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- Lazy Sunday #23
The other day I read this:
“Our brains have an upper limit on how much they can process at once due to a constant but limited energy supply”
Avid readers know that the brain has an almost constant energy consumption, irrespective of the work you do or don’t do. It diverts resources to where it is needed most.
The question then becomes: is there a limit to how long we can do deep work, assuming the energy supply itself is “unlimited”? And what is the maximum time of focused work we can do until our attention and ability to do mental work reduces dramatically?
The short answer is: research assumes it is somewhere between 4-5h a day.
Let’s take it apart:
If you have a finite amount of energy the brain can use to work, then it means that indeed we need to be very mindful about where we divert our attention when we want to do mentally challenging work.
Multitasking does not work. Actually, task-switching requires the brain to engage more regions. More regions mean more energy consumption and hence diversion of energy from other “work”.
Also, the brain has a way to make you stop doing focused work, so it can use the energy for regulating bodily processes. You getting tired is the brain tricking you to get “its energy back”.
2x2=4h deep work
After 45-60 minutes, the brain builds up different chemicals, which slow down your ability to concentrate.
This means that doing more than 60 minutes of highly engaging work either needs training (e.g. athletes or chess players), or breaks in between.
You might scoff on the pomodoro technique, but it is a good split. Based on science, the ideal setup might be 2x50min with a 10-min break every 50 min. You typically don’t need a longer break, if you stop after 120 minutes.
Do that twice a day and you will have 4-5h of really good work time, going through things that are new, or require transfer of knowledge (many brain regions).
Some work can still be focused but run more on auto-pilot. It becomes relevant to mix “new” vs “known” work. Known work, these are tasks you have experience in doing and hence can run more on auto-pilot, is still work but will be mentally less challenging.
Handle breaks
Literature suggests the following:
For highly engaged and exciting work, breaks can be shorter; for less engaged / exciting work, regular micro-breaks (approx. <5min) are beneficial. The latter is relevant for e.g. call center work.
Breaks to have food or a drink (e.g. coffee) don’t have the same positive impact on focus recovery as short breaks of socialization or walk.
Even during learning procedures, taking a really short break (10-15 seconds) between memorization of e.g. new words, phrases etc. helps the brain to repeat the process. During these breaks, the brain repeats the newly learned information in fast repeat, up to 20x faster. This helps to remember the learnt content.
View matters: green views (🌲🌳) relaxes more than urban views (🏬).
Idle time
A lot of focus (pun intended) is given to becoming more focused. But a lot of the work is done during idle time. That is time, that is not being spent on thinking about the problem itself.
I am pretty sure you know, that even when we do not consciously think about the issue, the brain subconsciously crunches through it anyway.
This so-called default-mode-network is the reason, why the brain still burns a good amount of energy when we believe we don’t think much.
Plenty of research suggests planning idle time into your schedule, especially if you have a hard problem to crack. A walk in the park, a shower, just sitting outside on a bench. The catch: listening to a podcast, scrolling through social media or similar “non-engaging” activities don’t count as idle.
To summarize:
Why only 4-5h?
The biggest factor seems the build up of adenosine in your brain. Over 5h hard mental work, adenosine increases to twice the level you have after you wake up. It activates sleepiness and impacts your focus and concentration.
Short naps or NSDR can decrease adenosine levels, but not completely to baseline.
You can optimize the 1) time and 2) output during the time.
Optimizing for time means
to block calendar
reduce distractions
add micro-breaks
no multi-tasking
reduce external stress pre work sprint (easier said than done, I know).
Optimizing for output means
plan of work sprints before you get started to not ponder over “what do I do now”, which already depletes your resources
reduce work blocks in as small chunks as possible
rely on existing knowledge (schemas) to save working memory
limit work scope, especially if you learning something new
don’t jump topics, stay within the same theme
More supporting research summaries below!
Find my research: neuroscience
Rest breaks - more but shorter (1)
A study tracked focus and attention at the end of a work episode and right after a break. The results suggested that focus and attention goes up after a break as short as 5 seconds for line workers.
Line workers spent hours doing the same work. Further into the day, concentration falls and more injuries or mistakes occur.
Important to note, the breaks are not an excuse to get a 10minutes espresso break, go for a smoke or eat another musli bar. Ingesting food or drinks were shown to not have the same effect on relaxation.
This could mean, even for e.g. support team, hacking away on customer request after customer request, could actually benefit from 5-10 seconds breaks in between customer queries.
(Elsevier)
Short breaks during learning (3)
Even during learning, taking small breaks between sets of data, seems to have benefits.
This study had right-handed people learn left-hand-typing. They were given numbers to type with the left hand for a specific amount of repetition.
After each “sprint” they were to take a break (or not). The group with 10 sec. breaks in between the sprints performed better, with fewer mistakes and increased speed of typing over the learning process.
During idle time, the brain “played back” the movement, seemingly a way to train the capability. Similarly, the brain replays newly learned capabilities during sleep to enhance formation of long-term memories.
(NIH)
Greenery boosts attention (4)
As I mentioned above, attention and focus can be improved by small breaks (even as short as 40 seconds) looking at green scenery. So you might want to get an office with a view.
In this study, students were asked to execute a task and after some time, either look at a green scenery, like trees and open view of roofs, or look at cement backyard, with no green at all.
The group looking at the green view performed better over the time frame of the experiment, with fewer errors in subsequent tasks.
Maybe this is h our “old” brain is still wired into the forest. Nature, and specifically the color green, is a powerful charger for our mental capacity.
So having plants in the office or even on your desk does help with focus.
Find my research: office
More expressive = more successful negotiations?!
I was told once in a career review, that I needed to smile more, to be more likeable.
After many years, I came around to accept that maybe the ask had something to it.
A study suggests, that people with more facetted facial expressions are more successful in negotiations, as other people tend to like them more. People with little facial expressions are harder to read, hence less likely to be perceived as “friendly” and “open”.
Social outcomes are still very much based on likeability and readability. We are human beings, after all.
This is where humanoids and robots will struggle. Unless they will be developed with similar facial expressions as humans, humans will have a hard time to accept them.
(Nature)
Napoleon’s multi-tasking technique
We know multi-tasking several mentally-straining tasks is not possible. Some of you now say “but I can walk and talk”. Yes, because:
“If one or more tasks are capable of being automated as reflexes, then they can easily be engaged simultaneously with another task without much consequence.”
Once you work through tasks you aren’t familiar with, it becomes much more tiring. You probably won’t be able to do 4-5h of focus work without feeling like a melted slushy afterwards.
Napoleon was apparently very good at compartmentalizing different subjects and just focus on the matter at hand.
“Do I wish to sleep? I simply close all the drawers, and there I am — asleep.”
The best managers I worked with were all really good at “being in the moment” while working through a subject. They were difficult to get on Slack or email, because they checked it 3-4 times a day. But they really got stuff done. They were not multi-tasking during a conversation. They were fully present. Compartmentalizing.
It takes some practice, but tuning out other topics (”closing drawers”) is a real power.
(Inc.com)
“Using Neuroscience To Increase Employee Engagement ‘Works Every Time,’ Culture Expert Says”
Understanding that we can not leave emotions “at home” when starting work, whether in the office or remote, is pretty essential for managers. I know that might sound pretty obvious, but how many times did you feel stressed, sad, angry or nervous at work without your manager or even anybody else acknowledging it and working through it?
Is the underlying assumption “we are all grown-ups hence you have to deal with it yourself”? I think this is bullshit. There is another quote that I find quite striking:
“Interestingly, accounting firms are increasingly using science in data analysis and other technological developments but resist science when it comes to human behavior.”
Source: Link, 23.06.2024
On top of tech
When AI researchers turn brain researchers - neural systems understanding
“Neuroscience tends to be more descriptive, because that’s easy; you can observe things. But coming up with theories that help explain why, I think, is where machine-learning ways of thinking and theories—more mathematical theories—can help.”
AI research has been pretty independent of neuroscience over the least two decades.
On the one hand, because AI was deemed to be too far away, on the other hand, we actually did not know much about the brain. Honestly speaking…
Over the few last years, things have changed. Models appeared to inch closer to the language capabilities of humans. Because these models evolved in parallel to neuroscience research about the language center of human brains, we now start to compare and draw learnings and conclusions from both.
But the models, more accidentally, ended up with similar “layering” of data processing. Meaning, deeper layers within artificial networks are responsible for more nuanced work.
Similarly to the brain, where smaller clusters of neurons are responsible for nuanced interpretation of e.g. faces or cars.
“One of the things we’ve really learned from the last 20 years of cognitive neuroscience is that language and thought are separate in the brain,”
Language has become a strong play in language models. But “thinking” in its human sense, is more complex.
Interestingly, the latest Anthropic model Sonnet 3.5 scores exceptionally high on reasoning, while being very energy efficient compared to older systems.
I think we will see more converging research from both neuroscience and artificial intelligence, boosting knowledge on both sides.
It is a long article, but if you are interested in artificial intelligence or developing in the area, it contains some really good studies.
Misc but not least…
You should know Vinod Khosla. He is founder of Khosla Ventures, and probably one of the most successful investors of the past two decades.
He made some predictions about the future. I think worth pondering over, as it impacts all of us, no matter how many of these come true (I believe pretty number of them will).
expertise will be free
labor will be near free
computer use will grow expansively
AI will play are large role in entertainment and design
internet access will be mostly by [through] agents [AI]
there will be clean, dispatchable electric power
cars could be displaced in cities
flying will be faster
resources will be plentiful
we will have new food and fertilizers
we will have patient-personlized medicine
we will have solutions for our carbon problem
Thank you for reading.
Please share the link on social media or by forwarding this episode of Lazy Sunday to your friends and colleagues.
Maybe they can learn something as well? ;-)
Have a great rest of the weekend.
Alex
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