PRESENTER: So, everyone,
thanks for stopping by for another outstanding
talk at Google. It's great to see so many
attention-respectful Googlers here in the audience. We're taking a look
today at something that's quite relevant
to the daily life that we lead-- technology
and organization. After all, we are here
to organize the world's information and
make it universally accessible and
useful, so they say. Today we're pleased to
host Dr. Daniel Levitin. He's stopping by to
assist us in this journey. He's the bestselling author
of "The World In Six Songs" and "This Is Your
Brain on Music." And today, he speaks to us about
the organized mind, thinking straight in the age of
information overload. Taking views from
neuroscience and from history, he takes the latest research
in cognitive psychology and brings it to the
masses in a book that's really quite interesting. So if you'll please join me
in welcoming him to Google, we'll get started with the talk. Thank you. DANIEL LEVITIN: Well, thank you
for having me back at Google. I'm delighted to be here. Everyone has been so
nice since I got here. A few engineers came
up to me and said, it was so nice to be able to
put a face with all that click traffic they've been
watching all these years. I want to talk about
three big ideas, and then I'd be happy
to take some questions. The three big ideas are
multitasking, brain extenders, and decision making in the
age of information overload. But first, I'll give
you a little glimpse into why I wrote the book. Neuroscientists in
the last 10 years have learned quite a bit about
why the brain pays attention to some things and
forgets others. And most of that information
hasn't trickled down to the average person. And I think that
all of us can use this information
in our daily lives to better organize our time,
our homes, and workplaces. And I wrote the
book a way to share what it was that we
as a field had learned and to give some
practical tips about how to use that information. The three big ideas. First, some numbers, just
to quantify what it is we mean by information overload. Americans, as you know
better than anyone else, take in five times
more information today than they did in 1986. That's the equivalent
of 174 newspapers worth of information. During our leisure
time alone, we process 34 gigabytes
of information. And we've created
a world that has 300 exabytes of
human-made information. Just one person's share of that,
your share of the 300 exabytes, if each piece of information
pertaining to you was written on a
three-by-five index card and laid out end to
end, side by side, it would cover all of the
square miles of Massachusetts and Connecticut combined. An overwhelming
amount of information. So no wonder most of us are
feeling like we can't keep up. And if you like watching YouTube
for work or for relaxation, and you feel like you want to
keep up with what's happening and what's new there,
as you probably know, every hour, YouTube uploads
6,000 hours of new video. So that means for every hour
of YouTube video you watch, you're following
5,999 hours behind. The only way you
could possibly keep up is if you had 6,000
screens going all at once. And I'm sure at some
point in the near future, that number is going to
double and keep on doubling. So enormous amount
of information. What can we do about it? Well, what many of us do
about it is we multitask. We do a whole bunch of things
at once, figuring that that way, we can manage all
of the stuff that's coming at us from
all different sides. But it turns out that
multitasking is a myth. And there's now ample research
that justifies and supports this. I know that it's part
of Google culture to have transmitted this
information to all of you. Multitasking does not exist. What's actually happening in
the brain is sequential tasking. The brain is rapidly shifting
from one thing to the next. It's doing it so
quickly and seamlessly that you don't really notice,
but that's what's happening. And what you end up
with is attention that's been fractionated into
little three to five seconds bits, and you're not
able to actually sustain attention on any one thing. Multitasking can release
the stress hormone cortisol, which might make you feel
at the end of a couple hours like your head has been
in a salad spinner. Multitasking is also
responsible for that mental fog that you feel, partly due
to the release of cortisol. So you're not saving time. You're wasting time. There are actually very few
jobs that require multitasking. One of them is air
traffic controller. Another is simultaneous
translator at the UN. And those jobs have high costs
if the worker makes a mistake. It's obvious if you make a
mistake as an air traffic controller, the consequences
can be calamity, disastrous. Same for simultaneous
translators at the UN. You get one word wrong, you
may have a war on your hands. So these jobs,
it's no coincidence that they have mandated breaks. People in those high-stress
jobs, air traffic controllers, for example, they're not
allowed to work more than 45 or 60 minutes without taking
a 15 to 30 minute break. That's their duty cycle. A couple of other jobs
that require multitasking come to mind. One is kindergarten
teacher, and the other is publicist or social
network consultant, and another is journalist,
breaking news journalist. But apart from that,
it's not really a job requirement
for most of us. And it ends up at
the end of the day, based on a number of
productivity studies, the people who were multitasking
were getting less done by any measure than the
people who were unitasking. Now, why does it feel
like we're multitasking? Well, it's an illusion. As a neuroscientist,
I can tell you, the brain is very
good at self-delusion. That's one thing that
it's really good at. And we see it in a
lot of different ways. I, for one, know that
I look a lot better after I've been drinking. But people tell me that
that's self-delusion. I'm also a lot more clever
and a better fighter after I've had a few
drinks, or so I think. So the brain doesn't always have
insights into what it's good at and what it's not good at. We're deceiving ourselves when
we think we're multitasking. We really aren't. The productivity
studies bear this out. So what can you do about it? Well, we can take a tip from
the air traffic controllers and the simultaneous
translators, and we can take breaks. And workers who are allowed to
do this in a number of studies in a number of industries
end up being more productive and creating better
quality work. You have to decide what
the appropriate breaks are depending on the
kind of work you do and depending on how
your brain works. But a good rule of thumb
is every couple hours, take 15 minutes off. Naps are also very
helpful, short naps. Even a 10 or 15 minute nap
in the middle of the day can be the equivalent
of an hour and a half of extra sleep the
night before, and it can raise your effective
IQ by 10 points. So naps are a good thing. And I read somewhere that
Google has nap rooms, at least in some
of the facilities. Is this true? So this is already a
part of your culture. But I'm saying it because
this is being taped and this will go out
beyond Google, I guess. Other companies have
been promoting this, too. Safeway Stores, the grocery
chain in the East Bay, has nap rooms and
exercise rooms. These are all critical
because of the underlying neurophysiology. The nap helps to restore your
depleted sources of glucose in the brain, which
I'll get to in a minute. And the breaks
allow you to enter a different attentional mode. And I want to talk
about that for a minute, about what the
vacations that you take are doing for you
neurophysiologically and what the breaks
and the naps are doing. There are two dominant modes of
attention in the human brain. One goes by the
rather inelegant name of the task-positive network. More colloquially, this is the
central executive of the brain. It's the part of your brain
that is engaged in a task, and you're not distracted. So you might be
writing a report, or doing research,
or reading a book, engaging in a conversation. But if you're focused and
you're not distracted, you're in that mode. The second dominant
mode of the brain is called the
task-negative network, and it's when you're
not doing a task and your mind is wondering. And this is a part of the brain,
a network of brain regions, that has been called the
default mode of the brain, because it exerts a pull on
that other part of your brain, and it's a kind of natural state
that the brain wants to go to. So I'm sure you've all had
this experience that you're reading a book,
and at some point your eyes get ahead of
where you are in the book. And you realize, well, your eyes
have been following the words, but your brain hasn't. And you've got to go back a
ways and figure out-- well, that's the mind wandering
mode that has kicked in. It's not that your
brain had shut off. You were just thinking other
thoughts, maybe stimulated by what you had read. So this mind wandering
mode turns out to be very different from
the task engagement mode, because it's where thoughts
that are loosely connected seamlessly flow into one
another, like in a dream. That's why we call
it daydreaming. And you begin to see
connections between things that you didn't see
as connected before. Loosely-affiliated
thoughts flow into one another, non-linear
kinds of thinking, sometimes juxtapositions
of different ideas. This is the mode of thinking
where your most creative acts are likely to occur, and
where problem solving is apt to occur. So I'm sure you've had
this experience that you're trying to solve some
problem, work something out. You focus on it. You're getting nowhere. You drop it for a while. You might be out
shopping, and suddenly, it hits you, the answer. That's the daydreaming
mode having kicked in. It usually kicks in when you're
doing something else that doesn't require a lot of focus,
and so the daydreaming mode takes over. And if you use a little
bit of self-reflection and think back, or the
next time it happens, analyze what's going on. It's probably that the
solution was something that wasn't obvious before, or
you would have thought of it. It's something that required a
non-linear thinking or putting together, piecing together
of disparate ideas that you hadn't seen
as connected before. So problem solving depends on
this other mode of the brain. And it's essential
for all of us who are engaged in
creative pursuits to be able to go back and forth
between the two modes. Now, attention switching, such
as we do during multitasking, and decision making
deplete fuel in the brain. Specifically, they
deplete glucose. Glucose is the fuel
that neurons need. Neurons are living
cells with metabolism, and they need glucose
in order to function. And glucose is not in
an unlimited supply. Every decision that you make
depletes a little glucose. Every time you switch tasks,
it depletes a little bit. And it turns out that
even small decisions deplete your stores of glucose
as much as big ones do. So if you're trying to decide
which breakfast cereal to buy at the store or whether to
use a red pen or a blue pen for something, these seemingly
inconsequential decisions are still decisions as far as
your neurons are concerned. And they're competing
for mental energy with important decisions, like
whether to put your pension into stocks or bonds,
or how to resolve some interpersonal
problem you have. They're competing with
trying to remember things, like you have to pay
your electric bill on a certain day
at a certain time. Whatever the decision
is, it's depleting these neural resources. Kicking into the daydreaming
mode is one of the best ways that we know of
basically hitting the reset button in the brain
and allowing the glucose to build up again. Taking a nap is another good
way, as is taking a vacation. Vacations are very
important, it turns out. When I'm talking about
taking breaks and vacations, I'm not talking about, oh,
I'm going to stop working. I'm going to do email, or I'm
going to watch television. Those are not breaks. I mean a real break. The most restorative
kinds of breaks are things where your
mind can really wander. And each of us has
a different way that we can kick
start that process. It might be exercise. It might be walking in nature
or a walk around the block. It turns out there are
evolutionary reasons why exposing yourself
to nature enables you to hit the reset button,
being around natural things like trees, water,
bodies of water, mountains, flowers, and shrubs. That's a very
restorative environment. I used to work in the
laboratory of Amos Tversky here at Stanford who did a lot
of work on decision making. And every afternoon, he and
Danny Kahneman, his colleague, would take a walk around
the Stanford campus. And as Danny
reports in his book, "Thinking Fast And Slow,"
most of their greatest ideas came from those walks. And that's no coincidence. This is a restorative
creative act. So exercise, taking
walks, taking a nap, literature, reading. Reading stimulates this
mind-wandering mode and helps you to hit
the reset button. The pull that we feel against
all this, this very natural thing that we feel as if
there's so much going on and we're asked to do so
much more now than ever before, that we feel as though
if we stop our work for just five minutes, we're
going to fall behind. You already have 300 unread
emails in your inbox, so how can you take
five minutes off? But the productivities
are very clear on this. If you take off those five
minutes, at the end of the day, you get back more than that. And overtime is even worse. In a number of studies,
people who work 60-hour weeks don't get an extra 20 over their
40 hour a week counterparts. They end up getting only seven
hours of extra work done. So you're putting in
three hours to get one hour of work done,
according to the research. Not in every profession,
not in every case. This is on average. And you can certainly
think of counter-examples. If there's a crisis-- look at
the Ebola workers in Liberia, or if there's an
earthquake, rescue workers. Of course, getting
those seven hours is worth them putting in 20. But in daily life,
in your daily work, if it's not an
emergency situation, it's worth looking at. Am I willing to put
in 20 to get seven? It may not be the best use
of your time or the company's time. So what can we do about this? How can we create this kind of
focus that I'm talking about? One thing that
experts do is they enforce productivity hours. They'll set aside a certain
time of day or several times during the day when they
don't want to be interrupted. And they turn off
their email program. They might even turn
off their phone. And they allow
themselves to enter a state of undistracted,
sustained concentration. And I think you'll agree
that most of the things that we care about, whether at
work or at home, whether it's time with family or time
on a much-loved hobby, they're more enjoyable when
you're fully immersed in them, not when you're trying to
do five things at once. So these productivity
hours are very important. And people always say, well,
I can't turn off my email. Something urgent might come in. Well, the answer to
that is, you just open up another account,
a private account, and you give that address
only to those people who need to reach you urgently. A number of successful and
productive people do this. They might give the address
only to eight or 10 people-- maybe a boss, somebody
who works for them, a couple of coworkers,
immediate family members. And you can instruct
those people, only use this address
if it's urgent. If you're sending me a
video of a cat playing the piano or an invitation to
a party that's a month away, use my regular address. Because that account is going to
be turned off most of the day. This is the one where I
can be reached urgently. This kind of partitioning is
what highly successful people do. I interviewed a number of
CEOs and successful artists, musicians, Nobel Prize winners,
scientists, military leaders, and government
leaders for the book. And one of the things that
was a thread through all of this in trying to
understand their productivity is they really partition
things like that. And I think I find
the idea refreshing. Because if you're like me, for
a lot of your working adult life, when you've
been at home, you've probably been
thinking about work. And when you're at work, you're
probably thinking about home. And you find that you're not
really in either place fully. And that's no way to live. It's better to be fully in
one activity or the other. So those are some of the tips
for avoiding distraction. Now, I talked about-- and I'll
come back to this in a minute. I want to shift and talk
about brain extenders. This is a very simple idea. The idea is that
if you want to be more productive and creative,
don't load up your brain with stuff that doesn't
need to be there. A great example is, you
hear on the weather report that it's going
to rain tomorrow. Why stick in your
head, oh, I've got to remember to bring
an umbrella, which is going to take up
neural resources? Put that information
in the environment. Go to the closet, get your
umbrella, put it by the door, and then it will remind you
to take it when it's time. If you're the kind of
person that loses your keys, get a key hook and put it by the
front door or a decorative bowl on a console table
by the front door. If the keys always
go there, you don't have to think about
where they are. Another example
of brain extenders are doors in office buildings. Why should you have
to remember how every individual door in
your life opens and closes? In big buildings,
usually this information is offloaded to the environment. If the door has a big
horizontal bar across it, you know you have to push it and
the door is going to open out, and if it has a
U-shaped handle on it, you know you're
supposed to pull it, and that the door
is going to open in. You don't have to remember
this or keep track of it. The psychologist JJ Gibson
called these affordances. They afford the way in which
they're supposed to be used. You HCI people know
this term, I'm sure. And we can do that
in all different ways in our environment
to externalize. The other thing we
do to externalize is we write things down. As soon as you put
something on paper, your brain no longer
needs to keep track of it. And paper is actually better for
remembering things and putting it than typing it. Because of the neural
circuitry involved in writing something
longhand, you end up processing the
information more deeply. So writing it down in many cases
is better than typing it down. Now, Google has, of course, been
the de facto information source for the last number of
years, replacing long trips to the library, combing through
irrelevant pages in dusty books to find the one fact that
you were looking for. As my colleague
Christopher Chabris says, we've outsourced to Google
a massive volume of research chores that used to take
anywhere from minutes to months of trawling
through reference sources, making phone calls,
and visiting archives. Our searches are in
order of magnitude more efficient and less time
consuming than 20 years ago. And this is an example
of externalization. We no longer need to carry
around facts like, in 1492, Columbus sailed the
ocean blue, or the sun is 93 million miles away, or
what the time difference is between here and Mumbai. We can get it in half
a second on an object we hold in our hands that
has more processing power than Apollo Mission Control had. So this is a great example
of a brain extender. And I think that it's
a very important way that we can become more
productive and efficient. Don't keep up here things
that don't need to be up here. And you understand this, I
think, better than anyone. The last thing I wanted to
talk about is decision making. With all of this information
at our fingertips, we have the power
to make decisions that we couldn't make before. And a good example of that
is in the medical domain. It used to be that you
just went to the doctor, and you did whatever
the doctor told you. But now there's all
kinds of information available through
the internet that can help you to make
an informed choice. There's so much more
information now than before. By some estimates, the amount
of scientific information in the world in
the last 20 years equals all of the scientific
information generated up to that point in history. So we've doubled
scientific information 20 years by some estimates. And there's enormous
amounts of medical data. It turns out that for some of
the most difficult decisions we make in medicine,
whether to get a treatment or not, whether to take
a drug or not take it, whether to have surgery or
radiation treatment if you've got cancer, these different
kinds of decisions, doctors aren't
schooled in a lot of the decision-making processes
that need to be applied here. It's not part of
their curriculum. They don't always know how
to acquire the information. And once they do, they don't
know how to analyze it. And I think we're
in an age where it's becoming increasingly
apparent that we all need to take control of our
own medical decision making, and we need to become
proactive and responsible. And the information
age has allowed that. Of course, the difficult thing
is separating the digital wheat from the digital chaff,
trying to figure out what is good information
and what is not. So one of the things
I think we need to do is start teaching our
children right away information literacy. I think the primary mission
of education has to shift. It used to be trying to teach
children a bunch of facts. Now they can get the facts. I think what we have to
do is start teaching them how to use those facts,
to use them intelligently and creatively in order to help
solve the world's problems. So to go back to the medical
case, if you're looking up a particular prescription
drug and trying to figure out whether you want
to take it or not, the first thing that's part
of information literacy that every eight-year-old
should know is, who's website are you on? Is it the drug manufacturer's? Might there be biased
information on there? Is it the site for
the manufacturer of a competing drug? Maybe it's some sort of shadow
site for the manufacturer of a competing
drug under the name Americansforbetterhealthcare.com
or something like that. And it's really a shill
for another drug company. These are questions that
are important to ask so that you can be informed. And why is that I'm
making such a big deal out of medical decisions? Well, I walk through several
examples in the book. I'll give you one. Suppose you go to your
doctor, and your doctor says that your
cholesterol is high, and that she wants to
start you on statens. You've heard of statens. You know that they're
cholesterol-lowering drugs. And so you think, sure, why not? Sounds like a good idea. I'd like to have
lower cholesterol. Well, the first
question you should ask is what is the number
needed to treat. This is a little-known
statistic that doctors don't like talking about
and pharmaceutical companies like even less. It's the number of patients
that have to take a drug for it to be effective on one patient. Now, you're probably
thinking, well, that's crazy. The number should be one. Why would my doctor be
giving me a medication that's not going to help me? But it doesn't actually
work out that way, because there are a
lot of medications that don't work on everybody. In fact, most don't
work on everybody. I can only think of
one or two medications where the number
needed to treat is one, and they're for rare cancers
only a few hundred people a year get. For most of us, the drugs aren't
going to work on everybody. Think about this for a minute. What do you suppose
the number needed to treat for one of the
more popular statens is? How many people need to take it
before one person gets cured? For the one I'm thinking about--
and which Penguin's lawyers said I'm not allowed to say out
loud-- for the one I'm thinking of, the number needed
to treat is 300. And I didn't just pull
this out to shock you. This is a typical
number needed to treat for pharmaceutical products. 300 people take the drug,
one person gets better. So now you're
thinking, well, OK, I don't want to have
high cholesterol. Sure, I'm willing to
take the chance of being the one in 300 that'll
help, because I'm helping to reduce the chance
of my getting a heart attack. But then the next
question you should ask your doctor is,
well, wait a minute, what are the chances of
side effects for this drug, and what are they? Well, for the drug
I'm thinking about, one of the most popular
cholesterol-lowering drugs, the side effects occur in about
5% of the people who take it. And the side effects include
severe and debilitating muscle and joint pain, gastrointestinal
distress, diarrhea, blood in the stool, blood in
the urine, headaches, nausea, and dizziness. These are awful. 5% of the people are getting it. Well, that's not a lot if
we take five out of 100. But if we take the 300
that we're talking about, that means 15 people are
going to have the side effects for every one
person who's helped. You're 15 times more likely
to experience the side effect than the cure. So now the calculation becomes
a little different about whether you want to
take this thing or not. This is the kind of
information literacy and decision-making literacy
that I lay out in the book and I think we
should be teaching beginning at
eight-year-olds-- some of the more nuanced things,
maybe not till high school. And it involves things that
some of you engineers know, Bayesian inferencing, updating
your estimates of probabilities with new information. But I think this
is very important. And I think that-- getting back
to the idea of what we should teach our children, not to
put too fine a point on it, but they're going to encounter
the facts on their own. They already know how
to find out information. What they're not getting
trained in adequately, I think, is how to evaluate those
sources of information and how to use them
creatively and intelligently. And I think solving the
biggest problems in the world will require a combination
of that-- knowing how to use information-- and having
adequate opportunities to let the daydreaming or
creative mode kick in. Let's face it. The biggest problems
we're looking at in the world right now--
aggression across borders and within countries, poverty,
unequal distribution of wealth, climate change-- if the problems
had simple, linear solutions, somebody would have
figured them out already. It's more likely
that they'll come from people who were thinking
outside the box, as we say, thinking creatively. And for that to
happen, it's not going to happen while you're
doing 10 things at once and giving five seconds
of attention to each one. It's going to happen when
you have a sustained period to deal with them. Now, when I talk
about being organized, I don't want there to
be a misunderstanding. I'm not talking about all
of us being like Mr. Spock, and being completely
regimented, and unemotional, and logical all the time. What I'm talking about is being
able to bring more efficiency to the workday so that
at the end of the day, you close the door on it and
have more time for spontaneity, for creativity, for time
with loved ones, and for fun. I'm talking about being able to
introduce those elements more regular in your life,
because you're not feeling like you're
always behind, that you're able to
make the most out of every minute and
every opportunity. So that's all I had to say. I'd be happy to take questions. And above all, I'm
grateful to all of you for spending this
afternoon with me. Thank you very much. [APPLAUSE] AUDIENCE: Hi, yeah. One of the things you
touched on is the rapidity with which you
can make decisions and how quickly you can do your
thing, your work, and so on. And yet, one of the
things that Google does is it tries to minimize
the amount of time it takes to get a response. You type a query, and it's
300 milliseconds or whatever. So we encourage a
very rapid iteration, a very rapid query
response cycle. And yet there's evidence to
suggest that sometimes slowing the pace of work down
increases accuracy, increases depth of processing, and so on. How do you make these sort
of personal evaluations in your life and in your
decision-making process? DANIEL LEVITIN: I
try to figure out whether-- I try to prioritize
my decision making, and separate the big ones
from the little ones, and deal with the big
ones in the morning when my gumption is at a high. And then I follow the
advice of David Allen and other efficiency
experts-- try to figure out what do I need
in order to make this decision, in order to push this
forward, especially if one's been lingering for awhile. Do I need more information? If so, where am I
going to get that? Can I delegate the acquisition
of that information to someone else? Is there an expert I can ask? Do I need time to
just think it over? This is what judges
do, of course. They often get all
the information and then allow
themselves a couple of days to ruminate
about it, especially when there are big consequences. You've raised another
point about the rapidity of information. Google has made searches
an order of magnitude more efficient than
they used to be. And most of the
time-- and especially Google Scholar for
somebody in my line of work is very helpful--
most of the time, you get exactly what
you're looking for. And if not, it's
not too far off. But I was thinking the
other day about how-- I wrote a lot of this
book in libraries. And I would be walking
to a shelf to get a book, and something else
would catch my eye. And I would start
looking at it, and it was something that was
fascinating and wonderful that I didn't even know
I was interested in. And that would set me off on
some non-linear but wonderful path. And I was thinking,
what I'd like to see in Google-- I'm sure
everybody comes here and tells you stuff that you've
already thought of. I'd like to see a
serendipity button where, when I get my
search results that are very accurate
and focused, there's a separate column of the near
misses, things that aren't exactly the right one, but
they're sort of related, the kinds of things I might have
found if I was walking around in a bookstore or library
on the shelf next to it. I would find that
a nice feature. Of course, I can use
somebody else's search engine and get those automatically. [LAUGHTER] I mean unintentionally
automatically, just to-- AUDIENCE: Your tips
are really helpful. I was wondering if
there's anything somebody with Attention
Deficit Disorder can do to improve and organize
their lives better? DANIEL LEVITIN: Attention
Deficit Disorder is an interesting phenomenon. It really does exist. Many people with
Attention Deficit Disorder are able to be especially
creative because of the way their mind works going from one
unrelated thought to another. One of the difficulties, of
course, is that people with ADD tend to start a lot of projects
and not finish any of them. So I think the greatest thing
is when somebody with ADD is paired with somebody
in the workplace who may not have a desire to
be particularly creative and is a real focused, logical,
get-things-done person. And working together
as a team, they can really accomplish
great things. And in fact, some companies
do this implicitly without using labels like ADD
or task manager or project manager. But big companies
sort themselves out in this way, especially
when you're putting together project teams. You're thinking implicitly,
well, this person has a lot of great ideas,
this person gets things done. And we're not using
the clinical labels, but it's the same kind of idea. Of course, then there are drugs. Ritalin, otherwise known
as methylphenidate, can help ADD people to stay
focused, but many report that they feel a
loss of creativity. So they finally get
things done, but they don't feel that they're
doing their best work. AUDIENCE: So you
mentioned multitasking is bad, and essentially
an illusion. And you gave
references to switching every five minutes or so. Is there data, or
do you have a sense of what is the amount of time,
at least, that someone should focus on a task and then switch? DANIEL LEVITIN: I think
it depends on the task. There are some
things that you know will only take a minute or two. And if you're trying to
create a productive day, it's best to group
those all and do them all in an hour where you can
do all the little things. It might be going through
your emails and sorting them, or you might have to
log into a website to find out how much you
owe the water company and then pay your bill. All these little things
that only take two minutes, productivity experts
say if there's something that
takes two minutes, do it right now, not in the
middle of something else. Do it today. Other tasks that
are going to require weeks or months of work, things
with a long event horizon, I think you really want to be
able to put in at least an hour at a time on the task and maybe
carve out three or four or five hours throughout the day
where you're just doing that. Maybe up to an hour
and a half or two. There are big
individual differences among the thousands of ways
that human beings differ from one another, big
differences in how long people can sustain attention. And as you know, it
changes throughout the week and throughout the seasons. But I think that
for anything we care about, you're looking at closer
to an hour than five minutes. Although every once in a
while, you surprise yourself. Some great songs were
written in 15 minutes. AUDIENCE: What about
research into different sorts of activities that you can
maybe more successfully do at the same time than others? For example, I remember at
a company I used to work on, we did most of our communication
by conference call. So if somebody was typing
or looking at the email, you could definitely tell
on the conference call, because they would
simply just seem to not be able to do both
things at the same time. If you ask them to
speak, there would be a big pause compared
to the people that were really concentrating. I remember also
that I often used to be at home and doing
something else at the same time completely different, like
the washing up or something, and seem to be able to do
that much more successfully at the same time
as another guy who would run during our
conference calls. So what research is there
on the type of activity that people try and
do at the same time? DANIEL LEVITIN: Well,
I think it's worth thinking about
what-- I think we all have a good intuition about
this-- what parts of your brain you're using. If you're using the verbal
parts to talk on the phone and do email and text
at the same time, you're not really
doing them all at once. On the other hand, if you're
standing on a treadmill and reading, that's
OK, because you're using different
parts of your brain for keeping the
exercise going than you are for reading the article. There's an interesting
case with driving. Driving actually benefits
from multitasking in a very limited way. If you're on a long
drive and you've been driving for awhile--
you're a competent, experienced driver, and there are
no hazards in the road, and it's not a windy road, it's
a straight piece of freeway like Highway Five here--
you're going to get bored, and your attention is going sag. And that's dangerous. So listening to
music while you're driving, if it's the right
kind of music-- not lullabies, but the right kind of
music that will raise your physiological
arousal level just a bit-- will actually make
you a better driver, because it's functioning
as a stimulant. If the music is too engrossing,
if it's trance music, that's pulling you too
far out of the driving. So you've got to hit
the happy balance. AUDIENCE: This is
actually kind of a follow on to the previous question. How would you classify learning
activities in the sense that-- it seems that
when you're learning, especially when you're
learning a physical task, there are aspects of it
that you do automatically, and then you have to focus a
lot of attention on the bit that you're not familiar with. DANIEL LEVITIN: That's
a great question. I know the most about
learning musical instruments and musical passages,
but it applies to a number of other things--
to athletics, to acting, and to other motor
learning kinds of things. You're asking about motor
learning in particular. It turns out that just
doing the motor movements isn't very efficient
or very helpful. You have to be conscious and
focused on what you're doing and why you're doing it. So musicians talk about
deliberate practice. Piano teachers talk about,
when you're on the bus, be mentally practicing
the piano in your head and picturing where
your fingers go. And when you sit down, you can't
just let your fingers go there. You have to be thinking
about what they're doing and how they relate to
the music in your head or the music on the page. And really, it's
a mental exercise as much as a physical
one for the practice time to be efficient, and not
to just practice by rote, but to practice mindfully. AUDIENCE: But I guess
what I was trying to ask about is how does
that tie into the notion that multitasking
is an illusion? DANIEL LEVITIN: Well, here, I
don't see it as multitasking. If you're doing it right,
they're completely integrated. So the idea of thinking about
what you're doing and doing it, and then getting some feedback
about whether you actually did what you thought
you were going to do, and then maybe changing it to
make some modifications, that's all part and parcel of-- when
I'm talking about unitasking, I don't mean you can only
have one tiny little kernel of thought in your mind. I mean that you're focused
on a constellation of ideas that surround a single activity. AUDIENCE: You mentioned
before that a 15-minute nap can make up for
an hour of sleep. I was just wondering if you
could explain a little bit more how that's physically
possible, and if so, why aren't we all just taking two
hours of naps every night? DANIEL LEVITIN:
Well, if you sleep longer than 15 minutes-- well,
longer than about 25 or 30-- you enter into deeper
sleep, and it's harder to wake up from that. So long naps in the middle
of the day are not helpful. It's really the
short naps that are. What's happening at nighttime
is memory consolidation. And we have only a relatively
recent understanding of this role for
nighttime sleep. And that is that
during your regular six or eight or 10-hour
stretch of sleep at night, your neurons are going over
the experiences and thoughts and activities of the
day and processing them in a way that allows them to
get into your long-term memory-- turning them over, thinking
of links between them, connections, and storing them. If your sleep is disrupted at
night because you stayed up too late or you woke up too many
times or something like that, it can disturb the memories
for the previous day for up to weeks or
months afterwards. Now, if you're working in an
intellectually-demanding job and you're putting in
four or five hours of work in the morning, say from 8:00
to 1:00 in the afternoon, when 1:00 rolls
around, your brain has been working
pretty hard, and you've taken in a lot of information. So being able to enter just
the first stages of sleep has the effect of hitting
a neurophysiological reset button. It relaxes some circuits. You make a few
little connections. You're preprocessing stuff for
that night's sleep episode. And there's a
neurochemical story that I could point you to
in a series of articles by Matthew Walker
at UC Berkeley. AUDIENCE: I have a fun
question about vacation if we could go back to that
and start planning my next one. Well, I have a couple questions
about your recommendations. How much time do you think is
required to take off in order to re-energize for getting back
into a heavy episode of work, like weeks on end? What type of vacation do
you think is recommended? You mentioned taking
walks around nature and having that
be a good charge. Does that have any impact in
longer-term stints somewhere? So scaling the small naps and
walks out to days and weeks, what's recommended? DANIEL LEVITIN: I don't know of
any literature that recommends a particular amount of time or
a particular kind of vacation. AUDIENCE: I'll write it. DANIEL LEVITIN: There may be
a vacation doctor out there. I think it's probably the case
that nobody has studied this. But if they did, my
guess is that they would find there are huge
individual differences from person to person and from
time to time in your life. I'm sure you've all had the
experience where you just felt like you needed a day off,
and other times where you felt like you just needed two
weeks or a month off. And it has to do
with a lot of factors about what's going on in
your life, and in your brain, and in your body, and your
health, and nutrition, and stress. Stressful episodes can take
a very long time to get over. Grief can take months. If it's just regular
workday stuff that you're trying
to get away from, a shorter vacation
would suffice. And if it's the
loss of a loved one, it could take months--
not a vacation, but months of recovery. AUDIENCE: Actually, I'm
a technical writer here at Google, and I've also
been a former librarian. Reading your book,
it's interesting. A lot of us spend a
lot of time on the web to pick out the
design elements that appeal to the distracted
mind and a lot that appeal to the focused mind. Can you comment on that? Because you spend a
lot of time on the web. DANIEL LEVITIN: These are really
interesting design questions. The very first
search engines were very cluttered and
headache-inducing. And Google is well
known for having introduced this spare homepage. And I think implicit
in your question is that a lot of people
like that sparsity, but not everybody does. And it doesn't meet the
needs of all different kinds of processing styles. I imagine that there's
a literature on this in the computer-human
interaction design community, but I'm not familiar with it. I know that for people
who are easily distracted, people with attention
deficit problems, having that big white space is very
intimidating and not very helpful. But then having too much
going on would be distracting. There's got to be
some balance there. One of the tips I give
in the book for people who have Attention Deficit
Disorder in terms of filing things-- and maybe this
is applicable-- there's some research that shows that if
they can file by color instead of by words-- the problem with
a lot of people who are easily distracted or have
attention deficit is, they can't focus
on the words that are written on the tab
of a physical file folder or the names of files
on the computer. So color coding can help. Everything related to a
certain project is red. Everything related to
another project is green. And then spatially
organizing them so everything related to the
Penske file is over here, and everything related
to the Miller file is over here, either on
desktop of the computer or on the physical desktop. I remember some years ago,
Apple, as part of their OS, had introduced
this way of having custom icons for the folders. The folder didn't have
to look like a folder. It could look like anything. It could be a
Simpson's character. It could be any JPEG or TIFF. And some people that I know that
had these kinds of difficulties and challenges found
that very helpful, because it allowed them to
sort things visually and not have to rely on words. AUDIENCE: You mentioned
the positive value of reading with respect to
recharge and creativity. And being an avid and
permanently-addicted reader, I'm always looking for some
positive value proposition I can sell to my kids, that
an hour of literary fiction is more beneficial than
an hour of YouTube. And I've found it challenging. I wondered if you had any
words of wisdom in that area. DANIEL LEVITIN: I
think it comes down to what the role
of art in society is, how we consider the
role of art in society. Art in general, and
literature in particular, helps us to
re-contextualize the world, to see things from
another perspective, to see things from a particular
person's perspective, maybe somebody from a
different background, a different age, a
different set of worldviews. We learn to empathize with other
viewpoints and other people. And we learn to see in this
re-contextualization process connections between
things where we didn't see those
connections before. And this can stimulate all
kinds of neural processes where we're momentarily
comparing our lives to the lives we're
reading about. We identify with some
of the characters, and we imagine what we would
do in these situations. And this is a tremendously
important experience for boosting
creativity and empathy and understanding of the world. And I do think that the role
of art is to do those things. I don't think the purpose of art
is to make us better at math, or to simply be a way to
fill time between work hours and sleep. I think art is
supposed to challenge us to think differently, and
great literature can do that. And I mean that about
literary fiction as well as literary nonfiction and poetry. And that very act of having
your mind wander while you're reading is part of
the treasure of it. And I think it needs
to be encouraged. Now, of course, watching
TV is different, or YouTube videos, or
watching moving images is different, because
you can't really control the pace like you
can when you're reading. I guess you could hit the
pause button, but people don't. In reading, though,
you can take your time and you can go back
over it very easily. And I think it's important to
encourage children to do that. And again, I think some of
the world's biggest problems are more apt to be
solved by people who have taken
inspiration from the arts. AUDIENCE: Kind of a followup
on the video part of it. What I've noticed is that
we tend to classify videos as very much like, OK, these
are cat videos, or these are distracting, and
so on and so forth. But at least in my
mind, when I compare my own experience--
say, an hour and a half reading some literary fiction
versus reading Twitter, there's a world of difference. But interestingly, I noticed
there's the same difference if I watch a 2-and-1/2 hour
documentary on something, like something that
Ken Burns made, for example versus
something on YouTube. So is there any
data or do you have any comment on the
quality of video that you can watch
as opposed to-- DANIEL LEVITIN:
Well, I would put Ken Burns in the category
of literary nonfiction. His documentaries employ
artistic techniques, narrative techniques,
narrative momentum, character development. So I think they're functioning
in a more artistic capacity. Just because they're
nonfiction doesn't mean that they're not
artistic, of course. AUDIENCE: So my question
is about napping in the day and at work. I've never tried this. And the only time I remember
napping was after having kids, when the tiredness
just makes you nap. So I'm wondering about
how do you get into this, and I'm also wondering about
the comment you made about, you have to make sure not
to go into too deep a sleep. So you meant set an alarm? How does all that work? DANIEL LEVITIN: Some
people can more easily take naps than others. Some people fall
asleep very quickly. Some people don't. And there are individual
differences here. If you're the kind of person
that takes 15 to 30 minutes to fall asleep at
night, it's less likely that you'll be able to carve
time out of your day at work. It's not just like you
can slip into the nap room and come out 15 minutes later. So knowing that about
yourself is important. And maybe instead
of taking naps, you'll engage in other
restorative brain activities. It might be listening to
music, or reading a novel, or taking a walk
around the building, looking at art pictures
or something of fine art. So to some extent, you're stuck
with your neurogenetic makeup in terms of whether
you're somebody who falls asleep quickly. If you do fall asleep
quickly, a lot of people do set alarms
after 15 minutes so that they don't enter
that deeper sleep. Now, I know there
are exceptions. When you're talking
about human physiology, there are a lot of exceptions. I know somebody who takes
two-hour naps every day. Gets a full eight hours
of sleep at night, takes two-hour naps
in the afternoon, and that works for her. But on average, it doesn't
work for the rest of us. Because it's putting you in
too deep a sleep mode, and you wake up with a mental fog. The body also has
these internal clocks that expect the same thing
at every time of the day. So if you can arrange
your life this way that you can try to take a
nap at the same time every day and eat your meals at
the same time every day-- because they work
into the cycle-- and exercise at
the same time, you might find with
a little practice after a week or two that
your naps are coming more easily, because your
body is conditioned for it. AUDIENCE: Thank you. Thank you very much.
