Institute For The Future

What if We've Created the Wrong Environments for our Brains?

 

In an excellent blog post, Jonah Lehrer makes an intriguing argument that in high pressure situations, rather than exerting every last ounce of energy on concentrating, people should take breaks and focus on something else. This is one of several arguments I've seen in the last week or so suggesting that some aspect of how we structure our work lives--from creating high stakes incentives to managing multiple streams of information at once--is fundamentally at odds with how our brains actually work. Which is to say, we've designed our work lives based on theories about human nature; empirically, it looks like many of those theories may be wrong.

 

Take Lehrer's argument. In writing about the oil leak in the Gulf, Lehrer imagines--I'd guess pretty accurately--what working on containing likely involves.

 

I imagine the poor engineers trying to fix this catastrophe back at HQ are working around the clock, swilling coffee by the gallon and trying to stay focused amid all the pressure. Their bosses are probably driving them crazy, demanding instant solutions to a seemingly impossible puzzle. And so the engineers drink more coffee. They pull yet another all-nighter. After all, a problem this difficult requires every ounce of their conscious attention.

 

This post is about why those poor BP engineers should take a break. They should step away from the dry-erase board and go for a walk. They should take a long shower. They should think about anything but the thousands of barrels of toxic black sludge oozing from the pipe....

 

To understand these weird results, it helps to understand how powerful incentives (like $20, or an angry President) change the way we think. The first thing that happens is we become motivated to devote more attention to the problem. It's now worth the expense of conscious analysis, a mental process that relies, in large part, on a brain area called the prefrontal cortex. While such focus is often essential - it helps us grind through difficult tasks - it turns out that our attention can also inhibit our ability to think outside the box.

 

 

 

 

In an interview with NPR earlier in the week, the behavioral economist Dan Ariely makes a related point by describing money specifically--but I think the case could be made for pressure more generally--as a "two-edged sword."

 

"Imagine I told you that if you will be really funny in the next 10 minutes, I'll give you $100,000," he told the interviewer. "It's a motivator when we get more money, we want to do better, but it's also a stressor in the sense that the more money creates more stress."

 

These examples suggest that, in encouraging better performance, we should do things like take more frequent breaks and have smaller incentives. It's not just that these are counter-intuitive solutions; they don't feel right. Even as I write this, I have trouble with the idea that a good strategy for containing the oil spill would be to make it feel like less of a big deal.

 

Which brings me to my third example: A recent New York Times piece highlighting the effects of multitasking on our brains. I found out about the story through Twitter, of all things, a medium designed to encourage multitasking despite all of the apparent costs of multitasking. Not only that, after reading about all of the costs of multitasking, thousands of people independently thought to themselves, apparently without irony: I'm going to go post this to Twitter!

 

My larger point is that we're moving into a future where we'll be confronting evidence that our assumptions about human dynamics may be off, but like resisting Twitter, actually listening to and acting on that evidence will be much trickier.