The Organized Mind

thank you we are living in an age of information overload in 2011 the average American took in five times as much information as we did in 1986 as you just heard there are 300 exabytes of information in the world now that's a 300 with 18 zeros followed by it there's been more information generated in the last few years than in all of human history before it the five times as much information we take in in today as opposed to 1986 that's the equivalent of reading a hundred and seventy-five newspapers every day from cover to cover if you went shopping 30 years ago the average grocery store carried 9,000 products today that same grocery store carries 40,000 products and yet most of us get all of our shopping needs met in about 150 items which means that you have to ignore 38,000 500 items every time you go to the grocery store in order to fill your basket that's information overload and maybe you think well I can't keep up with anything at work anymore I can't keep up with my emails at least I can go home and watch YouTube for an hour and keep up with what's happening there but you should know that every hour that goes by there are 6,000 hours of new video uploaded to YouTube which means that for every hour you watch you're already 5999 hours behind so what do we do about it we multitask we try to juggle a whole bunch of things at once but what we've discovered as neuroscientists in the last few years is that multitasking is a myth it doesn't really exist the brain just doesn't work that way you're not actually juggling five or six things at once instead the brain is rapidly shifting from one activity to the next in a little five-second increments or so and as a consequence you're not really focusing your attention on any one thing you're fracturing your attention into a bunch of little bits and what is this what does this do to the brain well it leads to decision fatigue and it leads to the production of cortisol cortisol is the stress hormone it's toxic you don't want to have that in your bloodstream it's part of the fight-or-flight reaction cortisol leads among other things too cloudy thinking so while you're doing all this multitasking and you think you're really good at it in fact you're not the if the feeling that you're good at it comes from the cloudy thinking produced by cortisol and there have been a number of studies that show that people who multitask well actually it's a bunch of unit tasking it's not really multitasking they think they're getting a lot done at the end of the day they've got much less done and their work is rated as being less creative and of a lower quality so why is it we think we're so good at it apart from the cortisol well I'm here to tell you as a neuroscientist that there's one thing the brain is very good at and that's self delusion the fact that your brain is telling you you're good at it should not be taken as evidence my colleague Mike Gazzaniga says the entire left hemisphere is the great confabulate er it just makes stuff up all the time so take it take it from me multitasking doesn't work a number of studies show this it's better to focus in on one thing now I mentioned decision fatigue a moment ago all these episodes of task switching of moving from one thing to another use up nutrients in the brain there is a structure that my colleagues and I discovered right here in the center of the brain that acts as a switch whenever you switch from task to task if you put your finger right on the top of your head about an inch below as this structure called the insula I don't mean that we discovered the insula but we discovered that it's what shifts when you're going from one task to another and it's also what is involved when you're making a series of decisions the reason this is important is that neurons are living cells with the metabolism they new nutrients in order to function they primarily run on glucose glucose is the fuel of the brain every time you make a decision every time you switch from one task to another you're burning up a little bit of glucose and after a morning of task switching or decision making if you're feeling depleted it's because you've literally depleted the glucose stores in your brain and that leads to feelings of fatigue cloudy thinking and poor decision-making this idea of decision overload is very real and has now been corroborated by a number of neuro scientific and behavioral studies so in one series of experiments people are asked to make a sequence of meaningless trivial unimportant decisions like whether to eat honey nut cheerios or multi-grain Cheerios whether to use the 2% milk or the 1% milk whether to use a tablespoon or a teaspoon whether to write with a green pen or a purple pen these are not momentous decisions on which your life hangs in the balance but after a sequence of those they are given very important decisions to make such as suppose you were just diagnosed with cancer here the statistics about radiation therapy versus surgery which would you choose or you've got this amount of money for your retirement are you gonna put it into stocks or bonds here the various rates of return after making a series of these trivial decisions people were really poor at making the important ones why decision fatigue there's a limited amount of decisions that you can make in the day before you run out of glucose before you run out of juice so what the experts recommend is that you move the important decisions up to the beginning of the day and try to minimize the number of unimportant ones you have to make one of the big distractors in our life certainly for people over the age of 20 is email I say over the age of 20 because most people under the age of 20 don't email that much they see it they see it as an old people medium they're mostly texting but with email how many of you feel as though you can't keep up that it comes in faster than you can deal with it that there's maybe a hundred or two hundred unread or undealt with emails in your inbox probably email is that each one comes in and you hear that ping you've got to make a series of decisions do I look at it now or later now that I'm looking at it do I reply to it do I forward it to someone else do I have to get more information before I can respond do I file it somewhere that was five or six decisions right there and that's just one email so you can see that if emails are coming in all morning long decision fatigue sets in very hard to stay alert and do your job or for that matter enjoy your leisure time so what experts are recommending is that you shut your email program off for productivity periods to avoid the distraction I have a new book out called the organized mind and I've been thinking about thinking thinking about organizing things and information overload for the last four years as I've been writing it and I was talking to my colleague Daniel Kahneman who wrote the excellent book Thinking Fast and Slow as I was writing the book and I said if there was one big idea that you wanted to transmit to people that you didn't put in your book what would that be and he said the pre-mortem and I said what's that he said well you all know you know when when something goes wrong the police come in or an investigator and they do a post-mortem to figure out what went wrong he said he finds it very helpful in his own life to do a pre-mortem think ahead of time about all the things that could go wrong now different people have various compulsions about this some people think about a thousand things that could go wrong some people think about a handful of them but the idea is take some time regularly to think about the things that could go wrong and deal with them if you've ever hidden a key under the mat that's a free mortem you've realized that if you get home in the dead of a Chicago winter and you can't get into the your front door having a spare key somewhere is a good solution to the problem so you plan ahead or you take a picture of your credit card front and back with your cell phone so that if your credit card stolen and you want to call the company to let them know to cancel the card where was the number oh well it was written on the back of the credit card which you don't have anymore but at least you have a photograph of that number on your cell phone and as I started thinking about pre-mortem z-- I started thinking that one of the biggest sources of stress for us these days that we really can deal with is medical decision making medical decision making has gotten increasingly complex because doctors have less time to spend with us there's more data out there about medical conditions and so among the many dozens of things that I talked about in the book I wanted to just close by sharing with you one tiny little slice of how to better organize your time in your life and that is to think ahead about how you're going to make medical decisions put in place certain questions or certain attitudes about it now the problem is that when you're sitting in that doctor's office and you're getting the diagnosis and sooner or later it's either gonna be you or somebody love who's going to have some important decision to make and that's a stressful moment why you're you're tense and the doctors throwing out terms you've never heard before you're trying to imagine what your life for your loved ones life is going to be like cortisol kicks in again and you remember what that does so ask us ask get in the habit of asking a series of questions let's take a simple example you go to the doctor the doctor says I just got your labs back I'm a little worried about your cholesterol I'd like to start you on a cholesterol-lowering drug a statin you've probably heard of statins you know that having high cholesterol is associated with heart disease increased risk of stroke it seems like a good idea to lower your cholesterol so you say sure I'll take the drug but there's a question that you should ask in the doctor's office which is for a statistic that most doctors don't want to talk about and drug companies want to talk about even less that statistic is called the number needed to treat how many of you have heard of this not so many the number needed to treat is the statistic for how many people have to take that drug or undergo a surgery or treatment before even one person is helped now you're thinking that's kind of a crazy number the number should be one my doctor wouldn't give me something if it wasn't going to help me but medicine doesn't work that way you have to give medicine or treatment to many people before one person has helped for the one of the leading statins in the United States today what do you suppose the number needed to treat is it's three hundred three hundred people have to take this drug before one person has helped buy it so are you thinking okay well what the heck I'll take it my insurance is paying for it I don't care but the next question you should ask your doctor is what what are the side effects and for this particular staff the doctor will tell you well the side effects happen in in 5% of the people they include debilitating muscle and joint pain severe gastrointestinal distress nausea fatigue and dizziness so you're thinking well 5% what do I care it's that's one in 20 chance I'll take the drug anyway but if you work out the numbers let's see we were talking about 300 people have to take the drug there's a 5% chance of side effects that means five out of a hundred so for these 300 people 15 people are going to have the side effects but only one person is going to be helped you're 15 times more likely to be harmed by the drug than to be helped by it now I'm not saying whether you should take the statin or not I'm just saying that you have to prepare yourself for these kinds of conversations ahead of time so that at the moment of truth truth you know which questions to ask in order to push the conversation forward and to be able to participate in one of the cornerstones of medicine which is informed consent before you consent to a procedure you need to be informed about it and the way medical treatment is going where doctors have less and less time to spend with us you have to become an advocate for your own health care you have to know which questions to ask to move the conversation forward now if you think that I've just pulled this statistic about this particular statin out of the air for its shock value this is actually quite typical for one of the most widely preferred performed surgeries on men over fifty prostate removal for prostate cancer the number needed to treat is 49 that is 49 surgeries are done for each one person who has helped 48 of the surgeries are unnecessary and the side effects in that calm instance are 50% 50% of men experience side effects so severe that the majority of men who undergo a prostate removal say they wish they hadn't done it this idea of moving moving the conversation forward with the right questions is something that's fascinated me for a long time and I devote a fair amount of time in the book to it it's something that you can train yourself to do just by example or by looking at how people make important decisions I'll give you one last example General Stanley McChrystal who was ahead of the the head of the Joint Special Operations Forces in Iraq as you know he describes when he went to a briefing with a local unit in a town and he asked the unit there what they had by way of intelligence and they say well we've recruited 250 Iraqis who are going to provide information to US troops about what's going on here and McChrystal's head of intelligence Mike Flynn asked the single question that moved the conversation forward he said to the to the local unit head of your 250 informants described to me the most important and valuable of them assuming that the rest of them aren't nearly as helpful as the number one and when the unit commander described that number one they realized they didn't really have much at all the very best one they had was not reliable and not providing very helpful information so the idea is that one way to organize your time your life your home and your workplace is to think for every decision you have to make and for every situation you're in what's the one question I could ask that will really make a difference in moving things forward thank you very much that's all I have

Channel: Chicago Ideas

Views: 24,142

Rating: 4.827848 out of 5

Keywords: The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight In The Age Of Information Overload, Science (TV Genre)

Id: brTxddP4BGs

Length: 15min 42sec (942 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 06 2015