It may sound old-fashioned, but it works.
Are smartphones, computers and artificial intelligence making us stupid?
Learning an instrument enhances critical areas of the brain.
Learning an instrument enhances critical areas of the brain.
Musical training provides lasting improvements to attention and focus, research finds.
Musicians have greater control over their attention and are less distracted.
The more musical training a person has, the better they can control their attention.
Musicians also develop better memories, previous studies have shown.
Brain imaging research has even shown critical areas of the brain to be different in musicians.
Changes in the dorsolateral frontal regions (the top front of your head), in particular, are linked to better memory, error detection and goal-oriented behaviour in musicians.
Dr Paulo Barraza, the study’s lead author, said:
“Our study investigated the effects of systematic musical training on the main components of the attentional system.
Our findings demonstrate greater inhibitory attentional control abilities in musicians than non-musicians.
Professional musicians are able to more quickly and accurately respond to and focus on what is important to perform a task, and more effectively filter out incongruent and irrelevant stimuli than non-musicians.
In addition, the advantages are enhanced with increased years of training.”
The conclusions come from a study of 18 professional pianists with an average of 12 years of practice, who were compared with non-musicians.
All were given tests of their attentional systems.
The results showed that musicians were better at ignoring distractions while doing a complex task.
Dr David Medina, the study’s first author, said:
“Our findings of the relationship between musical training and improvement of attentional skills could be useful in clinical or educational fields, for instance, in strengthening the ability of ADHD individuals to manage distractions or the development of school programs encouraging the development of cognitive abilities through the deliberate practice of music.”
The study was published in the journal Heliyon (Medina & Barraza, 2019).
What multitasking does to your brain and the emotions.
What multitasking does to your brain and the emotions.
Multitasking mostly makes people feel sad and fearful, new research finds.
Juggling emails, reports and other activities creates a tense working environment.
In contrast, people who have a relatively uninterrupted period to work find it easier to maintain a neutral emotional state.
The study suggests that allowing emails to continually interrupt is linked to negative emotions, even anger.
A previous study has shown that changing from one activity to another interferes with brain activity and may reduce productivity by up to 40%,
Multitasking could even shrink the brain.
Dr Ioannis Pavlidis, study co-author, said:
“Not only do people experience stress with multitasking, but their faces may also express unpleasant emotions and that can have negative consequences for the entire office culture.”
The study analysed the facial expressions of 26 knowledge workers as they tried to write an essay.
Half received interrupting emails they had to respond to during the task.
The other half received all the emails in one batch so they were not interrupted while writing the essay.
The results showed that those who were continually interrupted displayed facial expression of sadness and fear.
Those who remained mostly uninterrupted maintained a neutral expression throughout.
Dr Pavlidis said:
“Individuals who engaged in multitasking appeared significantly sadder than those who did not.
Interestingly, sadness tended to mix with a touch of fear in the multitasking cohort.
Multitasking imposes an onerous mental load and is associated with elevated stress, which appears to trigger the displayed sadness.
The simultaneous onset of fear is intriguing and is likely rooted to subconscious anticipation of the next disruption.”
In the office, where a room full of people are all suffering (and causing) the same interruptions, the sadness and fear can spread like wildfire.
Dr Pavlidis said:
“Emotional contagion can spread in a group or workplace through the influence of conscious or unconscious processes involving emotional states or physiological responses.”
Many people are working from home during the pandemic, noted Dr Pavlidis:
“Currently, an intriguing question is what the emotional effect of multitasking at home would be, where knowledge workers moved their operation during the COVID 19 pandemic.”
The study was published in the Proceedings of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Blank et al., 2020).
How the pandemic could be affecting your diet and attention.
Eating this fruit once a day is neuroprotective.
People can learn to control their brain waves when they are given feedback about the electrical activity in their brains.
This is the first study to look at its effect on teams.
There will be a test, so I hope you are paying attention.
There will be a test, so I hope you are paying attention.
When a person starts to blink more rapidly, it suggests their mind is wandering, research finds.
Blinking sets up a tiny barrier against the outside world, allowing the brain to focus on something different.
The researchers were inspired by neuroscientific findings that parts of the brain are less active when the mind wanders.
Dr Daniel Smilek, the study’s first author, said:
“And we thought, OK, if that’s the case, maybe we’d see that the body would start to do things to prevent the brain from receiving external information.
The simplest thing that might happen is you might close your eyes more.”
For the study people read a passage from a book while their eye movements and blinks were monitored.
Randomly, people were stopped and asked whether they were paying attention or not.
The results showed people blinked more when they had switched off from the text and were thinking of something else.
Dr Smilek said:
“What we suggest is that when you start to mind-wander, you start to gate the information even at the sensory endings — you basically close your eyelid so there’s less information coming into the brain.”
The study was published in the journal Psychological Science (Smilek et al., 2010).
Multitasking may affect crucial areas of the brain’s emotional and cognitive centres.
Multitasking may affect crucial areas of the brain’s emotional and cognitive centres.
Using laptops, phones and other media devices at the same time could be shrinking important structures in our brains, a new study may indicate.
For the first time, neuroscientists have found that people who use multiple devices simultaneously have lower gray-matter density in an area of the brain associated with cognitive and emotional control (Loh & Kanai, 2014).
Multitasking might include listening to music while playing a video game or watching TV while making a phone call or even reading the newspaper with the TV on.
Kep Kee Loh, the study’s lead author, said:
“Media multitasking is becoming more prevalent in our lives today and there is increasing concern about its impacts on our cognition and social-emotional well-being.
Our study was the first to reveal links between media multitasking and brain structure.”
The study used scans of people’s brains along with a questionnaire about their use of media devices, newspapers and television.
People who multitasked more across different media had lower gray-matter density in the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC: indicated by white dots in the image above).
This part of the brain, which lies towards the front, is mostly involved in aspects of cognitive and emotional control: things like empathy, decision-making and how we process rewards.
The study fits in with previous research suggesting that media multitasking is associated with emotional problems, like anxiety and depression, as well as cognitive problems, like poor attention.
The researchers found that this association had nothing to do with personality.
Both the study’s authors were quick to point out that this is a preliminary study which only finds a connection; it does not tell us what is causing what.
For example, it could be that those with a smaller ACC are more prone to media multitasking, not that multitasking is causing these changes in the brain.
However, Loh said:
“The exact mechanisms of these changes are still unclear.
Although it is conceivable that individuals with small ACC are more susceptible to multitasking situations due to weaker ability in cognitive control or socio-emotional regulation, it is equally plausible that higher levels of exposure to multitasking situations leads to structural changes in the ACC.”
We will have to wait for a future study which follows people over time.
This can examine how multitasking and brain structures change, and can give us another clue to this intriguing puzzle.
Image credit: Loh & Kanai (2014)
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