individuals and a lot of what we want to do now is understand the basis of that variable with it we have a finding that I didn't show you is sort of an incidental finding we had a questionnaire in that experiment with the driving multi testing game and found that independent of age or education people that engage in more creative activities have better multitasking abilities I mean it has to be repeated and validated you know these things can happen by accident and not real sometimes so I wouldn't go too far with it it's also a correlation but it is interesting to try to understand what aspects of our daily lives might allow us to interact better in addition to being an expert in training in it thank you thank you doctor um as a special educator I was most interested in your results for the eight to twelve year olds and I'm fascinated by its plasticity of the brain in learning so for children with developmental delays learning disabilities I particularly work with autism and ADHD population what would be your sort of from your findings how would you generalize them to learning and memory with special needs children from an academic standpoint yeah so it's a great question I can answer in lots of different ways I actually took literally right before I walked in here because I thought it was just too much I took off another data point on that lifespan curve like I said I added 8 to 12 year old today we have another data point on there but it's still early but it's children that have ADHD when most of them have what's known a sensory processing disorder and they look like they're 60 years old in terms of multitasking so it's quite interesting where they fit on the curve through collaborations we're looking at these types of games as both diagnostics and therapeutics and children that have autism and ADHD a matter of fact they help feed a new company to develop this as a product so this is an experiment as a product would be even more fun than this and that's what's happening and the the directive of the company is really focusing on a HD so it's interesting to think about interference occurs in younger adults older adults across so many different populations and so I think that these tools whether they be to understand the brain or whether they're directed at improving these ability might be directed across many populations I am a physician as well and I always up until recently looked at this topic from a healthcare perspective Alzheimer's disease leads to more interference many most of the conditions that we would think of as neurological psychiatric conditions maybe all of them lead to a larger impact by interfering it's true of all complex systems noise creates performance deficits and when you have something wrong with your brain you have more susceptibility to noise and so that was my perspective on it but recently over the last year I have been having more and more interactions with the education community saying that well since development part of it is is working with children that have prefrontal cortices that are still under development and they're more susceptible to interference aren't these lessons and these tools applicable to education and I think they are so a new perspective is that how we look at interference from the the part the point of view of it going wrong and a disease might be very relevant to how we look at it in the developing brain when you're developing in a healthy way or an unhealthy way so I mean that's a very general view but I think that it's highly relevant now to education and I would like to figure out how to sort of fulfill both missions of looking at this as a way to understand disease but also understand education and healthy people I feel this one crack haha it is a memory expert we can take this offline a little bit more if you want but I mean there are people who are very very good at at visual kinds of memory that's a sort of way they really like to represent things it's very natural for them to represent it in a visual way the true photographic photographic memory that's a very very elusive thing to try to find solid evidence for the in the limit you hear anecdote the people who can flip pages of a book and then lie down and read it later and we can actually sort of demonstrate that that can't be true based on the physiology but I think a lot of what this is tied to is real expertise we see in all sorts of domains where you have expertise your memory is much much better chess experts have memory that's far better inside of chest and outside of chest etc I mean that being said I would I would love to see people with photographic memories challenged by distraction of multitasking and I mean it would be hard to imagine that they wouldn't have some decrement in their performance even if it was from a very high level so I think that you know it's very hard to in the real world certainly pull out other factors that influence memory although clearly some people have really off-the-charts memories so I think it's probably as a contribution as well from their attentional abilities you showed that the action video games helped with the multi desk have you done it has anybody done anything looking at how they will affect something like reading a long-term task where they have to focus I don't believe so so we design this customized custom-made action video game and striving at the Ference game for a lab but most of the literature that exists are people playing commercially available action video games and then taking them into the lab and seeing how they perform on standard tests or taking novices naive people that don't play video games have them play these games and then see what improves most of the things that improves our cognitive control processes like resistance to distract ability task switching even some visual processing abilities like contrast sensitivity improves as well the thing that the aspect that's missing from that literature is what does this mean in terms of a lot of real-world activities it's certainly been told to me anecdotally at least many times that my child is the best Call of Duty player in Northern California but he can't sit through a class right so what is what are you telling me and so what we learn in the lab what happens in the real world are not always exactly the same and so it's a complicated topic but an interesting one and I've never seen anything that looked at reading abilities after that now it's very possible that it may lead to you know if you look at sustained attention ability from certain tests you would find that action video game players are better at that so you might extrapolate and say well you're better sustained attention you're probably better reading but the real world is more complicated than that because they sat down and they had a goal of doing this test and they are good at fast action video game players but in the real world has lots of all the fact that sometimes decisions have to be made on your own and and then the the findings are different so I don't believe anyone has done that and I don't I would be able to guess the answer I think that it would it would be very variable across people on how they would do in actual real world greeting scenarios okay I know there are going to be hundreds of questions I see a bunch of hands that have gone up but at this point what I'd like to do is to invite you all to reception outside dr. Ghazali will be out there as well so you can mob them with the questions there I like to thank him for a wonderful talk tonight

Channel: UCI CNLM

Views: 94,020

Keywords: attention, memory, distraction, imaging, neurology, gaming, adam gazzaley, uc irvine, cnlm, center for the neurobiology of learning and memory

Id: b0YSb4D2F9w

Length: 72min 38sec (4358 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 15 2017