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Captivating Minds: The Science of Storytelling and Attention in a Distracted World with John Medina
348 Plays16 days ago
I’ve been super excited for this episode of the podcast for a while! This week, I speak with John Medina, author of one of my favorite books on the brain—Brain Rules! John and I talk about brain science generally and also dive into some specific aspects that are particularly important to the work of any data communicator: the importance of capturing and maintaining audience attention during presentations, emotional engagement as a way to counteract boredom and stress, and how stories can be a powerful tool for enhancing audience connection and retention. You’ll learn how the brain prioritizes meaning over details, driven by survival instincts, and how storytelling effectively taps into these instincts by involving emotional elements.
Keywords: data, data visualization, BrainRules, AudienceAttention, PresentationSkills, 10MinuteRule, EmotionalEngagement, StorytellingPower, NarrativeConnection, SurvivalInstincts, MikeGonzagaResearch, EpisodicMemory, DataVisualization, ScientificPresentations, RecallImprovement, SkepticismInScience, TheoryOfMind, MultitaskingMyth, LearningEfficiency, TechnologyDistractions, VisualMemory, AugmentedRealityEducation, VirtualRealityEducation, MentalHealthAwareness, ClimateChangeImpact, EconomicStress, PsychiatricDisorders, StressManagement
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Transcript
Introduction and Excitement
00:00:00
Speaker
Hello, John, it is a pleasure to meet you. Thanks for coming on the show. Well, thanks for the invitation, John. Pleasure to meet you, too. I am
Enthusiasm for 'Brain Rules'
00:00:07
Speaker
very excited. Brain Rules sits in a prime spot. I think I actually have three copies of it. I have a softback back there, a hardback over there, and I actually have an e-book version. I don't know why I have so many copies of it, but yeah I've never coalesced my notes, which is a real problem. So excited to have you on the show.
Brain Rule #4 and the 10-minute Rule
00:00:23
Speaker
um I want to start like right off the bat in brain rule number four so folks haven't read the book they're gonna have to now um in brain and number four you talk about grabbing people's attention in a presentation you can talk about like 10 minutes is sort of like the magic number and to regain people's attention and restart that clock
00:00:44
Speaker
You know, use something emotional, something relevant. So, so a kind of two, two part question here.
Significance of the 10-minute Rule
00:00:49
Speaker
Okay. Why is 10 minutes like this magical number? yeah And what do you say to folks, particularly scientists, researchers, professors about using emotional content when I'm guessing many of them are like, that's not serious. That's not, you know, that's not scientific. So yeah. So, but so I'll just let you spin on that. Those are my two big ones. ah Okay. Why?
Research on Attention Span
00:01:11
Speaker
Let's do the first one first. Why? Well, that's gonna be easy, John. We have no idea.
00:01:20
Speaker
OK, it was a good one. All right. No idea what's special about 10 minutes. The number appears to be stable, interestingly enough. It was first shown in an empirical form by a guy named Bill Makichia at the University of Michigan. And he published in 1999. And he called it the 10-minute rule. If you don't do something dramatic at about 9 minutes and 59 seconds, you're going to lose your audience. That was confirmed again many years later in 2018.
00:01:47
Speaker
in a paper published in arguably the world's most prestigious scientific journal, Nature, where it's still about, this is Bob Euer's stuff, it's still about 10 minutes. In fact, it's 11 minutes, 32 seconds, I think is what he had. Or you begin to watch in with ah tools that are much more sophisticated to show the same thing, that after about 10 minutes, of your audience gets bored and it gets disengaged. And he put enough numbers underneath it that nature ended up publishing it. Now, the world of of information transfer in 1999
00:02:18
Speaker
was very different than the world of information transfer in 2018. So it surprised me like a son of a gun that 2018 that Bob you're still it's still around there. So we have no idea why it's 10 minutes. But we can't say that it's fairly stable. I don't know how stable it would be in the world of tick tock because even the world of information transfer in 2018 ain't the same world that it is in 2024. But there you have Okay, so to the first question, we don't know. okay That's a real long way to say it.
Methods for Studying Attention
00:02:49
Speaker
So real quick, when they do those studies, yeah are they putting people in front of um MRI machines and and having them watch something? No, in general, it's usually either self-report or in some cases they're looking at eye tracking to see where their eyes are are moving if they're moving at all. um There have been, I've seen not published, but certainly presented in papers, ah cortisol levels. When people get bored, they get stressed.
00:03:11
Speaker
And so you're starting to look at cortisol levels beginning, cortisol is a stress hormone, and the and those tend to go up. And those all tend to collapse around the 10 minute mark. So it's it's safe to say that you're beginning to lose somebody's attention at 10 minutes if you don't do something drastic.
Emotional Stimuli and Engagement
00:03:27
Speaker
So if something drastic is this is the part of your second question, I think, yeah yeah what do you have to do at 10 minutes to get people's attention?
00:03:36
Speaker
And it's fascinating that you should say it because I've run into it too. um I call them emotionally competent stimulus. You have to provide, or stimuli, ECSs. You have to provide an emotionally competent stimuli at the nine minute and 59 second mark, or you've got a minute and 30 second grace period before you they permanently check out from you.
00:03:57
Speaker
So to the point of asking the question, my research interests are the genetics of psychiatric disorders. And a lot of those are disorders of emotional regulation. So it's not a foreign field at all in the world of neurosciences
Role of Emotions in Memory
00:04:11
Speaker
to say the word emotions, except to say the following. you If you push me and ask me, hey, Medina, what is an emotion? I will answer, I have no idea.
00:04:22
Speaker
We don't know what they are. There's a lot of disagreement about how many there are and what they... yeah Even though we don't know what they are, we do know what they do. One of the things that emotions do is if they track very closely with the attentional systems of the brain, something in vision research that used to be called the attentional spotlight. You can sort of think of emotions like post-it notes. If you think you see a stimulus and it's going to incite an emotion in you, what's happened is that you have actually put a post-it note on there so that you pay attention to it.
00:04:52
Speaker
in ah in subjugation to other inputs that might also be available. And not only do you put a post-it note on it immediately and and and then lock your attention onto it, you also put a post-it note on it so that you can save it for further processing. Because one of the things that emotions are going to give you is a memory.
00:05:10
Speaker
a strong memory that is going to be immediately available to you. And so if you think about it for a second, the idea of being able to get somebody's attention is also going to change their recall and retrieval rates. Well, you've got something that could be potentially very relevant in a classroom experience. For God's sakes, you've got to keep their attention. The mantra is people don't pay attention to boring things. And if the and if you're boring, they won't pay attention to you.
00:05:36
Speaker
So what do you use? What is your strategy in the classroom?
Emotionally Competent Stimuli in Presentations
00:05:44
Speaker
Well, we should probably talk about what an emotionally competent stimulus is. okay yeah And then I'll show you how it is that we use it in the classroom. Actually, I can answer that second question first. I put it every 10 minutes, bottom line. Every 10 minutes, they get an emotionally competent stimulus. And I'll tell you what I do. I won a couple of of teaching awards for this, one national award, the ah but it's not because I did anything other than just pay attention to the attentional spotlight, if that makes sense.
00:06:09
Speaker
right so Write this across your heart. we're We're going to talk about what an emotion is. The human brain processes meaning before it processes detail. It wants the meaning of what's happening before it wants the detail. It wants to know if that saber-toothed cat's mouth is going to clamp down on your thigh before it wants to know the number of vertical lines in the saber-toothed tiger's mouth.
00:06:34
Speaker
Okay. Straight up. A lot of speakers, a lot of presenters, a lot of professors screw that up. They will put the detail first. And many times they already know the detail and that's what they're fascinated with. They don't want to do the 40,000 foot meaning of something because, you know, they found the meaning of this back when they were undergraduates and they've tended to poo-poo it and so they don't start with it. And the audience says, fine. Goodbye.
Darwinian Questions in Information Processing
00:06:59
Speaker
Right. Right.
00:07:01
Speaker
And then they sail off. So now the question you can ask is, what does meaning mean? When I say that you have to process meaning before detail, what does meaning mean? And there you can divide. And in the book, I have divided it roughly into six questions that the brain ah interrogates a piece of information that comes in once it's coming in, because it has to know whether it's going to process it or not.
00:07:22
Speaker
These are all strictly Darwinian principles, except in one case. The one case is actually pretty pretty interesting. There are six questions it asks, John. And then then then there's I'll add a seventh one that is probably the one ring that binds them all. okay certainly well Shall we go through them? Yeah, let's go through them. yeah Yeah, yeah, yeah. Number one, will it eat me?
00:07:46
Speaker
but fri good rule The brain is the world's most sophisticated survival organ. Its job isn't to learn in a classroom. Its job is to survive. And one of the first questions it asks is, is it a threat? If there's a mild threat, then it's going to pay attention. Here's how you can and introduce mild threat to the brain. Suppose John, you and I are talking, and then all of a sudden I raise the amplitude of my voice. And I assume a threatening posture. Look at that. It's a damaging finger I've just held up. See, I've known you for not even that long, but I can't, or I'm already, I don't know if I can take that as a threat, but i get you I get your point. yeah yeah What it is that the brain is going, I just need to pay attention to this. Now, if you're in a classroom that's going to know that you're not in a battlefield or you're not on the sides of the inguar and grow a crater, I mean, and know it's it's going to realize that, but still those mechanisms are in place. Will it eat me?
Survival Questions and Information Prioritization
00:08:36
Speaker
First question to ask. Second question.
00:08:40
Speaker
Can I eat it? and ah We pay tons of attention to energy resource. As anybody who's ever tried to project a commercial at nine o'clock in the evening in a football game, trying to get you to go to whatever venue of restaurant they're at, knows. There's a reason for that. the ah The brain is only roughly two, two and a half percent of your body weight, but it consumes 20% of all the energy you throw at your body.
00:09:09
Speaker
It is an unbelievable energy hog. It's so powerful, it is, that it's constantly asking the question, do I have an energy resource that's available to me? What can I look at? So will will it eat me? Can I eat it? are there Are questions number one or two? All right. Questions number three and four are also Darwinian and are the entire reason why the brain is interested in its survival. It wants to project its genes to the next generation. So the question number three is,
00:09:37
Speaker
Forgive me, I'll keep this family. as a fuck yeah Can I have sex with it?
00:09:49
Speaker
yeah and Question number four is related to it. Will it have sex with me? Is there enough of an opportunity to pass along my genes such that it will worthwhile be surviving to the next day? So there's lots of ways that you can get at that. ah Pleasurable dopamine related work, ah the things that are involved in, it's usually what's called the appetitive aspect of of sexual experience, which is the arousal. It's not necessarily the consumptive
00:10:20
Speaker
which is the part where you're actually doing the act. It's more interesting than the arousal. but what Can I have sex with me? Well, have sex with me is a great way to summarize those. Okay. Three and four. Okay. Questions number five and six, and then we'll get to the one ring. ah Questions number five and six to me are professionally the most interesting because there's no there's no a priori for these, John. the and Question number five is, have I seen it before?
00:10:46
Speaker
And question number six is, have I never seen it before? Is it unique? It turns out we are terrific pattern matchers. And we are constantly asking questions about pattern. Have I seen a good a good survival strategy for this? It has a Darwinian and and underpinning for sure. The red snake with the white stripe bit me yesterday. I almost died.
00:11:09
Speaker
If I see the same thing tomorrow, the same thing might happen. So if you see that same and ah same species of snake or even one that even looks sort of like it, your brain is going to absolutely remember that because it's going to try and survive to its next for its next meal.
00:11:25
Speaker
um right now Like I say, there's no a priority for this pattern matching. There's so many other cognitive gadgets that the brain could be using to process information. And pattern matching is only one of those. But it seems to have the best survival valence that's available to the brain as a whole. And so ah those teachers that are really, really good. It's one of the reasons why metaphor and analogy can work so well. Because what it's doing is that you're giving pattern matching to it. You're saying it's a lot like And then you're trying to give them something that they may be familiar with. But the idea is to explain something they're not familiar with. And what you're actually so circumscribing, John, is a delta. You're looking at a different thing in those two. And this goes, oh, yeah, it's pattern matching time. Give me my emotionally competent stimulus. So at the end of 10 minutes, you've got to answer one of those. You've got to address one of those questions. You just did.
00:12:15
Speaker
And the one ring that binds them all, that at the end of this, probably is the most powerful, the most spooky. And I'm going to argue probably the least well researched, which is weird given its importance. And that is, can I detect a narrative?
Storytelling in Presentations
00:12:33
Speaker
Do I detect a story?
00:12:36
Speaker
Do I detect something that is interactions that are occurring over time? And can I put a timestamp on it? um If the brain thinks that a story is happening, all kinds of cognitive gadgets light up. And there you can use your FMRI studies, non-invasive imaging to look at, ask questions about, is a story being developed? It's so well understood now. Mike Gitzagona isolated, and he's a researcher, isolated an area of the brain that he calls the interpreter. It's on the left side, it's left lateralized.
00:13:06
Speaker
And it's the area of the brain that marshals all kinds of other regions of the brain if it thinks that a story is going on. So if you if the brain detects a story, you might as well have given it a 280 volt shock. It's just a thing got it. i got It's the least understood of the of the six. But I do call it the one ring because it tends to bind everything else. We make most of our narratives out of those six questions. Will it eat hate will it i have sex a lot sex with me? Have I seen it before? I've never seen it before. But if it detects a narrative, it's there. so At the end of 10 minutes, you've got to give an emotionally competent stimulus. And for God's sakes, if you can turn it into a story, all the better. Now, how do you how do you think about story? I mean, I'm curious because within the data visualization world is all this talk about data and stories. And I've argued for a long time that, you know,
00:13:56
Speaker
Most of what we create are not stories. It's a chart that's, you know, it's an argument. This line goes up. This bar is tall. These other bars. So how in this framework, how do you, you, you mentioned time. Yes. Um, you know, is time the crucial element? Like what's it? Is it the sort of Freiberg pyramid of, you know, right you know, the, the code, like what how, how does.
00:14:18
Speaker
How does story like that concept of story fit in? You could probably take the Freiburg pyramid with a grain of salt. It was good in its day, but I am hopefully I'm a nice guy, but I'm a pretty grumpy scientist. And right now, once again, if you push me, I don't know how the brain works. I don't know what um an emotion is. And I'm about ready to say we have no idea. yeah right right yeah I'm so sorry, God. well it if you talking yeah and All my colleagues would say the same thing. I mean, i'm not i'm I'm nothing special. What it seems to be closest to, and where're when we're talking about data visualizing stories where a lot of that I've seen in presentations fall down, is that they don't take into account the extraordinary importance of the of the following.
00:14:59
Speaker
Most narratives that are detected that the brain understands is it an interaction of characters where an emotional response is trafficking between the two, and that response changes over time.
00:15:12
Speaker
OK. All right. So there is an almost like it's an episode. In fact, if you do push me and say, well, then don't be so grumpy, John. What can you say? Because we love storytelling. For sure. We absolutely love storytelling. The closest that comes to it is something that is super well described in the literature, John. And that is something called episodic memory.
00:15:33
Speaker
episodic memory is just what it sounds like. Hey, Gilligan, you're remembering all of it's an episode. It's an episode where there are major characters where there is an emotional emotional trafficking relational trafficking that is occurring between the two. And that emotional trafficking is changing over time. um okay If you can do that, you're probably familiar with made to stick and the Heath brothers at Stanford.
00:15:57
Speaker
they They have that canonical experiment where they ask the question. and They were trying to teach the kids how to do a one minute elevator presentation. And then they did, but they were they're good scientists, so they're measuring everything. 2.5 statistics per presentation were available.
00:16:15
Speaker
So you've got lots of, I guess you'd call it visual storytelling by numbers. yeah yeah like If they think that an arrow is a narrative, well, then welcome to nerd land, right? It's yeah yeah it's hard, but not a narrative. We have 2.5 statistics. Only about, I think it was 10% of their crew of that cohort, the one I'm thinking of, actually put a narrative in the formal way that I just described, where you actually are have an emotionally relevant,
00:16:42
Speaker
between main characters that's changing over time, even briefly. yeah um But then the next question was asked was in the next day, what's the retrieval? And the retrieval is amazing. Only about five, 10% of that possible, as I remember the the study, could remember anything if there was a statistic involved. But that number goes up to 62%.
00:17:04
Speaker
if there was a narrative involved. So whatever else narratives are in the brain, it's attached to the attentional states in such fashion that retrieval becomes much more competent if you allow a narrative to occur. So six questions in a narrative, the one ring binds them all because you can put into the narrative all any of those six questions and you'll be home free. Right. So now when you work with other clients, professors, scientists,
00:17:31
Speaker
yeah when you talk to them about telling stories.
Enhancing Engagement with Storytelling
00:17:35
Speaker
And I mean, I've run into this, I'm sure you've run into this where people say, oh, stories is that's, that's not real science. That's not real serious. Like how do you, what kind of stories do you, do you encourage them to tell? And how do they get over that hump of that stories aren't serious? Even though yeah I might even buy, your you know, they might buy your argument, they're important, but they're not serious. And so therefore I'm i'm not going to do that. Sure, sure. Yeah. And I'm i'm a biochemist for heaven's sakes. I mean, it's, and I'm looking at so the genetics of psychiatric disorders. So I look at lots of tissues in the developing tellencephal, dorsal tellencephal in a day 25. There's a lot of technical parts to that. And I do Fourier transforms even for heaven's sakes. Yeah. MRIs have these complex, you know, waves waves coming at you. ah Right. So you know what I do, especially if there's like a technical audience or an audience that has got that skepticism, I actually show them an fMRI.
00:18:23
Speaker
And I show them the signal. And I show them some of the variant processing that has to occur when we're making it. And then I say the following. um There is a concept called theory of mind. And I tell that to them first. This only takes about three or four minutes. But I do tell it to them because I'm going to try and win them over to show them that an ah an emotion is on the back of a neuron, not on the back of an opinion.
00:18:46
Speaker
and and It seems to work. Theory of mind. Theory of mind is the ability to ah peer inside someone else's psychological interior and with very little cueing understand the rewards and punishment systems inside that interior. It's as close to mind reading as the brain can get. There's two components to it. Number one, it really is ah understanding the intentions and motivations of someone else by looking at what makes them tick.
00:19:11
Speaker
but number two there's also the tacit understanding that the emotional world that you're living in you react to like you react to but it's not the emotional world i live in so you're never gonna react like i am you're gonna react like you do I end up calling it John Medina's second law of marriage. What is obvious to you is obvious to you. But yeah after I just give this little thing about theory of mind, I then give them an example of where you can show an fMRI. I said I can make the brain light up like the Fourth of July by stimulating something called the mentalizing network, which is the neural substrates underneath theory of mind and by certain types of emotional processing. And it's the old E.M. Forster quote, John.
00:19:54
Speaker
The king died and then the queen died. And if you do that with somebody who has an fMRI, right their brain just yawns and flatlines. And if you do that for 10 minutes, it says, when can I leave? But you can make the brain light up like it was the 4th of July.
00:20:10
Speaker
simply by adding two little words to the end of his sentence. And here are those two words. You're probably familiar with this because he unfortunately used it to define what a narrative was. ah The king died and then the queen died of grief. And all of a sudden you're having a psychological insight. You have a relationship that's formed. You watched it change over time, didn't you? Because they had a relationship and then the guy died and now they don't have a relationship anymore. Micro, as it were,
00:20:37
Speaker
full-on narrative when somebody who does visual processing and they don't include something like that, they're wasting their time. Yeah. I mean, all of this sounds like, if I had to sum it up, sounds like empathy, right? It is it is empathy for your students, for your audience, for whomever it is. No. its Sorry. but But we can define the term. It's close to empathy. yeah But it's not. it's ah Actually, all of all theory of mind is the ability to penetrate inside someone else's psychological interior and understand it, like a cartographer might.
00:21:08
Speaker
So it's emotionally neutral like that. ah let's But let's add a component to it. okay If you are kind with what you see with your theory of mind, if if you penetrate inside someone else's psychological interior, and you are kind with what you see, you will begin to virtually transpose that interior onto yourself. And you'll be able to feel what they feel. Now you're getting closer to something that's more like empathy. Theory of mind is just the cartography.
00:21:38
Speaker
But empathy is allowing an anthropologist to come in and say, these are valuable people. Don't, you know, don't invade this space. Right. yeah that makes sense yeah yeah Yeah. So when you do your talks, I'm trying to think about drawing the curve for your for your talks.
Connecting with Personal Anecdotes
00:21:52
Speaker
Like when you when you start Yes. You start with here. Boom. Here's this big story in the first 30 seconds. Get into some detail and then it curves back up at the end of the 10 minutes to another big story and then continue that sort of U-shaped curve. That is exactly what I do. yeah I start with it. In fact, in the first 30 seconds when somebody is first just just starting to know me, but all the all the brains in those audiences are not interested in what I have to say, even though that sounds weird. They're not. They're interested in you.
00:22:19
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. answer to What you're you what what you are all about what you like. So I will try and tell an emotionally competent stimulus that is also directly related to something in my own experience. You only need to do that for about a minute or so. In fact, I would I would not do it for more than a minute. But I try and it's the first 30 seconds so that they get to know me the one of the things I'll tell them I was a professional animator and a graphics artist before I was a scientist. And I had a choice as to what part of the field I was going to pursue and I talk a little bit about the choice I made to go into the the neurosciences. from So then they get, it's just me. It's just it's not nothing big deal. I had a wonderful teacher and I tell him this wonderful teacher who was a deep influence on me, name of Stan Falco. He's dead now. He was head of medical genetics at Stanford. And pretty soon, you know, there was my audience. There it is. Now.
00:23:07
Speaker
10 minutes at the 10 minute mark though I have to give the hook and I actually have rules for the hook and maybe we should go over those ah sure yeah The hook the tent what's gonna happen at 10 minutes has to be either one of those six questions with the one ring any of those is fine But it should be relevant to the stream of information that you're giving them So it can either be a summary of what you just said or a foreshadowing of what's to come It doesn't matter but it has to be within the stream Second, it should be short. It's not the main thing of what you want to say. You're not there to entertain them. If you're a professor, you're there to teach them. So if all you did was you but one emotionally, what a stand-up routine is, John, is nothing more than one emotionally competent stimulus after another. It's what you do every 10 minutes, collapse it so that there's no space between them. A good stand-up comic will actually just give these, think of them as pearls on a necklace.
00:24:03
Speaker
That's not the right that's the job of a presenter. The job of a presenter is to relay sometimes dry information. So that should be short, is the point. It should take over it should not be a standard routine. And then thirdly, it has to be emotionally competent. You have to have something in there that can address the emotions. And so ah if I'm talking about, oh, there's a million of these, because I work with psychiatric disorders, there's a million psychiatric ah Stories and I'll usually tell one of those that is directly related to the input that I am that i bring them If that sure so yeah, and then you can buy another nine minutes and 59 seconds on three hours I don't know that I've titrated it, you know in it in any meaningful fact. I don't know where the ceiling is on this. Yeah Yeah, you've got three hours at times and yeah, which I don't consider to be learning by the way, that's insane Nobody should sit in a classroom for three hours. Yeah, but we have
00:24:59
Speaker
yeah So we've been talking about speaking and presenting, and I wonder if you take the same approach with writing.
Engaging Hooks in Written Content
00:25:07
Speaker
Like I just finished, for example, um Charles Duhigg's new book, Super Communicators. And one thing that he does is kind of like every chapter starts with ah with a story. And I kind of feel like it's like the 10-minute version. I guess the chapters may take a little longer than 10 minutes, but it's kind of like the 10-minute version. So so do you...
00:25:27
Speaker
Think about writing in the same kind of way. Every 450 to 500 words, you get a book. Oh, wow. OK. And is that is is the four. OK, so you you might you might again answer. You don't know, which is fine. But it's the 500 words. Is that like is that ah essentially equivalent to 10 to 10 minutes? I have no idea.
00:25:50
Speaker
You knew I was going to say that. yeah i did i did yeah What I've just found is that no i don't think that I'm not sure how much empirical support there is for any of that this last. and Since i I tried to deal with evidence-based stuff, I'm now going to label what I'm about to tell you, opinion caveat. yeah or I am ah an N of one economist.
00:26:13
Speaker
ah Okay, ah but I will tell it what I found is that I found my even my even if something I've written, I've tried to write something when I was first knowing that I was going to start writing for lay audiences and I wasn't a career was spent mostly as a private research consultant, primarily to the biotech and pharmaceutical industries for years. And what I mostly did was that I would just drop down and ah troubleshoot data that is that they're looking at and make opinions about it, and then write up a summary sometimes. And I found that the summaries that I would write would write up, they were good. i think i' i'm i'm I'm a good scientist, good troubleshooter. They were boring.
00:26:51
Speaker
So when I knew I was going to write for a lay audience or that was going to, that I would embrace that as part of my career. I knew I was going to have to change my writing style. And I found just over the, I played with it. I totally played with this. Trying to get more of my own attention span began to wane. When did I need to bring it up? So 450 to 500 words is what ive I landed on.
00:27:14
Speaker
and ah You know, they became New York Times best sellers. So I don't, I'm not sure that did something right. And I'm not sure that was always 500 words either. So you have a strong sense of it. I haven't seen a lot of empirical work on it at all. And until then, what I just said, please do tell your good listeners. Yeah. You just opinion, not a fact. Yeah. Yeah. Well, well, it's also interesting if we think about the, again, the data visualization, data storytelling folks.
Storytelling in Graphs
00:27:40
Speaker
yeah Where does a graph fall? like How much does a graph account for those 500 words? right and But if you've incorporated a story into that graph, a real story into that graph, an emotional story into that graph, does that then become that point of that, I don't know, that that that hook, that switching point?
00:27:58
Speaker
um So I also want to ask, because you you write about this in the book on multitasking.
Debunking Multitasking
00:28:05
Speaker
You say multitasking when it comes to paying attention is a myth. I say this all the time ah when i when I teach and when I present. yeah People nod, and then they go back to checking their email while I'm presenting or while I'm teaching. but So um I guess I just want some more something else to use when I'm talking with people. That multitasking is a myth. Yeah. i was I was asked at the very end of a talk I gave for Google, Google had ah a had a book tour-ish component to their lives at one point. And it was ah ah the very last question. And and I only had a like a couple of minutes left until then I'd have to go to the next thing. So I said, you can't multitask, stop trying.
00:28:52
Speaker
So let's get into this though. That's kind of an important thing to to talk about. are We're going to define multitasking as the ability to have two simultaneous inputs processed at the same time and remember everything about those inputs at the end of the exposure period. Does that make sense?
00:29:08
Speaker
yeah And if that's the case, at one level, the brain truly can multitask. John, right now, while you and I are talking, there's parts of your brain that aren't listening to you and me at all. It's listening to your heartbeat, and it's gauging your lungs, and there are lots of decisions that are being made. That's true multitasking, because you're doing two things. but They're independent, they're simultaneous, and they have separable outputs.
00:29:31
Speaker
um At the attentional spotlight, which is the thing we now pay attention to, that's kind of a general term, but like I said, it came from the visual visual research. The attentional spotlight cannot multitask. If you try to push it, if it could multitask, you could literally open up a book and read the left page with the left eye and the right page with the right eye, scan everything down all at once and remember everything simultaneously.
00:29:56
Speaker
that does not happen. and You have to start, yeah if you're if you're not into um if you're not in Japan, it's going to start in the left-hand corner and you're going to go down. right now It's not an even down edge. The eye jumps around and does things, but the net vector is to go down to the bottom of the page and then goes back up to the next page. um What you do, if you get an interrupt, and these experiments have been done over and over and over again, what happens is that the brain just tries to do a lot of time splicing.
00:30:24
Speaker
it'll It'll pay attention to something and it'll go something else, it'll come up, it'll go. And with rapidity, the more you do that, the more it will feel like you're blurring it in such fashion that it appears to be one thing. But if you slow that puppy down, there's no blurring at all. You're you're going here, then you're going here, and then you're going here. So all you're doing is your task switching over and over again. The more you task switch,
00:30:46
Speaker
the less good your working memory becomes, something we used to call short-term memory. So your retention just just gets kicked in the it gets kicked guess kick in the head. That would be the way to say it, I suppose. Because if you're looking down at your watch, or you're looking down at your at your phone ah while you're sitting there trying to listen to the professor, you are automatically, ah you've been engaged in something, so you have to disengage, you have to find the re-engagement, you have to re-engage, and then you have to disengage from that, and then you have to find the... find the other stimulus and go back. So you're going back and forth at multiple spots. Each time the working memory, something we used to call short-term memory, is being taxed in such fashion that learning becomes exhausting rather than thrilling.
00:31:29
Speaker
So if you really want to gauge a student's interest, have them put down their machinery and by God, you better give the best lecture you've ever had because especially these days so where attentions are so strong and so little data is out there now that's that's actually studied it in any meaningful kind of way ah that we abandon to our peril, ah not taking into account the attentional states of the audiences that we're at.
00:31:54
Speaker
yeah Right. My kids are both in high school and our school locked down the phones this year. So they have to put their phones in a little bag. And and the email that came out from the principal on day one was, yeah um the big reason we were locking down the phones is because it's just even the buzz. The buzz is a distraction. And I think i think they said it was it takes 20 minutes for the kids to re fully re-engage with the teacher.
00:32:18
Speaker
Well, that 20 minute figure probably it was 15 to 20 minutes was I think originally that at Microsoft where you have an interrupt and then it comes back. I don't know that the classroom has been as well studied. as but but But you're absolutely right. there is a There is a period of time where there is a distraction that has to come. And even more insidious, thank God for Faraday cages, put those phones and those things. yeah yeah um is that you have long since set up a dopamine anticipatory response. Dopamine, it's very famous as a neurotransmitter. It's usually the reward. People don't know that it's also involved in motor functions. If your dopamine system is collapsing in the brain, you'll get a Parkinson's-like profile. um There's a lot of things that go on with dopamine that's important, but one of the biggest is that it's involved in addictions.
00:33:06
Speaker
And the more dopamine spikes the you get, the more you want. So what if so-and-so is calling you and or texting you and you're thrilled by that or you hate it, but in either way you want to know about it, it will distract your attention and the brain will give you a little squirt of dopamine that says, oh, thank you. And when you look back up at the teacher who's busy teaching and the teacher is not giving you the dopamine, you're looking, well, who the heck can you pay attention to?
00:33:32
Speaker
like Right. Yeah. So you set up these addictive profiles that go back and forth and that's, it becomes anti-teaching. I will say this, when Faraday bags are introduced into classroom situations, it should be incumbent on the part of a lot of the adults who are supervising this new, to phase it in. Because dopamine actually has a withdrawal.
00:33:54
Speaker
ah Yeah. Yeah, that's right. im to I mean, you can go cold turkey and far far be it for me to prescribe to a school district where there is very little data about this. Yeah. I mean, yeah yeah i mean I think they're all trying, right? And it's trying in different places of the country. I will say for our school in the classroom, you are not allowed to have it. But in the hallways and in the lunchroom, it's fine, which is maybe the maybe that's the ramp. Maybe you get that little dopamine during your lunch and that carries you to three o'clock. I don't know. But that's that's what they're trying.
00:34:24
Speaker
um You cannot multitask. If you just think you can multitask, that's as much of a myth as the fact that there's a left brain and a right brain personality, which are also deep mythologies. yeah Okay. All right. I wish we had more time. We could go into that too, but um we're gonna... um I wanted to get to my favorite chapter from from the Brain Rules book, which is the chapter on vision. And I have this as a slide i I think I have probably in all of my decks. You write in the book, the more visual the input becomes, the more likely it is to be recognized and recalled. And I sort of use that as, hey, this is why graphs and data vis and charts are useful and how, you know,
00:35:04
Speaker
Not that tables aren't useful or text isn't useful, but this is why why graphs are useful. And so I'm not even sure I have a question, but maybe I do. If the simple question is, why is is vision so important?
Vision and Learning
00:35:19
Speaker
Why is that sense so important to helping us recognize and recall information? Well, the answer is really simple. Most of our predators, most of our prey are are visually understood.
00:35:30
Speaker
got And as a result of that, we are constantly visually acquired. And so ah we had several choices available to us. We could have gone down. It's a zero-sum game bioenergetically in in here. yeah And so we could have deployed some resources for smell and become like dogs or like hearing and become like bats. Nope. Almost half of this fricking cortex is devoted to visual processing.
00:35:54
Speaker
So we decided a long time ago that we were going to become visual and you can actually see in our smell, ah most of the smell and smell receptor genes have been cloned and half of them all have mutations in them because all that sense is going away.
00:36:08
Speaker
That is not the case with vision. So powerful is is a visual stimulus that we give it a name. It's called the pictorial superiority effect because it has been responsibly pitched against other types of input, auditory, gustatory, olfactory, haptic, tactile senses, and vision wins out over every one of them in terms of retrieval. Not only vision itself, it's actually been augmented. If you can make the visual element move It gets even more attention. When I show a graph to my students, I no longer have the line. I just have the abscissa and the ordinate. And then I make the line move. And I reveal it in a wipe or I do something yeah to make sure that the the tip of the spear that I want them to remember, which is the quantitative information of that graph, I make sure that sucker moves.
00:37:01
Speaker
but right and yeah so that you if Nothing could be more boring as a visual presentation than just something that isn't moving. But if you could make it rotate in three dimensions, it's that's even best. that's the You've seen this in movie houses with 3D movies, right? yeah when the movie is all of a sudden there and people are trying to touch it, everybody is locked on to the visual ahs presentation. The reason why is so simple, John, we lived in a rotating three dimensional environment where, you know, if you had a hawk coming at you, that's not a two dimensional representation. Yeah. And it's not a static strobe like picture. It's a real thing. And it's gonna claw your eyes out if you're not careful. So we just lock down on it, pay attention.
Augmented Reality in Education
00:37:44
Speaker
Yeah. Have you thought about, have you or I'm sure people have studied, have you thought about, have you studied how augmented reality, virtual reality are going to yeah improve or or or ruin teaching?
00:37:57
Speaker
Boy, here's where my grump factor really flares. okay okay you You know what I'm going to say next. We don't know, yeah, for sure. yeah yeah But we don't know with a vengeance, because there's a lot of people throwing a whole lot of money at the we don't know. yeah There's so several work groups at Stanford that have done really good work. What they have shown, though, is that it's it's a little counterintuitive.
00:38:19
Speaker
um I'll try and explain it this way. The question you can ask is, when do you get the idea of presence when you feel like you're no longer in the world you're at, but in another environment, which would be like, an a I'm in a now teaching environment where this professor who's not really there, but I feel like he's there because I feel like his presence. When do you detect the presence? What are the factors that tricks the brain into thinking it's somewhere else?
00:38:43
Speaker
A lot of people and a lot of companies threw a whole lot of money about something that doesn't work. They tried to make their virtual worlds as photorealistic as possible. Thinking that the more realistic you could make it, the better it was going to be. It doesn't trick presence at all. We're not even sure what presence is. There may be some electrical signatures that are in the back doing presence, but that's why my grump factor flares. I don't know what that is. Asking me, John, what's a pastel? And I think to myself, I have no idea.
00:39:11
Speaker
i have no right I have no idea. right and um Okay, we've touched on a lot and I wanna sort of round this out by, I guess asking you, if you were writing volume two, I know you've written brain rules for babies, but if you were starting today with a new version, ah maybe not even volume two, but a new version of brain rules, would anything fundamentally change?
Future of Brain Science
00:39:35
Speaker
Oh, my field changes every six months. yeah yeah It suffers these Richter scale right changes. I think though I would start out as an approximation because I would try to read the tea leaves of the coming 10 years. I would do it on stress.
00:39:54
Speaker
Wow. Stress in the micro for yourself, stress out for traumatized populations over large segments of populations. um We now know, actually we've known this for a while, and as you know, my as we've discussed by thing is psychiatric disorders, which rise when temperatures go up.
00:40:11
Speaker
So the number of anxiety and depressive disorders, the thought disorders, everything sense tends to rise the warmer places get. And with global warming becoming a thing, the mental health issues, the wars that will be incited from that, the extraordinary self-centeredness that will come when there's not enough water and there's too many people,
00:40:32
Speaker
um That's all social and group stress, so I would not only do the micro stress, I would also do the macro. The other thing I want to add to that is, it's the answer to your question is is stress, maybe one last one. Stress tends to have echoes if you have social environments. A real good question that was asked, I think it was John Maynard Key? ah No, no. um An economist. I'm trying to get his name. um And then somebody commenting on his work. Here's the comment. The question was asked was, in 1929, when the stock market crashed in Black, whatever, October, yeah did the stockbrokers and and as an allied ah financial professionals all run up the fire escapes and throw themselves off the building? The answer is not even. right In fact, the suicide rate in the fourth quarter was the lowest of the year.
00:41:23
Speaker
Now, it did go up. I think it was like 12.1 per 100,000 as the base. It did go up. It went up substantially. It went up to, I think, one study had it at 20.3 per 100,000, which is a gigantic change. yeah But it took three years to get at it.
00:41:41
Speaker
And so it's called the delayed fuse. And the reason why is that you had to have extracted your bank account, go through your divorces, watch your kids leave you, see the kinds of things that could actually induce a stressful response, and then watch that go up. So there's almost always, we're seeing the exact same lag time, by the way, with COVID.
00:42:00
Speaker
Social coming and the same anxiety and depressive rates that are that where you saw go up after Great Depression are now being realized ah For years now. So the other part of that book would be watch out Cumulative stress has a delayed fuse on it, but it will blast over and people that are interested I know you're at Georgetown and maybe George Washington So policy is gonna be a big deal mental health is a larger issue than we have ever had in our whole lives And I'm not sure everybody sees that coming but it's the brand sciences. I And the impact on mental health, on the physical health, I think is is fairly well documented, but you're going to see the same the echo patterns, I think, happen over the next you know five, 10 years. Well, those delayed fuses occur. And it's fascinating to watch that certain types of stress really are cumulative with ah ah what is essentially a step function. You raise up enough and then, boom, and all of a sudden the rate goes up. Right. And there's no ah anticipating it. It's just, boom, and all of a sudden hit. Yeah. Yeah.
Summary of Key Insights
00:42:55
Speaker
Well, on that on that note, yeah
00:42:58
Speaker
but cheery as it very we've had we have a fun time until the cheery end boy oh boy Okay, so we've learned a few things though and tell stories There's no such thing as multitasking and and and vision is ah the most important to hook people's attention to keep it Thank you so much for coming on the show. This has been terrific. I really appreciate it. Oh, my pleasure there, John. And I'll i'll hold here until until you dismiss me. the I wish your daughter all the best. If she does any bioengineering at all, we need all the women we could get. Woo-hoo! Fire away.