Are we born to multi-task?

Are some people wired for multi-tasking? Do their brains work differently than those of folks who are able to concentrate on a single activity despite myriad distractions?

Apparently so, according to a study in this week’s edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Stanford University researchers recruited 19 undergrads who were heavy-duty multi-taskers – they were at the top of their class in their ability to simultaneously read, watch TV, listen to music, send and receive text messages, check their e-mail and surf the Web – and 22 others who rarely did two or three of those things at once. Volunteers in both groups submitted to a battery of tests.

It turns out the single-taskers do a better job of filtering out irrelevant stimuli compared with the multi-taskers. To measure this, the volunteers were asked to gauge whether a red rectangle had changed its orientation on a computer screen without getting distracted by a bunch of blue rectangles. The more blue rectangles there were, the worse the multi-taskers did on the test. But the distracting rectangles had no effect on the single-taskers’ performance, the study found.

As further evidence that multi-taskers are prone to distraction, a second test found that changing the color of letters that flashed on a computer screen caused them to take 77 milliseconds longer than single-taskers to decide whether they were looking at the letter “X.” (The multi-taskers were just as accurate, however.) Other exercises found that multi-taskers have the same problem when it comes to cluttering up their working memory with extraneous stuff.

Presumably, someone with a lot of multi-tasking experience would be quite skilled at toggling back and forth between two tasks. To test this, volunteers were shown a letter and a number together on a computer screen. They were asked to decide whether the letter was a consonant or a vowel or whether the number was even or odd. The researchers found that it took 167 milliseconds longer for the multi-taskers to switch between the letter and the number tasks than it did for the single-taskers.

Taken together, the results certainly imply that multi-taskers “approach fundamental information-processing activities differently than” single-taskers, the researchers conclude. But why? Does a long history of multi-tasking make it difficult for people to focus? Or do they become multi-taskers because they are naturally attracted to a wide range of stimuli? That question remains unanswered.

But the answer is important, especially for single-taskers. Though they performed better on the battery of tests, it’s clear these modern times favor those who can manage multiple forms of media at one time. If it’s hard for single-taskers to adapt, they may “be increasingly unable to cope with the changing media environment,” the researchers concluded.  Perhaps they should read this or this for some multi-tasking tips.

-- Karen Kaplan

Photo: High school student Kyle Gosselin chats on the phone while simultaneously surfing the Web. His brain might be wired for multi-tasking. Credit: Anne Cusack/Los Angeles Times

The truth is, we're easily tempted

Humans regularly succumb to greed, lust and self-destruction. One reason we fail so often in the face of temptation is that we routinely overestimate our personal powers of restraint, researchers say.

A study from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University tested how an individual's belief in his or her ability to control impulses -- such as greed, drug craving or sexual arousal -- influenced his or her response to temptation. It found that people usually miscalculated the amount of temptation they could truly handle, which led to a greater likelihood of indulging in an impulsive behavior.

"People are not good at anticipating the power of their urges, and those who are the most confident about their self-control are the most likely to give into temptation," the lead author of the paper, Loren Nordgren, said in a news release. "The key is simply to avoid any situations where vices and other weaknesses thrive and, most importantly, for individuals to keep a humble view of their willpower. . . . We expose ourselves to more temptation than is wise, and subsequently we have millions of people suffering with obesity, additions and other unhealthy lifestyles."

Besides individual behavior, the study raises important questions about whether we can trust our leaders and the need for regulations and oversight in business and government. People also tend to overestimate another person's ability to resist temptation, the study's authors say. People (say, parents) should think carefully when judging whether a person (say, a teenager) might fall prey to temptation.

The study will published this year in the journal Psychological Science.

-- Shari Roan

Photo credit: Brian Vander Brug / Los Angeles Times

Why we choke under pressure

Perhaps it was golfer Tom Watson's desire to become the oldest person to win a major golf tournament that led to his poor putt on the 18th green and ultimate loss in the British Open a few weeks ago.

A new study in the  journal Psychological Science shows that certain processes take place in the brain when a person is performing for a high reward and that those processes can have a detrimental effect on performance.

The study, published today by British researchers, used functional MRI brain scans to examine people while they played a computerized game for a modest monetary reward. Nineteen subjects played the games in which they had to catch a "high-payoff prey" or "low-payoff prey." They performed worse when trying to catch the high-payoff prey. Brain scans showed increased activity in the ventral mid-brain, an area linked to motivation and reward response.

"[H]ighly skilled players sometimes perform catastrophically when on the brink of victory," the authors wrote. "Often called 'choking under pressure,' this phenomenon extends beyond sport." Examples include students taking academic tests and tasks that are performed in front of an audience.

This study suggests that it's the presence of an incentive or reward that causes people to choke and that they might perform better if they didn't care as much. The intense desire to perform well causes an excessive arousal and activity in the brain that actually could interfere with decision-making, memory and attention.

The researchers note, however, that many variables are linked to choking under pressure. Anxiety, for example, can impair performance. But the fact that subjects in this study performed worse on a computer game in which the reward was relatively modest suggests that being over-motivated can be a stumbling block.

-- Shari Roan

Photo: Tom Watson on the 18th green during the British Open final round July 19. Credit: Peter Morrison  /  AP

What happened next for famous brain injury patient Phineas Gage

A newly discovered daguerreotype of Phineas Gage, the only image of the man known to exist, recalls one of the most bizarre incidents in railroading and neurological history. (Today's story: "A piercing image of Phineas Gage.")

Gage was the foreman of a construction crew laying a railroad roadbed in 1848, using powder to blast rock. As he was packing powder and sand into a hole in rock, the powder detonated, sending the 13-pound tamper into his cheek and out of the top of his head. It landed 25 to 30 yards behind him.

Surprisingly, Gage was unconscious only momentarily, if at all, though most of the front of the left side of his brain was destroyed. He made a full physical recovery over the following 10 weeks, but his personality was irreversibly altered. Whereas he had once been an intelligent and even-tempered worker, he had overnight become irreverent, grossly profane, obstinate, capricious and ill-tempered. His friends said he was "no longer Gage."

Gage's case influenced 19th century thinking about the localization of functions in the brain and was perhaps the first to tie specific behavioral attributes to localized areas of the brain. His case has subsequently been the subject of many books and scholarly papers. Some authors have stated that his experience provided insights into brain surgery, but most authors now agree that the only conclusive fact to arise from it was that surgery could be performed on the brain without being inevitably lethal.

Gage was never able to resume his job on the railroad. He spent some time at P.T. Barnum's American Museum in New York City, where patrons apparently paid to see him, and made appearances in several large cities in New England. He later found work in a livery, eventually moving to Chile to pursue this occupation. In 1859, feeling unwell, he returned to the United States to live with his mother and sister. In February 1860, he began to suffer a series of increasingly severe convulsions, and he died in May of that year.

-- Thomas H. Maugh II

Photo: Reproduction of a daguerreotype of Phineas Gage, the railroad construction worker.

Credit:Journal of the History of the Neurosciences, Copyright Taylor and Francis Group LLC.

Perhaps it's time to stop blaming our cave-dwelling ancestors

Sometimes, men have affairs. Sometimes, their wives stand by them. (The reverse also happens, but those scenarios are rarely played out for public consumption, as is the exceedingly common case with U.S. politicians.) For people seeking some public explanation for such intensely private matters, evolutionary psychology has offered one-stop shopping.

The notion is that evolution has bestowed upon us certain predispositions. That is, men are hard-wired to procreate, regardless of the emotional toll on others; women are hard-wired to protect their existing offspring, regardless of the emotional toll on themselves. As for politicians -- well, it all goes double for them, with the need for power, stature, conquest, etc.

Done. And on to the next public display of emotion and remorse.

Now, evolutionary psychology is getting a more skeptical look.

Sharon Begley writes in Newsweek:

"In some environments it might indeed be adaptive for women to seek sugar daddies. In some, it might be adaptive for stepfathers to kill their stepchildren. In some, it might be adaptive for men to be promiscuous. But not in all. And if that's the case, then there is no universal human nature as evo psych defines it. That is what a new wave of studies has been discovering, slaying assertions about universals right and left."

Here's the article, "Why Do We Rape, Kill and Sleep Around? The fault, dear Darwin, lies not in our ancestors, but in ourselves."

And David Brooks attests in the New York Times:

"Far from being preprogrammed with a series of hardwired mental modules, as the E.P. types assert, our brains are fluid and plastic. We’re learning that evolution can be a more rapid process than we thought. It doesn’t take hundreds of thousands of years to produce genetic alterations. Moreover, we’ve evolved to adapt to diverse environments."

Here's the column, "Human Nature Today."

Begley in particular has taken some flak for her article. Gad Saad questions her assessment and defends the field in Psychology Today:

"Evolutionary psychologists are perfectly aware that humans are an inextricable mélange of their genes and idiosyncratic life experiences. This is known as the interactionist perspective. ... That said this does not imply that human nature is infinitely malleable.

Here's his full response, "The Never-Ending Misconceptions About Evolutionary Psychology."

David Sloan Wilson, meanwhile, says on the Huffington Post that "Begley's article made some cheap shots but it also made some fair shots about evolutionary psychology that need to be acknowledged." He lays them out here in "Evolutionary Psychology and the Public Media: Rekindling the Romance."

The discussion about evolution's influence on our behavior will continue, but clearly the media seem less inclined to accept it as explanation.

-- Tami Dennis

Photo: People looking for a simple answer to infidelity may have to keep looking.

Credit: Eric Boyd / Los Angeles Times

No racial bias? Really? A brain scan may give you away.

Our brains may empathize along racial lines, even if we report no such bias. 

Observers shown video clips of subjects receiving painful stimuli showed increased brain activation in the areas associated with empathy and emotion when subjects shared the observer’s race, Chinese researchers reported in a study published in the Journal of Neuroscience on Wednesday. 

The study is the first to use brain imaging technology to confirm subconscious in-group prejudice, a topic that has been investigated since the 1950s.

Perceiving others’ pain is an automatic reaction that activates the same neural circuit in the brain as the one that is activated during first-person pain. This kind of empathic response has been shown, in studies, to be stronger if there is a connection between individuals. For example, a 2002 study showed that white college students who read a passage involving a black or white man charged with a criminal act reported greater empathy for, and assigned more lenient punishments to, the white defendant.

In this study, from Peking University in Beijing, Chinese and Caucasian university participants watched video clips showing faces of Chinese and Caucasian models with neutral expressions receiving either a painful (needle penetration) or non-painful (Q-tip touch) stimulation on the cheek. 

The participants were then asked to rate the amount of pain the model felt, as well as their own level of discomfort while watching the jabs. 

Race had no effect on the survey responses by either Chinese or Caucasian observers. But the same was not true in their brains.

While participants watched the videos, researchers used functional MRI to scan what was going on inside their heads. The scans revealed increased activation in the brain regions that mediate the empathic neural response. But when the painful simulations were applied to subjects who shared a race with observers, the neural responses increased significantly more than when the ones being stuck with needles were of the other racial group.

The findings suggest that bias against those from other groups may exist at a fundamental level in the human mind, despite what self-reports reveal. 

“If this is confirmed in future research, people then should be careful about their own behaviors during social interaction even though we intend to deal with in-group and out-group members equally well at the conscious level of the mind,” says coauthor Shihui Han, a professor at Peking University's Department of Psychology, in an e-mail.

-- Shara Yurkiewicz

Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your (right) ear

The answer to your question may depend on which ear you ask. We tend to offer our right ear to speakers and are more likely to say yes to a request addressed into it, reported Italian researchers in a study published in the journal Naturwissenschaften.

Although knowledge of right-ear dominance is nothing new, how the results were generated in this study was: The scientists talked to strangers in nightclubs.

Right-ear preference is one of the best-known asymmetries in humans, transcending gender, ethnicity, age and right- or left-handedness. It is thought to be due to the right ear’s speediness in transmitting information to our brain’s left hemisphere, which dominates in processing language.

Until now, however, most studies on the phenomenon were performed in laboratory-controlled settings, not more “natural” environments.  

To change this, researchers Daniele Marzoli and Luca Tommasi of the Gabriele d'Annunzio University in Italy gathered observational evidence from what they called an “ecological situation”: noisy Italian discotheques.

First, the researchers watched 286 clubbers while they were talking, and observed that 72% of all interactions happened on the listener’s right side.

Next, the researchers had a woman approach 80 men and 80 women, mumble a meaningless request and observe which ear the listener offered. (She then asked for a cigarette.) 

Overall, 58% of the subjects lent their right ear, with females showing a significant preference for doing so. In this situation, when the people who were approached chose the ear they offered, the woman was just about as likely to get a cigarette regardless of which ear she spoke into.

In the final leg of the experiment, the woman went up to a person and chose which ear she spoke into. When this was done, the likelihood of the woman being given the cigarette doubled with requests that were spoken into the right ear: 34 of 88 clubbers offered a cigarette to an asker addressing the right ear, and only 17 of 88 clubbers did the same when addressed on the left.

Why should this be? It is thought that activation of the left and right brain hemispheres correspond with positive and negative judgments, respectively. This asymmetry is linked to two motivational systems: “approach” in the left and “avoidance” in the right. 

The data, which suggest specialization of different sides of the brain for different emotions, are consistent with previous findings. For example, one study from 1991 found that subjects showed a better memory of arguments with which they agreed when the sentences were heard through the right ear, and better remembering of disagreements heard through their left ear.

However, the scientists caution, “Unequal distribution of sound sources in space, type of music played, [or] effect of alcohol intake” all may have had an effect on results.

-- Shara Yurkiewicz

Well-meaning parents may be worsening their children's OCD

Parents of children with obsessive-compulsive disorder are often faced with a tough choice: not indulge the behavior, or soothe the anxiety. While many parents often opt for the latter, they may do so at a price. A recent study shows that accommodating OCD behavior may trigger more serious symptoms, but therapy may help in reversing that.

In the study, which appears in the Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 49 children aged 6 to 18 with OCD took part in 14 sessions of family-based cognitive-behavioral therapy with their parents. In those sessions, emphasis was placed on helping parents reduce "family accommodation," or trying to relieve the anxiety by offering comfort, giving the child objects, or even doing tasks like homework. The therapy also included exposure-response prevention, a method of treatment based on the idea that by facing their fears and realizing they're baseless, people will eventually stop their behaviors as they find better ways to cope.

Before the sessions, tests were given to measure the children's level of OCD and note how often parents indulged their behavior. Researchers (from the University of Florida) noticed that the more serious the symptoms, the more the parents accommodated them.

But after therapy, families did not try to soothe their children's anxiety as much or facilitate their behavior. Parents who changed the most also saw the most progress in improving their children’s OCD symptoms.

Despite the results, researchers caution that the study had its limitations, including the lack of a control group, the fact that most study participants were white and middle or upper-middle class, and that parents reported their own levels of family accommodation. They recommend that future studies delve into what factors could influence families accommodating their kids' behavior, such as subtypes of OCD, comorbidities, or family patterns.

-Jeannine Stein

Photo credit: Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times

Please silence your phone -- NOW!

Everyone hates that cellphone that rings in an inappropriate setting -- a classroom, during a concert or movie, in a church (how about during a wedding?) These calls are not only annoying, a new study has found, they pose the kind of distraction that can impair learning or derail someone's train of thought.

"Nuisance noises have real-life impacts," said Jill Shelton of Washington University in St. Louis, the author of the study, in a news release.

In one study, Shelton posed as a student in a crowded, undergraduate psychology lecture and allowed her cellphone to ring loudly for about 30 seconds. The students exposed to the ringing scored 25% worse on a test of material presented before the distraction. Students tested later scored about 25% worse for recall of content during the distraction even though the same information was covered by the professor just prior to the phone ring and was projected as text in a slide show during the distraction. Students scored even worse when Shelton added to the disturbance by frantically searching her handbag as if attempting to find and silence her phone.

The study, published online in the Journal of Environmental Psychology, also found that cellphones that play a popular song for a ring tone can have an even longer-lasting negative impact on attention. A custom tone that identifies the caller as a particular person, such as mom or the boss, can be especially distracting.

"Depending on how familiar people are with these songs, it could lead to an even worse impairment in their cognitive performance," she said.

The findings raise the question of what other types of everyday disturbances -- such as beeping and buzzing from incoming e-mail -- jar attention and learning processes. But the study showed that, with repeated exposure, students were able to block the distracting effects and reduce the cognitive impairment caused by the noise. Evidence also suggests that being prepared in advance for nuisance noises lessens their impact.

"There's definitely some evidence to suggest that people can become habituated to a distracting noise," she said. "If you're in an office where the phones are just ringing all the time everyday, it may initially be distracting to you, but you will probably get over it."

-- Shari Roan

Photo credit: Washington University

Brain drugs won't go away, so best give them some thought

If pills can make us better mentally -- and it seems clear they can -- it's time to answer the question of whether we should let them. 

For some people, the question is already moot. In the April 27 issue of the New Yorker, writer Margaret Talbot explores the issue of brain medications in "Brain Gain: The underground world of 'neuroenhancing' drugs."

She writes: "In recent years Adderall and Ritalin, another stimulant, have been adopted as cognitive enhancers: drugs that high-functioning, overcommitted people take to become higher-functioning and more overcommitted."

She tells her story in some part through a recent Harvard graduate named Alex. He makes a compelling case for what can be accomplished with a little help.

Some neuroscientists and ethicists have already answered the bigger question among themselves. Says a recent blog post from Times staff writer Melissa Healy: "Pop a smart pill? Why not, says a group of neuroethicists"

-- Tami Dennis

Photo: Ritalin -- the little helper for people with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and overworked, over-stressed students -- is going mainstream.

Credit: Keith Beaty/Toronto Star/ZUMA Press