

We are not Information Sponges & that is alright!
The drama of news is one of the most amazing, and interesting contexts to attention research in the world. A long time ago, much before the advent of Fox News TV was something you watched, it very quickly became a contact sport with the brain. I used to love American news for the sheer number of things happening on the screen, and then our Indian news people followed the innovation, and we were off to the races, not in a good way. Chances are you have seen the miniature squares on the screen these days where fire, bombs, and other scintillating visuals are happening. What does this have to do with attention research?
The brain is a wonderful thing but it has a severe physical limitation, and that limitation makes it hard for us to focus, really focus, on more than one piece of information. Watch the video here, and count the number of times the white team passes the ball. Did you do it? If you did, did you see the Gorilla pass by? If you did, let me congratulate you. For a lot of people the focus required to count the passes means that the chest thumping Gorilla is missed. This has been a classic experiment which has been used in different settings across the world, the findings remain the same.
This experiment has been used to train professionals working in the field of airport security, to power plants and the ability to spot what they are not looking for remains almost constant at around 1/3rd of the time. What connects the two, the disorder of news, and the inability to spot a Gorilla? The urban myth of multitasking. The psychologists use the word bottleneck to describe our latent inability to process overcrowded information. Why should we care?
Our societies are placing more and more demands on our time, resources, and our cognitive abilities are struggling to keep pace. The following graph from 2017 (pre-pandemic) paints a picture of how overworked we are. So what happens when we are overworked?

So what happens when we are overworked? Let us turn to a study conducted by Prof. Michael Marmot which was started in the 1970's, the purpose of the study was to track the physiological impact of work. The study tracked 10,000 civil servants working in Whitehall and the results were eye opening. Those working fifty five hours or more started to suffer cognitive impairment. When tested for vocabulary, reasoning, and reaction they had slowed times, and their cortisol levels were high. This early cognitive impairment also is a sign of an early grave. The Japanese, some of the most overworked/productive societies in the world, even have a name for it Karoshi - literal translation overwork death.However, let us ask another question what happens to productivity when we work so hard? It suffers. Here is a graph for every extra hour that we work it does not really add to the productivity.


This finding is not new either, in 1908 one of the founders of Carl Zeiss, Ernst Abbe started a study and realised that reducing the working hours from nine, to eight hours actually increased productivity. The same conclusion was reached by Henry Ford in 1926. The study has been done in various industries, and the conclusion has never changed. Talk about replication, and never being scaled up! So, why do we work so much? Enter Cyril Northcote Parkinson, of the ubiquitous law.
"It is a commonplace observation that work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion."

Parkinson a naval historian found an interesting pattern. He spotted that the Royal Navy reduced the number of capital ships, and sailors, but the bureaucracy increased at the same rate as it would have with business as usual. The way of unintended work to come together and create clutter in our life is now being detected. Last year the Covid induced overwork did budge 4 million American people to reduce the clutter of their work life, and seek cleaner, focused, work life balance. Though the process started in 2019.

At the heart of the conundrum is a pastiche of the Protestant work ethic, the fact of the matter simply is that we have made heroes out of overworked executives and leaders, instead of what they are – dangerous. In an interesting experiment, psychologists found that people who have not slept for a night have the same impaired decision making as a person who is drunk.
So perhaps we need to think about the fact that sleep and the less you take of it has been turned into a boast, but what does it do? The less you sleep, the more is your sleep debt. The more your sleep debt your body starts compensating by keeping you focused on the bigger picture and that could mean bad decisions start mounting. The UK Health & Safety Executive found that levels of fatigue increased with consecutive early shifts. Within a week the fatigue levels are up by 75% compared to the first day. The 23rd March 2005 Texas refinery incident was due to a lot of problems, some were very complex, some were fairly obvious such as the fact that the Night Lead Operator had worked for thirty-three consecutive days, the Day Lead Operator had worked for 37 days without a break. The most rested member of the team had slept a total of 5.5 hours per night for a period greater than three weeks, he was operating with an accumulated sleep debt of a month and a half. Sleep debt has been found to make us rigid, slow to respond, and creates a cognitive tunnel vision. In an fMRI study of sleep-deprived, and fully slept people doing the same task it was found that the occipital lobe and parietal lobe of the sleep-deprived subjects were significantly less active. The occipital lobe is involved in visual processing, and the parietal lobe is responsible for integrating sensory information and working with numbers.
Another interesting finding was that the thalamus which sits in the centre of the brain was overactive. It was trying to compensate for less activity in the occipital and parietal lobes of the brain. There is a marked reduction in the amount of glucose reaching the brain, within 24-hour wakefulness, there is a shortfall of 6% glucose, but it is not equal. The parietal lobe, and pre-frontal cortex lose around 12 to 14% glucose and these are the areas that we need to solve problems, have social cohesion, and general ability to think.
So yes, we can remain awake for a long period of time, but our ability to think gets critically eroded. After the refinery incident, a curriculum was developed for the workers there. It has the following sentence which is very hard to argue with, 'A tired worker starts to perform like an unskilled worker'.
We live in a world where information is exploding, and we get told that attention is getting scarce, and therefore we must pay attention to detail. However, there are a lot of things which are beyond our control.
We must economise our decision making based on our priorities, and realise that the physical limits to decision making, attention, and priority need wider context. Biology trumps economics, always.

