Why can't I concentrate?

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0:30School ready at Whole Foods Market. What's in the canteen today? Did I park my bike? No, I definitely love my bike. Wait, no. What is it? What is it? Right, concentrate, Alex. Just pay attention. Is that my email? Okay, got it. Hello. That's it, Alex. Profound. Hello and welcome to CrowdScience from the BBC World Service. Profound. This is the show that answers your science questions. and the fact that you're listening, maybe even concentrating, frankly, it's quite an honour. And you're going to be hearing why, because we're going to be exploring why paying attention can feel like hard work. It's because you're not paying attention.

1:13So don't get distracted, because I want to introduce you to the people who are going to be revealing the inner workings of your brain. From the Attention Lab at London's Royal Holloway University, we have psychology professor Polly Dalton. Hi Alex. Polly, what is the thing that always distracts you? Oh, I think I have to say, like so many people I talk to, my phone. That's something that I try and really work hard to manage to try and avoid those distractions because it can be, yeah, such a big distraction. Thank you, Polly. And joining us from Pompeo Fabra University in Barcelona, Spain, we have cognitive neuroscientist Professor Salvador Sotofaraco.

1:56Hi there, Alex. Thanks. Salvador, as I understand it, you research how sight, sound and touch are blended together by the brain. So when we go about our day to day, we see the world as one whole reality, not split up into different senses. That's absolutely correct. Now, this is radio. So whatever the truth may be, you have to say that hearing is the most important of those senses. OK, absolutely. Thank you, Salvador. and also joining us from the University of Washington in the United States, we have psychologist Professor Sophie Liwa. Hi Alex, thank you for having me. Sophie, you've studied how being interrupted affects our ability to focus and perform, right?

2:39Yes, that's correct. And in fact... So if I interrupt you, it's purely in the name of scientific rigour. I only joke. Now, let's kick off with our first question sent in by you curious crowd science listeners. Hi, my name is Elizabeth Devlin and I'm from Melbourne in Australia. I've noticed many times when people are focusing on a task, the tongue often hangs out the side of their mouths. Is there any connection between the tongue and concentration? Sophie, what do you think is going on? So the tongue's moving a lot in the mouth, right? And so we try to actually control the mouth by limiting its movement to minimize some of the internal stimuli.

3:26We try to avoid the mouth touching the teeth, for example. So sticking out the tongue actually helps release self-control resources and cognitive resources so that we can better focus. So your brain has a certain amount of attention resource there. And by dropping your tongue out, it's just saying, hey, here's some extra you can use elsewhere. That's right. I often compare the brain to a pie, right? So if we use a part of that pie to control movement or other things, then that means we have fewer left to focus. Now, we've also had another question on children sticking their tongues out. Family therapist David in Canada has said sometimes the children that he works with can go into a sort of hyper-focus.

4:13I notice when children use scissors, when I ask them a question, they seem not to hear. Why would this be, and could there possibly be any evolutionary connection? Polly, you've studied how we can be quite selective in what we hear. So what do you think could be going on here? Yeah, this is a really interesting example because I think it's the concentration aspect here that's important rather than the control of the mouth that we were talking about earlier. We only have a limited amount of ability to process information in the world around us. So in many situations, we do have to be really selective about what we're processing.

4:51and many researchers have found that if you're paying attention closely and really concentrating on one aspect of your environment it can leave you open to missing even really quite detectable and surprising elements. So we had a nice example from our lab of a phenomenon we call inattentional deafness where we played people a women's conversation at the same time as a men's conversation so it was a really busy difficult scene to listen to we asked half our people to attend to men's voices half our participants to attend to the women's voices and then we had a man walking through the scene saying I'm a gorilla I'm a gorilla over and over again for 19 seconds he was audible for and what we found was that the people who were attending to the women's conversations the majority of them around 70 percent completely failed to notice that person walking through saying something really surprising and shocking that didn't fit in with the scene, I'm a gorilla.

5:49And people in general are really shocked about this. When they hear our recording back and they hear that gorilla come through, they're often really surprised, often quite amused. It's quite funny to realise how much you can miss in the world around you. See, I'm glad I wasn't put forward in your study because I love gossip. I can hear everything from anyone at the same time. My ears twinge whenever I'm on the tube. Moving on to driving. Now, as far as I'm aware, I don't stick my tongue out when I'm in my car unless, I don't know, I'm sticking my tongue out at someone else who's cut me off. Long story.

6:20But I do find driving rather tiring, and so does Ian in Sheffield here in the UK. I was driving on the motorway on a rainy day, concentrating hard as the visibility was poor and there was spray everywhere. It felt like hard work. So it made me wonder, do we know how much, if any, extra energy the brain uses to concentrate on some tasks? Why is concentrating tiring? Salvador, what does neuroscience say about this? Okay, first, the brain is about 2 % of the body mass, but it consumes 10 times more energy proportionally. So it consumes about 20 % of the energy in the form of sugar, oxygen. This means that there is constant consumption of energy.

7:08It's like a refrigerator, if you want. but we have many millions of neurons in the brain and when they enter into action then there is even more energy spending so concentrating is tiring and challenging tasks if you're driving on the rain and it's dark and it's a road that you're not very familiar with all these things will contribute to set in motion many of the brain systems that are necessary to succeed at this task For example, sharp visual attention, keeping close control of your motor system, and so on. So all this means that many of your brain networks or neurons need to be set into high energy consumption mode.

8:01Now, you're probably not going to be surprised that when I'm driving, I love listening to the radio. but maybe I should try listening like Neville in Cape Town, South Africa. I listen to a lot of podcasts and usually when listening, I simultaneously play a game on my phone. Doing this seems to help me concentrate and stay focused on the podcast. Why might this be? Sophie, what's going on there? Should we all be playing games like Neville while listening to this? Well, the answer is it depends, right? So there's something interesting about multitasking. First, I'm going to say that we cannot multitask in the sense of we are not able from the brain standpoint to process multiples to malay at the same time.

8:48So thinking about the game and the podcast, what the brain does is that it's going to switch back and forth between the game and the podcast. It's not really processing both at the same time. So if the game is rather simple, automatic, something that I've done for a long time, I'm very used to it. It does not really require a lot of cognitive resources. I might be able to listen to the podcast at the same time because in a way, it's more of a physical rhythm and physical actions as opposed to me processing what's happening in the game. So enough of my cognitive resources might be left to process what's going on and what's talked about in the podcast.

9:38However, you know, as soon as the game becomes a little bit more cognitively demanding, what will happen is the person will not notice that they're actually missing chunks of a podcast. Polly. Yeah, I agree with all of that. I was just going to add that I think there's an interesting concept around understimulation as well. So that sometimes if we're doing a task that's quite simple, and that may not be using up all of our capacity, that can actually be a problem in itself, that understimulation that can cause us to become a bit more distractible. And so I think it is quite common for people to, if you think about things like doodling in lectures, or a lot of people find it very useful to have a fidget toy or something.

10:24And I think that what might be happening there is that people are in some cases where there's a risk of perhaps being a bit understimulated, adding a little bit of that gentle and quite flexible task demand might actually help people to focus. It might be one of the reasons why a lot of people like working in cafes, for example, just a slight extra bit of stimulation in the environment. But I think doodling and fidget toys, they're all under your own control. So when the podcast or the lecture gets a bit more demanding, you can just stop doodling and that doesn't matter. Whereas if the game is actually imposing demands of itself, then I agree that risks drawing you away from the podcast.

11:02Now on that, crowd science listener Ravi in Ohio in the United States says he listens to podcasts while he's walking and he's worried that it might mean that he's not taking it all in. I have noticed that I often struggle to recall the key details of the show I hear. This made me wonder, I'm missing out on the important information due to multitasking? Salvador, what do you think? And what I would say is walking by itself is not a very challenging task. And my hunch is that it actually gets you active. It prevents you from falling into mind-wandering mode and then missing out on the podcast. So essentially, doing a task that you don't require focus on, that doesn't use up the same sort of mental energy, that processing energy that requires you to divert resources from other things.

12:00So off the back of that then, what can someone like me do to ensure that when I'm listening to podcasts, I can keep completely focused? What should I do? Polly? I think it's interesting. There are probably differences between people. And that's also what the science would say is that there are individual differences at play here in terms of the way that people might find it easy to process information, might prefer to process information, and the different tasks that they may like to combine. So I would say try out some different things and see what works for you. So I'm imagining there's this sweet spot, over-stimulation, under-stimulation, and then this moment where you can divert all the resources you need exactly as you need it, divvy it up as required.

12:44Yeah, I think that's probably it. And that's going to change according to whether you're tired or whether you're hungry, you know, as well as between people. So it might need to be something that's flexible that you can adjust according to your particular state at that moment. Well, I hope some of what you've been hearing has been processed because we're going to be playing a game to test your concentration. Pop quiz. What's in your kid's lunchbox? At Whole Foods Market, they've already done the studying. Over 300 food ingredients are banned from their shelves. no hydronated fats in the peanut butter, and no high fructose corn syrup in the cookies.

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13:36Next. You're listening to CrowdScience from the BBC World Service, The show that takes your attention and hopefully does something good with it. I'm Alex Lathbridge and with me here are... Professor Pauli Dalton. I run the Attention Lab at Royal Holloway University of London. Salvador Soto Farako. I work at the University Pompeo Fabra and we basically like to study how different senses are put together. I'm Sophie Leroy and I'm a professor at the University of Washington. I study attention, in particular the difficulty of switching attention. tension. Amazing. Now let's have a quick question before we test each of you.

14:14Hi there, my name is Deborah Batsofen and I'm from Johannesburg, South Africa. My question for CrowdScience is, I just bought a new car and when I reverse it automatically turns the radio off. Why do we have to turn sound off to concentrate on something such as reversing a car? My favourite question so far because it's something that I deal with a lot. Sophie, what are your thoughts? It goes back to this idea of if I really want to be hyper-focused, hyper-vigilant, if I have too many stimuli around me, it's going to be really, really difficult to block them off so that I can be focused or even hyper-focused.

15:00So the music, if it's too loud, might create an interference and pull attention away from me focusing on the task at hand. When one is reversing, that is a cognitively more difficult task to execute. And so we need to help the attention, the brain, really focusing on what matters the most and reduce the stimuli that might pull the attention away. Something that listeners might also relate to is when we really need to pay attention to the road, Sometimes we actually don't pay attention to what the passengers are telling us. It's the same mechanism where we're like, okay, there's suddenly a situation where we go into hyper-vigilance.

15:44We pay attention. We're not hearing what they're telling us. And then after the event, we're like, oh, by the way, what did you say? Right? That's the same kind of mechanism. And so the car does that automatically for safety. Let's reduce the stimuli around you so that you can really be focused. You see, I completely understand that from a less sort of scientific perspective. You know, I'm in my car and I'm going, everyone shush, shush, shush. I'm trying to parallel park. Everyone shush. Polly. Yeah, I really like this question as well. I really relate. And having also fairly recently got a new car, I was really tickled when I noticed that it was doing that because I think it was doing, as we've heard, what the brain is able to do.

16:25we are able to exert that selective focus ourselves like we used to before the cars could do this for us but that in itself that maintenance of the selective focus is demanding for us so if we can do something physically to take away potential distractions then that's really helpful because it means we don't have to spend our capacity in keeping that focus via our brains. Salvador was anything you want to add? No, no, no. All brilliant. This is also what I think. Only I was thinking that this is analogous perhaps of when we close our eyes and we want to listen to something very carefully. Sometimes we tend to like shut down the vision, but in the case of the eyes, we can just close them.

17:14In the case of the ears, we can't. It's really nice you mentioned that, Salvador, But that's another area where, you know, if you reduce visual demand, you might boost up sensations in all different modalities. It might be why we close our eyes also when smelling a lovely rose or something like that. Now, listeners, you can play along with this one at home. You are about to hear a sequence of numbers. We're all going to count how many times we hear the number seven. No writing it down. No using your fingers. you've just got to use your mental tally. You ready? 8, 2, 7, 4, 1, 7, 7, 9, 3, 7, 5, 6, 7, 2, 7, 8, 7, 1, 4, 7, 3, 7.

18:07Wow. I've completely failed because... You're a distraction. Completely distracted. So I'm nine salvador yeah i got nine too sophie i got 10 oh let's try the exact same task again but this time we'll have some fairly loud music playing in the background same as before count the number of sevens you hear 4, 1, 7, 9, 2, 5, 7, 3, 8, 6, 7, 2, 4, 9, 1, 7, 5, 3, 8, 7. I'm going to ask how all of you did first. Sophie. That was hard. So I got five. Salvador, four and a half. I just want to note that I was distracted by the dancing in the studio as well. But I got five. All right. So one final round. Same challenge.

19:17Count the number of sevens. But this time you'll hear voices underneath. So ignore the speech if you can and focus only on the numbers. Three, seven, one, eight, seven, four, seven, Another sandwich. I might get some noodles. Oh, noodles are good. They also have good soup in the can. Five. Oh, okay. Three. Yeah. Seven. I'm just not carrot and coriander. Eight. I love that one. One. No, but seriously, I love that one. Four. That's what I have today. Seven. Two. Sophie, how did you do? That was hard again, but I got seven. Seven sevens, Polly. Eight. Ooh, Salvador. I got six. So, let's see. How well did we do?

20:04Now, let's go from start to finish. In the first round, the number of sevens was nine. I think I got ten, so I created a new seven. Okay. For the second round, the number of sevens was five. I think we got that, didn't we? Well, Salvador had four and a half. Yeah, almost there. And in the third round, there were, in fact, seven sevens. I got an extra. Why do you think that happened? I guess maybe there was a word in the other speech that could have sounded like a seven. That might be it. It might also just be that I had lost count. It was a really demanding task to keep track of the count, especially because you said we weren't allowed to use our fingers or anything like that.

20:52So I think I could just have got lost with where I was. Any number of reasons. Okay. Okay. so time for another question now have you ever heard the expression that we shift into gear to do something torren in minnesota in the usa wants to know if there's any truth in that my question for crowd science is do human brains change processing speeds at different times kind of like shifting gears on a bike thank you sophie what do you think well you know i think we mentioned even earlier that at different points in time, we might not have the same cognitive energy, right? And so sometimes we're really well rested and we are really into what we're doing.

21:36And so our ability to process better, faster, that's enhanced. And at other times, we might be depleted. We may have actually used our cognitive resources a lot during the day. and our brain is just slowing down and it's just having a harder time, even on somewhat simpler tasks. So absolutely, there's a natural rhythm too. Some people concentrate better in the morning, some it's better at night. So there are natural rhythms around our ability to focus. Salvador. Yeah, actually going back to something that Polly said before, and I think Sophie mentioned as well, right now we not only have, as we have said several times, limited resources, But also these resources seem to vary in different ways, and we can actually make them vary ourselves on purpose, say setting into different levels of alertness or what we call arousal.

22:33So my impression is that, yes, we can just transition from one level of arousal to another. Some levels of arousal are best for certain tasks. Like, it's not the same level of arousal that we have to reach if we're studying than if we're skiing, for example. And one thing I'm fascinated about is that when we take this to the extreme, Say, for example, in very impending grave danger or when adrenaline is very high, we speed so much that we may perceive time slow down. So we all have, or at least some of us may have the experience of when we are about to, say, crash with a car or something, we remember time slowed down a little bit.

23:20And this probably is because we are set in a very high gear. Wow. So the brain that is, you know, 2 % of our body, but can consume up to 20 % of our energy needs, you know, you can actually take it from this very low relaxed state to processing a lot very, very, very quickly to the point that you actually feel time slow down. That's correct. That's what the experience says. okay now our final question comes from will in gloucestershire here in the uk hi i work as a fencer and landscaper this leaves me physically tired and i mostly sleep well at night but if i sit down in the middle of the day reading or doing paperwork i invariably fall asleep i've been wondering if this is due to the mental strain of work that challenges my brain more than my body So my question is, can mental effort tire you out more than physical effort?

24:19Thanks. All right. Thank you, Will. That is a fantastic question. What's more tiring, physical graft or thinking hard? Polly. Yeah, it's a really interesting question. I think from my own kind of personal perspective, they feel like two different types of tiredness. So we've talked a lot about that kind of effortful concentration that's involved in something perhaps like forcing yourself to focus on boring paperwork. I noticed that the question mentioned paperwork in particular. So no doubt that can be really tiring. But I think that's a very different type of tiredness from the kind of physical exertion type of tiredness.

24:56And I think a lot of people find that it's that more physical tiredness that is linked with sleep for them. But that's my hunch. Sophie. Polly was mentioning the extent to which a task is also pulling your attention, pulling your resources. So if you're doing paperwork, you actually have to really exert effort to be excited about doing that work, right, and persisting with that work. And it's easy to disengage from it and potentially fall asleep. When you're physically active, the task itself might pull you forward. And so I think there's just the element of how stimulating in a way the task might be.

25:43Cognitive tasks are tiring as well, but they don't have the same type of demands. Salvador, what do you think? Yeah, the muscular and skeletal systems of the body are massive. So definitely more energy spent with the muscles than with the brain. even if the brain, according to its size, it's very high energy consuming. Some people actually have been clever enough to try to work that out in joules and apparently a full working brain would consume the equivalent to a 20 watt light bulb. That's an average, of course. I like it. You know when you see in cartoons when someone has an idea, the light bulb above their head goes.

26:28You're telling me, neuroscientists, this is correct. Fantastic. Taking it literally. Sophie, Polly, Salvador, thank you so much for such a focused discussion. Thanks for having me. Bye. Listeners, please do keep sending in your amazing questions. And here's Deborah Batsofin with a reminder of how to do it, including our new WhatsApp number. You've been listening to CrowdScience from the BBC World Service. The presenter was Alex Lathbridge and the producer was Tom Bonnet. If you've got a science question you'd like the team to answer, you can email it to crowdscience at bbc.co.uk or send a message or voice note on WhatsApp.

27:16The number is plus 44 8000 314 773. That's plus 44-800-314-773. Thanks for listening.