Here is the full transcript of neuroscience researcher Marvin Chun’s TEDx Talk Presentation: What Makes Some Brains More Focused Than Others? at TEDxKFAS conference.
Listen to the MP3 Audio: What Makes Some Brains More Focused Than Others by Marvin Chun at TEDxKFAS conference
TRANSCRIPT:
For me, smart living has to start with being productive. How many of you would like to be more productive? If you are a student, you would like to get better grades without having to work harder.
If you have a job, you want to be more productive in your work, you want to gain more recognition for your work, without having to put more hours, because everyone has the same twenty-four hours a day.
And there are many ways to be more productive. But the one way that I’m going to talk about in my session is how you can improve your focus, and how you can improve your attention, and what psychology and neuroscience have to say to improve your focus and attention.
The big challenge that faces all of us, especially in modern society, is that there’s too much information. It’s both a blessing, but also a curse, that we have access to infinite amounts of information. All the knowledge that has been produced by humankind is at the end of your thumbs just by opening up your phone. And again, it’s a huge privilege, and we’re very lucky to be in this kind of era.
But on the other hand, it’s very hard to choose, and it’s very hard to decide where to start, because we are constantly confronted with too much information.
Secondly, we also distract ourselves. It’s hard to focus on our own. One good example is that you commonly see people walking down the street with their eyes glued to their phone.
[Video clip]
See he’s coming to the door and boom, he just hits the door, walks right into it.
In the next video is a woman walking in a mall checking out her cell phone. And you can see that she fell straight into that fountain.
Okay? So, you know, we distract ourselves all the time, making us oblivious to our surroundings. These are comical examples, but, of course, there are more serious dangerous examples.
For instance, if you’re driving a train — an engineer driving a train, and you lose your focus for even just a few seconds, then if you don’t slow down your speed your train is going to run off the tracks to very dangerous effect.
So these are just a few examples of how we are overloaded with information and how we distract ourselves.
How Can We Improve Our Focus?
And so the question is: How can we improve our focus? We are living in what John Cassidy of “The New Yorker” magazine calls the “attention deficit disorder economy” or the “attention deficit disorder society.” And the consequences of that we’re still trying to understand.
We know that it means that we’re a little less focused, more distracted, we may be more shallow. This overwhelming information may make us less productive. And as I just pointed out over here, it can also lead to dangerous situations.
The economic cost of attention deficit has been estimated to be even up to about $200 billion in the United States alone. These are serious problems that affect our productivity.
So here’s an example. I want to see how well you can attend at the beginning of my talk. This is a video, and your task is to focus on the team with white clothes and ignore the team with black clothes, Okay? They’re going to run around the screen, and your task is to count how many times they’re passing the ball to other players on the screen — other white players, white T-shirt players, on the screen.
Okay, count it quietly in your head, and then at the end I’m going to ask you to yell out the answer. So count how many times the white T-shirt team passes the ball to other players on its team. And it’s important to do this as quietly as possible. Don’t laugh, don’t cough or talk because that’s going to hurt other people’s concentration.
Okay. So here’s our first attention deficit test. Here we go. One, two, three.
[Video clip: “How many passes does the team in white make?”]
Okay, what was the answer? How many times? Thirteen? Thirteen? Excellent, you guys have great attention and that’s really fantastic. We’re off to a good start.
Now some of you may have seen this video because it’s on YouTube, and it’s a pretty well-known one. But if you’ve never seen this video before, please raise your hand up as high as you can. Look around, most of you have not seen the video. Keep your hands up high, please.
Now there was actually something else going on in this video, and you can lower your hands — keep your hands up please — you can lower your hand if you saw a dancing bear. But if you did not see the dancing bear, keep your hands up, look around, you’re not alone. Most of you have missed a very critical part of this video. So now you can lower your hand. You’re not alone. Let’s watch the video again, no counting. Just watch the video now.
Okay so now no counting.
[Video clip: “How many passes does the team in white make?”]
And just watch. As you were monitoring the white T-shirt team, on the right, this guy in a bear suit comes out, and he does this kind of dance. Right? And then moonwalks out. And the good majority of you, the very smart group of people, totally missed this very obvious feature of the video. Okay?
On the one hand that means that your attention is really good, because you did not see something that I didn’t ask you to look for. But on the other hand, it really highlights how limited your ability to see the world, and to experience the world, is. Our brains are limited. And that’s the point I’m trying to make with this video.
In fact, we studied this in my own laboratory at Yale in collaboration with one of my former postdoc students, Yao Daju, who is now a professor at Harvard University. We conducted this study where we asked people to do something very simple: Just look at these shapes shown there on the left.
And we asked them to attend to the shapes, and try to remember them for like two seconds. And sometimes they have to remember one; sometimes they have to remember two; sometimes they have to remember three. Very simple task.
People have no trouble attending to and remembering one of the objects. Okay? And we also measured what their brains are doing while they’re looking at this task and doing this task. And that line on the bottom with the light green shows what happens when people are attending to, and remembering, just one item. The brain doesn’t have to work too hard and people do super well. They’re almost perfect in the task.
But once you increase it to two items or three items, you can see in the darker lines on the graph, your brain has to work harder. And not only does your brain have to work harder, the performance drops. People start making mistakes, even for something this simple.
Basically your brain can handle only one thing at a time. Only one thing well at a time. Yes, you can try to remember two things or three things. You’re capable of doing it, but your productivity, your performance, is going to start to go down.
So let’s do one more, another attention test, just in case you missed the bear, try doing this one. Just listen to this nice video again. It’s actually a commercial advertisement for a car, but I think it makes good use of psychology and cognitive science. So I’ll let it speak for itself. I don’t receive any endorsements from this company. But here we go.
[Video clip: “To test just how much attention, the attention-stealing design of the new Skoda Fabia actually steals, we left one parked on this ordinary road in West London. We wanted to see if its sharp, crystalline shapes, bold lines and lower, wider profile would attract the desired level of attention. Will the 17-inch black alloy wheels stop passersby in their tracks? Will the angular headlights attract the attention of other road users? Will a crowd gather to check out its fresh, sporty look? Well not quite. But did the attention-stealing design distract you from noticing that the entire street has been changing right before your very eyes? Don’t believe us? Have another look. Did you spot the van changing to a taxi? How about the scooter changing to a pair of bicycles? Or the lady holding a pig? Let alone the fact that the entire street is now completely different. Didn’t think so?”]
So hopefully I’ve made the point that your brain can really only attend to, focus on, do well, one thing at a time, one object at a time, one task at a time.
And so with that background, I’m now going to share three tips on how to improve your focus and attention given these limitations.
Simplify
Tip number one is to try to simplify what you attend to. Okay? And I’ll explain that more in a moment, because first we have to try to understand: Why is it the case that the brain can only attend to one thing at a time?
I would like for you to think of your brain as an orchestra. Okay? It’s like an orchestra. When you listen to an orchestra you don’t just focus on one instrument or one player, you listen to the whole harmony of all the different instruments coming in and out. Beautiful music comes from this synchrony and harmony and coordination of all the different instrument pieces. And that’s exactly how the brain works as well.
And right now, again, in my laboratory we’re working on ways to measure this harmony, and to quantify this harmony using something called functional connectivity. And we can build models of how well people attend based on this harmony such that what you have here on this graph over here on the X-axis is a prediction of who’s more attentive and who’s less attentive.
And what we have on the Y-axis is the actual individuals that we’re predicting. And you can see that our models do a good job. If you listen to the entire brain, you can predict who’s going to be more attentive and who’s going to be less attentive. In fact, these graphs allow us to even predict symptoms for attentional deficit disorders.
So clearly people differ. Okay? I told you that you’re all limited to only attend to one thing. But still different people — some people are more focused than other people. The people on the top right are more focused, and can hold their attention for a longer time, than people on the bottom left.
So what is different about all of your brains, and how can we help you have a kind of brain that’s on the top right, that allows you to maintain focus?
So my three tips as I mentioned. My first tip is: simplify. I told you that there is too much information in the environment, then control how much information that you have to pay attention to. If you are a company trying to sell a product, or to teach something, or to introduce something to another person, simplify your message.
And likewise, as a consumer, simplify what you see. My favorite example is this legendary introduction of the iPhone by the past Steve Jobs. The phone design speaks for itself. He puts the price up. He puts up the size of the memory, and just leaves it to the bare essentials, so that people can focus on the important information. If he were an amateur presenter, he might have presented a slide like this: Introducing the new iPhone. Revolutionary design. And this is how some people make their slides. It’s how some companies sell their products.
But really you have to simplify, because consumers, all of us, we don’t have the capacity to process so much information.
Relax
Tip number two is to relax. It’s so important. This is a very famous, old principle in psychology called the Yerkes-Dodson curve. And what we have here on the X-axis is arousal. Okay? Or stress, or emotion, or focus, it’s all of that on the bottom axis, from low to high. And then of course, what we care about is the Y-axis, performance, okay? We want to be high, show high performance.
Some people act as if the more pumped-up they are, and the harder they try, their performance is always going to go up. Okay? The more stressed you get, performance will go up. Some people think that. But, of course, research indicates that that’s not the case. The curve is actually an upside-down U-shaped function. So that optimal performance — yes, you need some arousal, you need to put some effort into any task, and then you hit your peak performance.
But if you put too much effort in, or you are over aroused, then your performance is going to drop over on the far right. So that’s a very important principle in attention research.
So how do you relax? Of course, that’s a whole other TED talk, on how to relax. I’m just going to share two quick sub tips for that.
One is to don’t forget to breathe, as basic as that sounds. But if you’re feeling stressed or even if you’re not feeling stressed, it’s really good to breathe. So let’s try it once here. We’re going to take a deep breath in for about 5 to 10 seconds. Just breathe in, make the air come all the way down to the bottom of your lungs and then exhale very slowly.
Okay. Very good. Can’t you feel the clarity in your brain happening when you do that? It makes two points. When you engage in deep breathing, it will actually help you relax. And another point is that in order to breathe deeply you actually have to relax. No one’s going to do this deep breath while they’re jumping up and down or doing some kind of weird exercise. And so that’s, I think, one very simple and free tip you can have to try to help relaxing. Meditation, prayer, yoga — there are many other ways to relax as well.
The second thing I’ll share on the topic of relaxation is maybe a surprising one, or maybe it’s not. But exercise is really great. And taking walks is huge. There’s actually a ton of research showing that taking a walk is very beneficial, not only for your mood, but also for your attention, for your cognitive skills.
And importantly, it’s important to take a walk in a park or a place where there are trees, where there’s greenery, where there’s a green environment. So, if you take two groups — and this is work done by Berman and Jonides at the University of Michigan — if you take two groups, compare walking in a city versus walking in a park or walking in a forest, people who walk in a forest are not only more relaxed and happier, but they actually show improved attention and focus after they return from their walk. So just a little plug for taking a walk after lunch.
Unitasking
My final tip is unitasking, and this is probably the most important tip I want to share with you because I think there’s a ton of research that is counterintuitive to people. People think: “In order to be productive, I need to multitask. I need to do more things at any given time.” But that’s actually opposite to everything I just told you about how the brain works.
Your brain works better when it’s unitasking, when it’s only doing one thing at a time. Okay?
How many of you check your phones when you’re studying, or when you’re doing something important like writing a report or making an important plan for your job? How many of you check your phones – check your messages when you do that? Come on, let’s be honest. Everyone checks their phones right?
How many of you check your phones more than one or two times an hour? Yes, all of your hands are still up. Okay?
Psychology and neuroscience research suggests that that’s not a very efficient way to work. So let’s try this out. I think this is an important demonstration. I’m going to show a list of numbers on the left. If the number is blue, add seven; if the number is pink, subtract seven. And then move on to the next number. You’re going down the list as fast as you can. Add seven if it’s blue, and just subtract seven if it’s red, and move on to the next number. When you’re done just clap your hands so I know when people are finished.
Okay? It’s clear instructions. Add seven or subtract seven. Here we go. One, two, three. Do it as fast as you can.
Okay. I am hearing some claps. When you’re done clap your hands quickly.
Okay. Great. So, you’re pretty much done. Let’s just do it one more time. Now the list on the right. Here we go. If it’s blue add seven; if it’s pink subtract seven. As fast as you can. And then you can clap at the end of the list.
Okay. So what do you think? Much harder isn’t it? It’s much harder.
But you probably also noticed that these two lists are the same. The same number of addition problems, the same number of subtraction problems. But on the left you’re unitasking, doing a bunch of addition and then only switching once to do subtraction.
On the right you’re multitasking. Okay? So when you’re studying or working while checking your phone, you’re doing stuff on the right, you’re making your job harder for yourself.
And if you were to test this in the laboratory, on the right you’re going to be 30% slower and you’re going to be 30% less accurate, and your brain has to work harder. It’s like exercising wearing a big heavy backpack. Why would you handicap yourself if you can unitask like we showed you here on the left?
Okay? So that’s my final tip. It’s to try to unitask to improve your focus and productivity. It’s OK to check your phone; just do it after you’ve finished working for 30 minutes or an hour as a reward. Don’t check it every five minutes. Don’t check your emails every five minutes, don’t check your Facebook every five minutes.
So in conclusion, again my three tips for improving focus and attention are: simplify, relax, unitask. I guarantee that the research indicates that your productivity will go up if you follow these tips, and it may even make you smarter.
Thank you very much.
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