Think Smart: A Neuroscientist's Prescription for Improving Your Brain's Performance (22 page)

Another study on worker productivity found that 28 percent of an office worker’s day was spent dealing with interruptions and the resultant recovery time needed to redirect attention to the main tasks. According to RescueTime, a company that analyzes computer use in the workplace, the typical computer-based information worker checks e-mail fifty times a day and sends or receives seventy-seven instant messages. Many of these are unnecessary, distracting, and disruptive of sustained attention. The resulting losses in productivity are estimated to be as high as $650 billion a year. So urgent has this matter become that Microsoft, Intel, Google, and IBM, among others, formed in the summer of 2008 the nonprofit Information Overload Research Group, aimed at coming up with solutions.

Third, and most important, multitasking creates stress. Think about the last time you tried to monitor a basketball game on television while talking to a friend on the telephone. Such a situation was stressful because you were recruiting the same brain areas to perform two competing tasks. Your brain was in conflict with itself: you were trying to watch and listen to the game while also trying to listen to your friend’s remarks. To reduce the stress of the situation, you had several alternatives. You could have recorded the basketball game to watch later or told your friend that you would call her back. As a less efficient alternative, you could have turned off the sound and simply watched the action while continuing your conversation. If you had done that, you would have been slightly less distracted because the language centers for talking on the phone and the visual processing areas for watching the game call upon different brain resources.

As we age, we get worse at multitasking. In one of Arthur Kramer’s studies on multitasking and age, he monitored the performances of both young and old drivers as they took part in a simulated driving test while carrying on a conversation. He found that while all of the participants tended to miss unimportant variations on the simulator, older drivers often failed to notice and remain attentive to important variations of the simulated scene that could lead to an accident.

In order to avoid stress-associated multitasking, whatever your age, learn to rivet your attention on what you are doing at the moment. This holds true both at work and at leisure. “Practice only as long as you can concentrate,” teaches famous PGA golf coach Jim McLean, author of
The Eight-Step Swing,
one of the most popular golf instruction books ever published. “Stop if you lose focus. Short, focused practice sessions are the most productive.” Golf legend Ben Hogan advocated a similar approach. “Adopt the habit of concentrating to the exclusion of everything else while you are at the practice tee and you will find that you are automatically following the same routine while playing a round in competition.”

No doubt you’ve noticed that multitasking shares features with working memory. But multitasking differs from exercising your working memory in several important ways:

Multitasking usually involves time urgency: stressful attempts to “save time” by doing two or more things simultaneously. As mentioned, this is doomed to failure; it’s better to complete one activity before starting another. Working memory isn’t about saving time but improving performance by holding online several independent lines of thought—as with a musician practicing the art of counterpoint. Novelists routinely exercise their working memory by skillfully blending dialogue, narrative, character, mood, and writing style in order to bring everything into balance. While describing the action of a character, for instance, the novelist must retain in working memory all of the things he has written earlier about her.

From the brain point of view, multitasking is inefficient at best. When you’re multitasking, you’re going to make more mistakes, mistakes that can be costly and potentially dangerous. At the very least, you’re going to feel increasingly stressed and harassed if you establish the multitasking habit. As an antidote, slow down, take a few deep breaths, select which of competing tasks is most important and do that one first (prioritize), and then finish that task before moving on to something else.

When he was eighty years old the concert pianist Arthur Rubinstein was asked in a television interview how he managed to retain his level of expert playing. He responded that he played fewer selections, practiced them more frequently, and played the slower segments even more slowly than usual in order to make the ensuing fast segments seem even faster.

The novelist Harriet Doerr described a similar acceptance and compensation for age-imposed limitations in an interview I conducted with her five years before her death at age ninety-two. Doerr, who didn’t start serious writing until she was sixty-five, won the National Book Award in 1984 at age seventy-three for her novel
Stones for Ibarra.
When I asked about the effect on her writing career caused by a severe late-life-onset visual handicap (macular degeneration), she responded:

“Adjusting to my loss of vision has been hard, but I have enjoyed some secondary benefits. When you can’t see, you think a lot more. The best exercise of my imagination is sometimes lying in bed a few moments in the morning in the silent house and letting things like a difficult sentence or the ending of a story simply float into the mind. I’ve also learned to employ various methods of substitution for my visual handicap, such as my recent switch to a word processor.”

Rubinstein and Doerr are good examples of the three-part strategy for overcoming some of the limitations imposed by age that were first suggested by the late Paul Baltes, the main investigator for the Berlin Aging Study: selective optimization with compensation (SOC).

Selection:
Acknowledging rather than denying an area of weakness (Rubenstein’s decision to concentrate on fewer pieces; Doerr’s acceptance of her visual limitations).

Optimization:
Working harder to overcome limitations (Rubinstein’s increase in his hours of practice; Doerr’s early-morning efforts to think “a lot more” about her stories).

Compensation:
Using new ways to counteract decline (Rubinstein’s employment of a kind of impression management whereby fast passages seem faster than they actually are because they are preceded by exaggeratedly slow passages; Doerr’s shift from writing by hand to using a computer).

While Bates’s SOC strategy theory can be applied by anyone over forty years of age, it’s especially helpful for those over fifty-five. If you’re fifty-five or older, the odds are that you are experiencing limitations in your speed of information processing and your working memory. What’s more, these functions will continue to decline as you move into your sixties and beyond.

The good news is that the deterioration isn’t the same for everyone—an indicator that the brain ages at different rates and that a general decline isn’t an inevitable result of aging. That’s why it makes sense to remain positive and learn to work with the age-associated changes that accompany longevity.

One thing we do know for certain: A healthy brain is a prerequisite for success, even survival, during our mature years. Therefore it’s important to understand how it differs from the brains of young to middle-age adults.

During my brain lectures I’m often asked if our IQ lessens as we get older. The answer depends on which of the two kinds of intelligence one is referring to. The first,
fluid intelligence,
can be thought of in computer terms as the hardware of the brain that determines the sheer speed and accuracy of information processing; it includes any activity involving the registration and use of new information. When we try to learn a new language or accommodate to new demands at work, we’re calling upon our fluid intelligence. Reaction time, attention, concentration, and working memory are all components of fluid intelligence—and they all decrease in efficiency as we age. This age-associated falloff in fluid intelligence is believed to result from a loss of neurons in the subcortical nuclei—the juice machines—especially the nucleus basalis, which manufactures and distributes the neurotransmitter acetylcholine. It’s the decrease in acetylcholine and other neurotransmitters that leads to a decrease in enthusiasm and general “get up and go” energy. It also leads to distraction and difficulty “sticking to” a project or line of thought.

Crystallized intelligence (CI),
in contrast, doesn’t lessen with aging. Sometimes referred to as the “software” of the brain, it can be compared to the computer programs that we install on our PC over the years. These vary according to cultural rather than biological factors: where we grew up, our reading and writing abilities, our language, the schools we attended, our educational attainments, and professional skills. CI also includes one’s mastery of emotional and social skills. All of these components of CI will vary from person to person, depending on life experiences. But as with Arthur Rubinstein’s piano virtuosity and Harriet Doerr’s writing genius, performance based on CI will remain largely unaffected in most people as they age (assuming they are free of brain disease).

In short, maturity induces a kind of standoff within the brain. The impairment of fluid intelligence makes it difficult for an older person to compete with someone younger on tests involving the rapid retrieval of information—one of the reasons people older than fifty-five rarely appear on
Jeopardy!
But when rapidity of response isn’t required, the older brain is often even more proficient in some areas than its younger counterpart.

Think for a moment about what you’re usually looking for when you seek help with a complicated professional or personal problem. It usually isn’t quick analysis (the product of fluid intelligence); truly challenging problems usually aren’t quickly solved. Instead, you’re looking for someone possessing what Paul Baltes defines as wisdom: “a state of knowledge about the human condition, about how it comes about, which factors shape it, how one deals with difficult problems, and how one organizes one’s life in such a manner that when we are old, we judge it to be meaningful.”

Because they have lived long lives, older people have had the opportunity to see and learn more. As a result, they are in a position to synthesize knowledge in many different areas and provide it to others in the form of wisdom. At the moment, scientists lack an objective measure of wisdom. Nor is psychological testing very helpful here. A twenty-five-year-old may achieve impressive scores on tests of memory, fluid intelligence, and general mental performance; yet compared with an older, more experienced person, the twenty-five-year-old would probably make a less capable judge, surgeon, or airline pilot—three professions requiring years of experience before a person reaches the highest level of achievement.

“Experience,” “maturity,” and “judgment” are among the terms frequently employed in industry, science, and the arts to describe the wisdom-based performance of the mature worker. Another synonym is “expertise,” consistently superior performance in a specialized area. Examples include retained levels of expertise over the life span of professional musicians, airline pilots, surgeons, and trial attorneys. In most instances, this expertise is restricted to their area of proficiency. An older concert pianist, for instance, shows the same age-related slowdown in brain processing as other people of the same age do. Only musical ability remains largely unaffected. (Notice that I’ve slyly introduced the qualifier “largely” in the previous sentence because, as with the methods described by Arthur Rubinstein, the aging pianist often compensates for age-related declines in brain function by resorting to various “tricks” that are noticeable only to other musicians and critics. Indeed, the key to retained performance and successful brain aging is to learn and practice such “tricks.”)

As an example, consider transcription typists. Despite a general slowdown in reaction time and speed of hand responsiveness, a skilled older typist’s performance may be comparable to that of a typist twenty or thirty years younger. How do they do it?

In a classic 1984 study, the renowned psychologist Timothy Salthouse tested the reaction time and typing skills of typists of all ages. He discovered, as anticipated, that the general reaction times of older typists were generally slower than those of their younger counterparts. Yet they typed just as fast. Puzzled at this unexpected discrepancy, Salthouse considered two possibilities. Perhaps the older typists had been even faster at an earlier period in life and had simply slowed down. Or maybe the older typists were using a different strategy.

In order to decide which explanation was more plausible, Salthouse retested his subjects, but this time he imposed a crucial limitation based on an elementary principle about typing. The superior speed of expert typists is related to how far they can look ahead in the text beyond the word they are currently typing. As their skill level increases, expert typists prepare for upcoming keystrokes by scanning ahead in the text and anticipating future key strokes with a premonitory moving of the relevant fingers toward the required location on the keyboard.

When Salthouse restricted the typists from looking ahead, the younger typists’ speed remained about the same, while the older typists’ speed decreased dramatically. A similar look-ahead strategy holds for older pianists when they sight-read pieces of music.

As a result of changes in technique, older, more experienced architects, graphic designers, and others whose work involves the exercise of spatial ability perform comparably to younger workers. Older expert pilots perform as well as younger pilots on decision-making challenges because their extensive experience and knowledge enable them to quickly home in on the most critical information needed to solve the problem. Another compensatory strategy for older pilots is to fly fewer but longer routes, thus reducing the number of takeoffs and landings, which contribute to both stress and workload.