Instant Genius - Why you can’t multitask (and why that’s a good thing)

Episode Date: January 18, 2021

Humans' ability to turn thoughts into actions has enabled us to change the world. But we've never been great at getting two things done at once. Understanding how our brain helps us achieve our goals through something called executive function, or cognitive control, can explain why we're so bad at multitasking. According to neuroscientist Prof David Badre, when we're armed with this knowledge we can begin to work together to become a better society. Badre's new book, On Task (£25, Princeton University Press) explains the mechanisms behind cognitive control. In this episode of the Science Focus Podcast we speak to Badre to find out more about how our brains work. Let us know what you think of the episode with a review or a comment wherever you listen to your podcasts. Subscribe to the Science Focus Podcast on these services: Acast, iTunes, Stitcher, RSS, Overcast Read the full transcription of this episode [this will open in a new window] Listen to more episodes of the Science Focus Podcast: Dean Burnett: The neuroscience of happiness Daniel Freeman: How virtual reality is helping patients with phobias, anxiety disorders and more Anthony David: Why is there still such stigma around mental health? Pete Etchells: Are video games good for us? Sandro Galea: What is the difference between health and medicine? Helen Russell: What does it mean to be happy? Gordon Wallace: Is an implantable electronic device the future of medicine? Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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I'm Amy Barrett, editorial assistant at BBC Science Focus magazine. Now, humans' ability to turn thoughts into actions has enabled us to change the world. But how exactly do we do this? Neuroscientist David Bedder's new book, On Task, reveals the latest in cognitive science, and I'm here with David today to find out more. So let's start at the very beginning. What's involved in forming a thought? Well, forming a thought is, that's sort of the core problem.

That's a big mystery in human psychology and neuroscience. You know, this book is kind of goes, is asking the next question is, how do we go from a thought that we have, that we, you know, that we form some idea about what we want to do, some tasks we want to take, some goal of what we have, and how do we translate that into the actions we need to do to actually achieve that? And that's something that is we kind of take for granted. We do it at any, lots of times during the course of our day. You know, it doesn't, and it can be from big, big goals, you know, you want to, you know,

maybe go to university or you want to, you know, start a business or something, but it can also be just simple everyday goals, like going and getting a cup of coffee, which is an example I use in the book. All of that requires making a link between this idea you have, this goal you have, and the actual actions. And it turns out that's not a trivial thing. The brain requires a special class of mechanisms to do that, and those are called cognitive control mechanisms by scientists,

and that's really what the book is about, because it affects so many aspects of our lives, how we do that translation between our thoughts and how we behave. But in like the example you've just used there of going to maybe get a cup of coffee, that for me feels like it's something I don't have to process. You know, I think to myself, I want my first coffee of the morning, and I go and do it.

how much kind of cognitive control is involved in just that one thing? Well, I mean, even though it's something we do every day, like in my house, for instance, it's kind of my job. I'm the one who makes the coffee every morning. And so it's something I do every day. It's a very well-learned activity, no doubt about it. And those kind of activities, we don't have to pay attention to every little thing we do, right? So they don't require a lot of direct control. But that being said, on any given day, it's probably slightly different than the day before and the day after. We don't live in well-controlled environments, like the kind that scientists like me like to create in the lab where we can control everything, right?

Rather, our environment is very complex, dynamic, and variable, right? And a given morning when I'm making my coffee, like, my kids can come running in, right, interrupt me, right? Maybe someone put the mugs in the wrong or the cream in the wrong spot. I have to go find it. You know, maybe, you know, any number of things happen. Things are in slightly different positions even. And what's kind of remarkable is that despite all of that, those little, those little, bits of changes and so forth.

Our brain accommodates that very, very easily and is able to assess where we are with respect to our broader goal. It doesn't stop us midstream when something isn't the same as it's always been, where we're able to readjust on the fly. And that's, and that requires, that requires control. And it's for that reason that, so this system that we had, you know, is, is important to lots of things we do. It's also important to our, to our independence.

our ability to kind of take care of ourselves every day. And so that's one reason why scientists are so concerned with this function is that when people, for instance, lose this function due to, say, brain disease or to accidents, they lose independence in their lives because even simple tasks that they were able to do before become very hard for them. And so even though we take these mechanisms for granted, they really are, they're very real and they're a really important part of the course of our everyday life. So if something could cause us to lose this function,

does that mean that there's a specific part in the brain that corresponds to disability? Yeah, that's a great question too. So cognitive control in general is associated with the most front part of the brain called the prefrontal cortex. It's widely associated with that. But one shouldn't make the mistake of thinking that it's sort of one function, right? It's just one thing that's sort of lost or not, right? It's actually multiple networks and systems in the brain and mechanisms that give rise to control.

And as a result, it's something that is affected in a wide range of different neurological and psychiatric disorders. And it's something that you can also have two patients who will show problems with cognitive control, and inability to control themselves, but for different underlying reasons. The mechanism underlying those things actually is different, even though they're showing a same behavior. And this is one reason why it's been such a complicated problem to address for scientists. And it's kind of strange to here it referred to as control, because it's something that it feels like it's completely out of our control,

and it's just subconscious and how we turn a thought into an action. Why is it given that term? I think it's by sometimes it's also referred to as executive. function, I should say, and it's probably widely known as executive function. The reason why I think cognitive control is a better term, and it's a term, at least I prefer, is the one that is used by a lot of cognitive neuroscientists like me, is that it's in reference to sort of the engineering idea of control. The idea that, you know, control systems are like your thermostat, for example, right? So it has a set point, particular temperature, and then as there are perturbations in the world,

things get colder, things get warmer, right? The thermostat will detect that difference and then will enact a process, typically a heating or a cooling process, to move that temperature back towards its set point. So by analogy, a control system of thinking of the way we control our behavior in terms of a control system is we have a set point.

We have a goal, we have context to rule some desired course of action, and what we want to do is assemble actions that get us there, but also be monitoring as we go or how we're doing so that we can make adjustments as we need. And so it's sort of, in other words, we can get from any start point, right,

to any desired outpoint if it's a well-controlled system, right, that we want to get to. And so it's as a description of the function, that's why people use, call it control. They call it cognitive control because it's doing so based on some internal representation you have of goal or plan or so as opposed to sort of being controlled by our environment, which we are a lot as well.

External stimuli, things that we process in the senses, also will control our behavior sometimes, particularly for habits and strongly associated actions. So is there like an example of a time where something like that might happen to change what we're doing? I think, I mean, one example which I raised in the book, is when your sort of cell phone buzzes, right? That's a case where you have a strong association very often of wanting to look at it because that buzz, right, means that there was a, there might be a text or some other kind of notification from social media or something,

and thousands of prior events, right, where that buzz was followed by some interesting thing when we looked at our phone, have now associated those actions very strongly. And so sometimes with our phone buzzes, right, in spite of ourselves, right? And sometimes situations we shouldn't be doing so, like, you know, in a meeting or in front of, you know, in other places or while we're driving our car, right, we'll check the phone, right? Because that's, that input, right, has anything to do our plan. We weren't planning to check our phone at that moment. But that input was so strong that we decided to do it to check. So what happens then when we're multitasking? How do we do those two things Well, the first thing I should say, right, is that we're never, we're really bad at multitasking.

It's not something we do well, right? So by multitasking, any time we have, we're trying to do multiple things at the same time. And so to say, how do we do it is sort of like, how do we do poorly at it, right, to some extent. But when we're trying to do multiple things at once, right, we're trying to orchestrate more than one action, right, through the same system. and because the way we think about our actions, the way we are able to assemble our actions, rely sometime on the same components, that causes interference.

So just as an example, right, if I tried to say two words at the same time, like literally just at the same time, I couldn't say two words at once. It would just my mouth can't do that, right? And so that's a common resource, my mouth, right, in the task of saying those words. And I can only do one of the,

words at a time. So I have to do one and then I do the other, right, if I'm trying to sort of multitask at that level. Okay, but that's obviously, there's a lot of similar resources like that that happen well before you get to my mouth, right? So in my brain, there's lots and lots of common or overlapping resources that your brain is using. And when those, when two tasks draw on the same one, you're going to have a bottleneck. You're going to have interference, and it makes it hard to do it. So that's the problem of multitasking, right? So in terms of coming back to this question about cues and things in the world, right? Often when we do tasks, we associate things in the world with those tasks.

And those can also kind of elicits, even if we're trying not to do a task right now, right? I'm trying to work on my, you know, doing a, you know, say writing something, right? But I have my smartphone nearby and it buzzes or I see it even, right? it's going to elicit another task, like checking social media or doing something else. And so either I'm going to be compelled by that and go and do it, which would distract me from what I'm doing, or I'm going to have to go through some mental work to keep that at bay. But nonetheless, it's going to cause some interference, and that's going to disrupt what I'm doing right now. And so multitasking is something that's not even just about trying to do multiple tasks at the same time.

It's about putting yourself in an environment where you have cues to multiple tasks, that will cause that kind of competition and interference. And anybody who's been a parent with children at home during this pandemic knows that it is very hard to be productive when you're multitasking. And you have strong, demanding, intentionally, intentionally demanding cues to other tasks in your world, it's hard to be productive. And you've talked about things that we do every day or things that we've learned to associate the buzzing with, you know, stimuli, social media, texts and friends.

How do we then, if that's kind of fundamental for competitive control, then how do we achieve goals, which we haven't before? So how do we know which actions will lead us to a goal that hasn't happened before? Yeah, that's really the fundamental thing that, that we, we get from our control system. Lots of animals species do complicated things. I give the example in the book about the spider building a web. It's a wonderfully complex and sophisticated behavior. And it looks for all the world like the spider has a goal, right, of building this web because, you know, if they can adapt the web is based on like the environment they're in and the kinds of prey they're in the area, right? And it's a very sophisticated hyper. And it's a very sophisticated hyper.

hierarchical process of like putting in these special scaffolding strands and then capture threads and they edit them and stuff like that. And this web itself is bigger than the field of view of the spider. So how could it build something without having a mental representation of the thing it wants to build in that case? But it turns out you can actually simulate a spider building a web without having any such goal, right, with just having a list of rules that are based on the last couple threads the spider touched. And so, and it'll generate, it'll simulate spider web building very well, or last couple threads. And the reason for that is that there have been many, many, millions of years of evolution

that have programmed that set of rules for a spider to build a web. So it doesn't require this notion of conceiving of a goal and then assembling the behavior. Humans, in other hand, we certainly have some behaviors like that, but we actually could build a web in some sense, right? but it would be done very differently. We'd be imagining what the web should look like, and then we would come up with a bunch of behaviors to do it. And so that generative aspect of human behavior,

that we can do novel behaviors we've never done before, that evolution hasn't specified for us, is really the key thing that control does, gets us. And to your question then, like, how do we do it? Well, that means that we have to have sort of basic building blocks that we can assemble action out of, So this is what we call it, a scientist called it compositional action.

In other words, we can break down our behaviors into little components. Think of it like a library of little actions. And then we can reassemble, we can assemble and reassemble that library into all kinds of new actions based on the things we want to achieve. And that's actually where the things like multitasking costs come from, though. Because if I've got this common library of little actions I can use, then any two tasks I'm trying to do are likely going to, going to pull some of those same similar actions, right? And anytime that happens, they're going to be

competing. It's like a, it's like having a big highway system, right, a big road system. So the bigger my city gets, I'm going to need some arteries that everybody goes through and I'm going to get traffic when they all try to go through those arteries. It's the same thing in a big complex human brain, right, trying to do multiple tasks because you're, because you, so it's sort of like multitasking cost is the price we pay for having this wonderfully generative ability to sort of do almost anything we can conceive of, right, at some level. And is that unique to humans then? Well, you know, it's hard to get, anytime you get in a debate about is this, like, uniquely

human, someone can come up with an example, right? I think the, I do think it's, it's, no other species can do this on the scale that humans can do. I certainly think that there are, the components you need, like cognitive control, and on, on the one hand, and another is the ability to engage in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in counterfactual and detailed future thought. You have to be able to conceive of that future where you're building that spider web or what have you.

There are versions of that in lots of species, and they rely on the same mechanisms in the brain in those species as well. It's just not at the same scale that humans have them and can do these things. And so to some degree, it is unique. Another unique thing is that humans have language, and humans, and we are able to communicate,

we don't just have goals, we can communicate our goals to other people, right, and through cultural transmission, through language and other forms of that, and that allows us, that expands the range of things we can do, which then, of course, we can leverage because we have this control system that allows us to assemble the actions you need to do it.

And so those things combine, I think, to produce the scale, which, you know, human, this kind of human intelligence is very unique. And it's something that we haven't also, by we've been able to reproduce artificially. There's no current artificial intelligence that rivals that aspect of human behavior, of our degenerative aspect of human behavior.

So at the moment, AI is kind of working like the spider, just following the rules that we've given it. Exactly. I mean, I think there, you know, AIs are able to specialize in like playing Go or playing chess and things like that, and they will beat human players on those games. But they aren't very robust to small changes in the environment. If you change aspects of that game of chess or Go, you change the rules,

that AI is not going to have a hard time. With the human player, you can say, you know what, today we're going to do this, we're going to add this a new crazy rule to this game, and they'll be able to accommodate it and do it immediately. Not to mention the fact that that human. and player will also be able to go and have like a brunch with their friends and, you know, get on Zoom and talk to people and do, you know, a seemingly endless number of other tasks really well, too, which that AI could never do.

So is this something that we can do from the moment we're born or from the moment we're able to speak or at what point to kind of humans develop this system of control? Well, it's definitely the case that our capacity for control undergoes development over the course of our lives. So I think it's, you know, we see that children, you know, from up, you know, there's a development and control and the capacity for control that grows over the course of early childhood and into early adolescence and then kind of a refinement period over, over the adolescent years to reach sort of mature adult level. So it's definitely dynamic. I do think, though, it's important. Sometimes there is a misconception, however, there

confusions, however, that people think there is no control, like kids can't control themselves at all, or there's no cognitive control among children. And that's not really the case. And I should point out that the prefrontal cortex, which is the part of the brand I mentioned earlier, that is important for control, you know, also shows this prolonged developmental time course. So it reaches, you know, it's kind of mature stability at, you know, much, much later in life, close, you know, in the mid-teens to 20s. So it means. So it means. is that time course. But again, you shouldn't make the mistake saying, like, thinking that the frontal lobe is, like, sort of just not doing anything until it comes online, suddenly at an adult and we can

control ourselves. I mean, you can look, for instance, you know, in a case of my kids actually, whereas when they went to in-person school, their school had an in-person thing, they had to learn a whole bunch of new protocols about mask wearing and like sitting at the right distances and the way you can, you know, walk in the hallways in the school and so forth. And they were able to do that, right? And again, that's the only reason you can do. do that. You can take this arbitrary rule that you were given. It's not arbitrary in the sense there's a reason you do it, but it's a new rule, right, that is you have to implement and do that is because you have a control system. So what is changing over childhood, though, is that the capacity

for control is growing because through experience with the world, our brain learns the policies it needs in order to coordinate all of its systems to be able to draw those links between what we know and how we behave. And that takes data. It takes a lot of living in the world for the brain in order to understand what to do it. So in other words, the brain is, so control is developing, not sort of, you know, in spite of the environment around it, but rather because of the environment around it. And that's a really important aspect of the, of when we think about sort of what important for education and for the environment of children with their control system in mind, I think that the fact that it's a driving force for how we learn to control ourselves, it's very

important. And does it keep kind of going up as we get more data? So as we age, does it continue or do we at some point in our aging near the end of our life? What happens to our cognitive control then? Well, so, yeah, in, you know, it pretty much the control stabilizes roughly by, you know, by the time we're in our 20s to early 20s, but it continues to change over the course of our lives. Though for the most part, what we see is that our capacity for control starts to decline as we get older. And in fact, it declines sufficiently in very old age that for many people, they end up, you know, losing independence because they aren't able to sort of carry out the kinds of tasks you need for everyday life. due to the loss of control, even apart from other physical and financial reasons why independence,

older adults lose independence. And so I think it's a, it's actually a topic of a lot of interest as we have a growing aging population to try to understand how we can maybe help or aid that or intervene to allow adults to maintain of independence for longer. There's also a question of why different individuals show different time courses of those changes as well over time. So some people seem to have, so as much as control declines as we get older, and it actually declines about pretty linearly from about age actually 30 or 35, unfortunately, but we don't really start to notice it until much later in life, right? It's a slow decline.

But you see there's a much steeper change in the 70s and 80s, primarily. And yet, that's sort of on average, right? There's a wide individual variability in that with some people who show more and some people show less. And one thing that's interesting is that older adults, in addition to showing this general decline, they also, though, lean on control for a lot of their kind of compensation for other things that are happening in their world. It's actually a source also to some degree of strength as we age.

For instance, by planning and structuring their environment, older adults and through control systems, older adults are able to better cope with some of the changes that they experience in their lives. And so one important question people have is why is it that some people seem to show this, and there's not really a good answer right now, but seem to show that they're sort of resilient to these changes, right?

And they can lean on that control system for longer, right, relative to other people. And that's actually a major area of research right now, because obviously if we had an answer to that, we might be able to help people, you know, address these issues as they go. But I should say that one reason why, if we come back to the point about development,

why control does show these changes we get older. It could be because of changes that happen in the brain. There's definitely our changes in these systems, including their frontal lobe, that make them less able to carry out their function as we get older, even in healthy aging. However, it's also the case that if you think about early development as being us sort of collecting data,

trying to optimize our control system, we're basically using that, first 10 to 20 years of our lives as a way of sort of setting up a model for how the rest of our lives are going to go, like what the world is going to be like to control ourselves. And you can just imagine that as given the sort of the entropy of our, of the world, right, that the world becomes less and less and less and less like the world of our childhood as we get older. And so the applicability of that library of control policies that we've built becomes less and less too. So it puts demands more and more on our control system as we age.

And that's part of why it's harder to engage in that kind of control. And are there certain kind of illnesses, diseases that can affect this system? There definitely are. I think, as I mentioned earlier, I mean, why it's actually, there's involvement of cognitive control or executive function, as a neuropsychologist would call it, in most major psychiatric and neurological diseases and disorders. it gets affected in some way. And I think that speaks to the fact that it's sort of not one, you know, single system, like, you know, part of the brain or something. Rather, it's emergent from the interactions of lots of different systems in which any one of which, right, if it gets affected, will generally affect our, you know, control. And so one of the major research initiatives right now, particularly when looking at mental health, is to try to ask, what are the underlying

computational components, what are the underlying parts of this system, right? That, can we kind of identify certain functions? And for one example, I talked about a lot in the book is, for instance, the notion of a memory gate, right? So that function, right, would have a lot of different symptoms that would arise from it. And one thing we could do in mental health is try to redefine. in a transdiagnostic way, right? What's happening if we understood, you know,

across different types of patients, and even create new classes within certain types of patients if we knew what the underlying cause was, right, in the control system. So there's a big effort to try to understand things like cognitive control at that level, that functional level, that we can better both assess and treat patients. You mentioned memory.

So how is kind of memory involved in this process? I mean, I sort of didn't even think that we'd have to remember things in order to be able to do them. But of course we do. Yeah. So memory and actually specifically working memory, which is kind of our short term, you know, what we're holding in mind right now in the sort of capture of our consciousness at this moment is actually really crucial for control. So we go back to an example we talked about earlier, which was the car,

the phone buzzing in your car. So if you're driving and your phone buzzes, you're going to have that urge because of that strong association to check your phone. But if you know anything about the statistics on distracted driving, it's a very dangerous thing to try to text while you drive. And so it's something you shouldn't do.

So even though the more common thing to do, when your phone buzzes is to check it, in this environment, driving, you need to not do that. You need to do something else. Maybe pay attention to the road instead or I don't know what. Try to come up with some distracting thoughts. Who knows?

But you need to do something, anything but check your phone. And in order to do that, what you need to do is hold in your memory, in your working memory, the state you're in, the context you're in right now. And the context you're in is driving. All right. And that is something that, you know, it could be available through the senses in the case of the driving example. But it's not always. Sometimes we're in situations where the context we're in, right, is, was something that we saw earlier, right? For instance, someone told us, you know, when you're in this room, so-and-so is busy.

Don't go and interrupt them. Go talk to these other people, right? You have to kind of hold that in mind, right, in order to guide your behavior. No one's going to keep telling you that, right, as you go around or else you're going to commit a party foul. So in the case of the car, your brain has to hold that important contextual information that you're driving somewhere. It's held in your working memory. And then when that phone buzzes, you need to be able to use that information to pick a different action. And that's the essence of control.

And doing that requires control over that working memory. What's the information that's important to hold right now? So the fact that you're driving is important to hold in memory, and maybe not the dog, the cute dog you saw on the side of the road or something as you were driving, right? So you have to make a decision about what goes in memory, and you also have to make a decision about when that information should be used as a control signal. And in the case of the phone buzzing, actually, at the moment, of course,

when the phone buzzes and you have this urge to answer it, that's when you also need to enact that control. And if you miss those, if you miss those moments, If you fail to update memory with the right information, or if you fail to, you know, act on the information at the right moment, right, from memory, that's where we make errors. That's where we have slips of action that we all commit, right?

But just hopefully not too routinely. But things like, you know, missing your, you're driving on the way to your friend's house and your, you know, but the first three quarters of the way is the same as you go to your office. You end up at your office without realizing, you know, before you always happened. You didn't check at the right moment, right? You didn't, even though you're holding your task, your goal in mind, you didn't actually use that in order to guide your behavior at the right moment.

So you missed that check. And so both kinds of, so the ability to control memory is really important. And the metaphor we use for that is a gate on memory. It's basically when the gate is open, we can update memory, we can allow information that's in memory to influence what we're doing. And when the gate is closed, we can keep irrelevant things out of our memory and we also kind of hold on to stuff

and we don't use it at the wrong moment to try to drive our behavior. But can these things be wrong? Can they get things wrong? Oh, surely we do. I mean, I think that's part of what you're, you know, what your brain is trying to do. And this is the mechanisms in the brain that actually enact these gates.

At least, one, the theory that I describe in the book, the framework I describe in the book, is that they're enacted by interactions between the cortex, particularly the prefrontal cortex, which is maintaining this information, and a set of structures called the basal ganglia, that together enact this gate in there by interacting with one another. And the basal ganglia is heavily affected by a neurotransmitter called dopamine, which we know is related to things like predictions of future positive outcomes and so forth. And why this is potentially important is it's a way for the brain to learn, to effectively predict what information is useful to hold in memory.

You can learn through these dynamics, oh, this is something important to hold in memory. So it's trying to make a prediction about this being a valuable thing to hold in mind or make a prediction about this is something that I should allow to influence my behavior. Now, that prediction, if that prediction is wrong, well, you're going to end up with a slip or a problem. But hopefully the brain can learn from that so that the next time that doesn't happen. And in fact, it's that kind of learning that we think is happening throughout that early childhood period, too, where you're starting to lay down better and better and better policies, better predictions about what to, what, if given this type of context, what should I be holding in memory, and when should I let it act? And so whenever we're trying to kind of figure out a new task,

we're doing something for the first time, we're slow at it, right? Because we're trying to work out all those dynamics. We're trying to figure out the right dynamics of when to update memory and how to move it around. And so that's really at the heart of sort of efficient human performance. And so can we use this understanding to get better ourselves? Can we use it to kind of get things done faster or more effective?

I think so. I mean, to some degree, I think recognizing how the system does this allows us to, one way it helps us, I should say, I always forget to mention this, but I think it's important to me, at least. We're a little bit more forgiving of ourselves in terms of like how we behave. Once you sort of understand these systems, you sort of see why, you know, why was it so hard for me to do that, you know, that example of that case of multitasking and so forth? Well, there's a good reason for that to some degree. But I think more practically, one thing you can do is you can structure your environment to help age your control system to some degree. And, you know, I think, you know, one example is multitasking. There's no cure for multitasking.

There's not, you know, the only way to not have a multitasking cost is just don't multitask, right? But if you have to, many of that, sometimes you can't avoid it, right? then there are things you can try to do. Like, for example, trying to find particular settings, be they a place or a time of day, you know, anything you can think of it, even a type of music, right, that you use, that you associate with particular kinds of tasks

can help you, right, get back, maintain state on those tasks, right? And hold yourself in those relative to other ones. And the better you separate, the environment separates multiple tasks, the less you're going to have sort of cross-talk interference between them potentially. Again, it's not a cure for this, right, but it can certainly help. Other examples, you can structure your environment to do those kind of reminding, so you don't have to remind yourself. Psychologists call this forcing functions. These are, you know, if this would be,

for instance, I put my keys on the door. So now these days, I hang my mask on the door, so I don't forget it as I'm leaving the house, right, to make sure that, you know, and so I can't turn that door knob unless I've got that mask in my hand. That way, I don't have to use the context of, now I'm living through this, you know, pandemic, and therefore, if I'm going to go to a place where I'm going to be indoors, I need to wear, or I'm going to be around other people, I need to bring a mask with me. So you can, again, structure an environment to kind of help your control system. And in fact, looked at that way, it's interesting because you're using your control system to aid to help itself. Are you using your control system to set up plans, right, to structure your

world to help itself. But the more you know then about it, right, that it's easier to kind of come up with those strategies that work for you. But these are some kind of very short-term goals? Is there anything that can help us with longer-term goals? Yeah, that's a great question. The, I mean, the first thing I think I should, I should point out is there's a bit of a distinction between a very long-term goal and a short-term goal from, you know, in terms of the problem involved. So, there are two issues. So one is that you have, as you're doing a task in time, you're, you have to do something, the brain has to in some way abstract over time. It's called temporal abstraction. So you have to think of that same task has to exist in the time moving forward, right? And you're

sort of collapsing across all the differences in time, and you're imagining that task. So for short-term goals, that's very realistic. I can be making coffee. You can characterize me as making coffee, for some reasonably, hopefully short period of time where I'm engaged in that task. But if you're thinking about like preparing to go to college or to university, that's a very long time frame, right? And it's very unlikely that you would characterize everything you're doing over the whole of your early part of your life as going to, you know, getting ready for, to go to the university. Right. And so the kinds of mechanisms you need are going to be different between those two situations. The second big difference is that the bigger goals are typically more

open-ended. In other words, you're not quite, you can't trace the whole path, right? You can't, of what are the different actions I need to take that get me all the way from the day I went into my first classroom as a child, all the way to the day I walked into my first classroom at the university, right? It's just impossible. That would be intractable. And so in that case, you can, again, again, you're going to probably have a series of reassessments over time, of where am I with respect to that broader goal, and then how can I plan accordingly? And I should say that with patients that suffer problems with executive function or cognitive control, it's those open-ended problems that cause the biggest challenge for those patients. That's where you'll typically see them. Some of them will be fine at simple tasks.

They won't have an issue at all. It's with those complex open-ended problems where they run into issues. So now what kinds of, can I offer any tips in terms of how to do better? That's hard to say. There's not a really a clear recommendation I could make that's supported by data, other than to say that I think we recognize that these open-ended problems are hard, and they require lots of reassessments. So one thing that's helpful is to find ways of doing that monitoring of those checks,

right with respect to that's why probably many people like to emphasize things like personal development plans and other kinds of goal setting because it's a way to make explicit right where when you when you have to do that replanting step over and over again it makes very explicit sort of where you are and that's probably a good strategy for the system to take but yeah it's it's you're asking a great question if we really understood like the full process that got us to university then um that we'd be much further along than we aren't today. But all of these things we've talked about are kind of individual actions.

So how does this help humanity as a whole solve problems together? Well, that, so this was at the, is a good question, because I think it addresses a really, really deep point about why we study things like cognitive control. I think, I think if you think about, you know, a lot of the problems we face as a, as a, the brain faces, right, the challenges that it faces in order to be a general, engage in general action, right, as a control system, are going to be faced by any system that wants to do general action, including things like societies.

So I give the example in the book of climate change, which is something, a crisis that we're facing as a species, as a world, actually, not just us, right? The whole world's facing this. And so one question is, what do we do about it? And it's an interesting problem because a lot of the focus, at least in the U.S., has been on people who are sort of don't accept the science behind climate change and deny either human involvement or that it's happening at all. And that's surely a problem, and it's an obstacle to any kind of progress. But there's another question, which is also of interest to activists in this area, is why is it that there are actually a large number of people who do.

do believe in climate change, right, who accept the science, but yet don't seem to be enacting any changes in their own behavior as a result of that knowledge, right? So why would that happen? And what's interesting about it is it's a case at the level of the society of this knowledge action dissociation that I mentioned earlier, right? The idea that it's not enough to just have a goal, right? You need processes that can assemble the right actions to take and that will will assemble the right actions to take to do it. And so I think studying something like cognitive control, it allows us to understand first a little more about why is it that people might have goals

that they don't actually follow through on that they aren't able to enact at the individual level. And it also raises these dilemmas that the brain faces that are being faced by a society too. Like one example is the so-called stability flexibility dilemma, right? So things that you do to build stability into a system of control, right, make it harder to be flexible when you need to be, and vice versa. If you're too flexible, it's also hard to be sustained. And so those kinds of dilemmas face the society as well. And I think a better understanding that might help us understand how we can do things like enact

the changes we want, as an example, combating climate change. And talking of changes in context, obviously, this year for most of us the last year has been very, very different. Do you think that there's anything that you've seen happening that will have a lasting impact on the way we act or the way we process? Well, that's a fantastic question. I think I do think that we have, there are going to be some changes in terms of,

we understand more about, a little bit more about how we, take information that is important at a societal level, right, and how we can change sort of as a group in response to it. I actually think it's, I can't think of a crisis that was as worldwide as this that caused as massive behavior change as we saw. I mean, it was within weeks, you know, large, you know, people, the whole societies are changing the way we work, the way we get food, the way we do everything. we socialize. And so I think we've learned a lot both about our capacity of that,

but also how fatiguing it is and how challenging it is to keep track of and to do. And I think one thing that you're seeing is things like, they call it pandemic fatigue where compliance rate, compliance goes down over time. And it's raised interesting new questions about why that is, right? What's the, you know, why do we see changes in, in compliance, again, for something we know we should be doing, but yet people seem like just less willing to do it,

just put in the mental energy to do it. And it's, I think heavily, it's related to a lot of different causes, obviously, but one of the interesting ones from my perspective is the change in the way that mental effort, mental investment affects our ability to do things that we know are good for us to some degree, which is, I think, a problem that transcends the pandemic. In terms of, like, will we, I think, change the way we behave, work, and at least speaking as a scientist, do science, I think it's broadened us in a lot of ways.

I think it's made much more, because we've built into our behaviors now, the ability to talk to other people over Zoom really regularly or whatever your favorite medium is. And I think it's made, it's sort of, I'm seeing much more. we're common now that people are like, oh, you know, we're having a lab meeting on this topic. We thought you might want to, if you're available at this time, would you like to drop in?

You know, I think we've, since we've now dealt with all the barriers on that, I can see that easily continuing into the future, which will connect us a lot more in certain ways. I think could be positive. That was David Better, revealing why we can't multitask, how our brains turn thoughts into actions, and how life and lockdown might have changed our minds and our behavior. For more stories of science, news, and research, pick up the latest issue of BBC Science Focus magazine or head to ScienceFocus.com. If you've enjoyed this episode of the Science Focus

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