AMA #11: Improve Task Switching & Productivity and Reduce Brain Fog

ANDREW HUBERMAN: Welcome to the Huberman Lab podcast,

where we discuss science and science-based tools

for everyday life.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

I'm Andrew Huberman.

I'm a Professor of Neurobiology and Ophthalmology

at Stanford School of Medicine.

Today is an Ask Me Anything episode, or AMA.

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Without further ado, let's get to answering your questions.

The first question is about task switching.

The specific question is, is there

a way to get better at task switching?

Task switching is an incredibly interesting topic.

It's something that plagues many people.

That is, a lot of people have challenges with task switching.

It's also a topic that people will often confuse

with cognitive flexibility.

All of us, unless it's been removed,

have an area of our brain called the prefrontal cortex.

The words prefrontal cortex actually

refers to a fairly varied real estate within the human brain.

It's not one area of the human brain.

Prefrontal cortex actually includes a lot

of different subdivisions that do different things

in the context of cognition and directing action,

withholding action, these kinds of things.

One of the main functions of the prefrontal cortex

is that when it's working well, it

allows us to direct our focus and our cognition,

our thinking, in a context-dependent way.

One of the simplest ways to describe this

is that when you took math in high school

or if you're still taking math, your brain

had to carry out certain types of cognitive operations

that were very different than the types

of cognitive operations that you need

to carry out in your history class or your social studies

class.

There were some features of all three

of those classes that were the same,

in the sense that presumably, you

had to sit in a chair for all of those classes.

You followed a certain set of rules

that pertained to all three of those different classes,

even though there are different subjects.

But then, there were certain rules that pertained just

to mathematics, certain rules that you followed

because a particular teacher was strict-- not because

of the topic they were covering--

as well as certain rules that maybe you did not pay attention

to because a different teacher was a little more lax.

For instance, maybe there was a teacher

that let you put your feet up on the chair in front of you.

Maybe, another teacher forbid that at all costs.

The point being that your prefrontal cortex

is the area of your brain that, along with other areas

of your brain, ensures that you engage

in context-specific behavior, context-specific thinking

and context-specific understanding about what

you should and should not do.

Now, cognitive flexibility is similar,

in the sense that it describes your ability to switch

the types of cognitive operations--

as the name suggests--

depending on what sorts of things

you're trying to learn or understand.

It's a lot more extensive than that.

In fact, we will probably do an entire episode

all about both cognitive flexibility and perhaps,

even a separate episode on task switching.

Task switching is somewhat distinct

from cognitive flexibility.

First of all task, switching requires cognitive flexibility,

but they are not the same thing.

Now, when we talk about task switching-- or rather,

when you see task switching in the scientific literature--

most often, it has to do with people

performing one particular type of mental or physical

operation.

Say, they're maneuvering things with their hands

or other parts of their body, or they

are required to carry out one specific type

of mental process.

And then, they are required, either at random intervals

or at specific intervals-- maybe every 10 minutes

or so-- to switch their attention

and to do a different task entirely.

In the laboratory experiment situation,

this has most typically been carried out the following way.

People are going to do one cognitive task, maybe

mathematics, or they're going to count, for instance, from 1

up to infinity, as high as they can

go in a given amount of time, in increments of say,

7 or increments of 7 plus 1 then 7 minus 1.

These can be made increasingly difficult. You get the idea.

And then perhaps, a tone is played

or they'll get a signal from the experimenter.

They need to switch their task to doing something quite

different, but also cognitive.

That's the most typical arrangement.

Another typical arrangement in a task switching experiment

is that the person in the task switching experiment

will be asked to do some sort of physical manipulation

of objects, maybe placement of puzzle pieces

into the correct configuration.

Then at some designated interval or intervals,

they will have to switch to a different manual task.

Fewer-- not zero, but fewer-- experiments

have examined task switching between

physical and cognitive tasks.

There are these kind of outrageous examples

that you can find on the internet.

By the way, I don't suggest that anyone

go engage in these examples in real life of extreme task

switching.

One of the most notable ones would be chess boxing.

Believe it or not, this exists, where

two people will enter a ring.

They will sit down at a table.

They will play chess for a given period of time.

They're entirely focused on playing chess.

Then a buzzer will go off.

The chess table will be cleared.

The chairs will be cleared.

They will be expected to box, literally

fight, for a round of a minute to three minutes,

and then, go back to chess, then to boxing, so-called chess

boxing.

Again, I'm not suggesting people chess box.

But I know that many people have challenges with task switching.

Here, I can raise my hand and say that I am one such person.

I've always had a pretty good ability to drop into deep focus

after a period of time.

I, like everybody else, take a little bit of time

to get into a book chapter or to get

into a mode of physical exercise.

But once I'm doing something, I tend

to be very focused on that.

I have a much greater challenge in switching out

of that focused mode to doing the next thing, which

is one of the reasons why oftentimes, I run tardy,

because I'm still mentally thinking about or physically

engaged in the thing that I was doing before.

This is something I'm constantly working on.

As a consequence, I've had to seek out and implement

certain tools to improve my ability to task switch.

I'm going to share a few of those tools with you

now, because I know a number of people

probably struggle with the same thing.

As I mentioned earlier, I'm also going

to do a full-length episode about task switching,

both the underlying mechanisms of task switching as well

as a more extensive list of tools related

to task switching, as a full-length Huberman Lab

podcast episode.

How can we get better at task switching?

Short of having somebody scruff you by the neck

and force you to stop whatever activity you're doing

and engage in the next activity that you're doing,

one of the best things that we can

do to support our ability to task switch-- that's nicely

supported both at the mechanistic level

and at the practical level within the published

literature-- is to introduce short transition

gaps between the activities that we're trying to switch between.

This is something that, in my opinion,

has not been discussed enough.

In fact, when was the last time you heard about the requirement

for introducing gaps between tasks

if you want to switch between them more efficiently?

And yet, as a consequence of this

not being discussed very often, I think a lot of people

have placed an undue burden on themselves.

For instance, a lot of people think that when

you sit down with a book and you're going to read,

that you should be able to immediately focus

on the material that you're reading

and not have your mind flitting about.

During the first five, maybe even 10 minutes

of reading a book chapter, unless you are absolutely

enthralled from the first word, or you

are intensely curious what the material in that book chapter

is--

maybe that book chapter is about you

and what's going to happen to you next in your life.

Maybe the news article is about something

that you care oh so much about.

But unless it's one of those specific instances,

it's going to be about five or 10

minutes before the neural circuits

in your brain that are required to understand

and digest and commit that material to memory

are going to come online at the levels of activity that

are going to be required for you to experience

that as intense focus, or even as mild focus.

The activity of the brain is always

going to be in a push-pull.

This is extremely important for understanding task switching.

When you go from one task--

and maybe the task was simply to walk over

to where the book is located--

to focusing on the material within that book,

you have to both engage activity within certain neural circuits

and you need to disengage the activity

of other neural circuits.

Sometimes, this is referred to as inhibition

of certain neural circuits.

Other times, it's just going to be a dissipation of activity

of those neural circuits.

They're just going to quiet down,

like a dimming of the lights in a particular room,

while the activity of other neural circuits increases.

The first thing that you really need to understand,

if you want to get better at task switching,

is that you cannot and you should not expect yourself

to immediately drop into a narrow trench of focus,

or a narrow trench of ability, for anything that you're not

already extremely skilled at or extremely interested

in knowing.

One of the reasons why this is often overlooked

is that, for instance, if we receive a text

message from somebody and we are very interested in what's

contained in that text message, maybe even eagerly anticipating

the dot, dot, dot in that little window

where the text message is going to arrive-- like here it comes.

Here it comes.

Here it comes.

It's an example of where you are able to immediately pay

attention and absorb information.

For instance, if you're trying to meet somebody in a big city,

and you need to know exactly where to meet them,

and you've arrived at the place where

you thought you need to be and then, you can't find them.

You're waiting.

Where are you?

Where are you?

You're going to commit that information to memory

and you're going to act on it.

But when you sit down to read a book of unknown content,

or where you have just a general sense of what the content is,

or when you sit down to do something like work

on a spreadsheet or your taxes, or engage

in a conversation with somebody, expect a five to 10 minute

transition period.

I can't emphasize this enough, because I think a lot of people

mistakenly think that they have issues with attention.

Perhaps indeed, they have clinically diagnosable

attention deficit hyperactivity disorder

or some other form of attention deficit disorder.

I certainly can't rule that out based on this conversation

alone.

But a lot of people place this unfair burden on themselves

to immediately be able to focus on a given task.

This is also true for physical tasks.

If you go to the gym to work out or you're heading out

on a run or a cycling expedition,

the idea that you would immediately be able to cycle

at your peak performance, or that you could perform sets

and reps in the gym as best as you possibly

could without any warm-up, without any transition period,

that you could forget about the difficult or maybe even great

conversation that you were having on the way in,

or that you could forget about other activities

that you need to do in the rest of your day,

that's just completely unfair.

It doesn't match at all the way that your neural circuits work.

You really need to match your expectation of your ability

to focus on and perform a given task,

whether or not it's cognitive or physical, to

the actual underlying biology.

That's the first point.

The second point is that we know that if you want to switch from

one task to another task, that you are making it more

difficult to drop into full-task engagement-- or rather,

engagement with task B following task A,

if you try and go immediately from task A to task B--

that even the introduction--

I find this so cool-- even the introduction

of an arbitrary but very short transition period of say,

15 seconds, where you know that you're introducing

15 seconds of transition and you designate it as transition,

will allow you to engage in a more efficient and more

complete level of task execution on task B

if you introduce even a brief transition period.

This I find fascinating, because what this means

is that there are top down influences.

There are literally things that we can tell ourselves,

based on an understanding of the underlying mechanisms, that

allow us to task switch better.

This certainly doesn't involve taking any kind of prescription

drug or supplement or doing anything differently,

except as you go from task A to task B,

knowing and designating that a transition period, even a very

brief one where you are not trying to perform task B

and that you've designated this as a transition period.

I'm not trying to focus on the next thing that I need to do.

I might focus on it inadvertently,

but I'm not deliberately trying to focus on it.

Rather, I'm going to think about what I just did

and the fact that I'm no longer doing that, kind of leaving it

like a fog behind.

You're trying to move from this deep trench of attention,

hopefully on task A-- or maybe, you

didn't achieve a deep trench of attention--

and you're now done with task A. You're not

placing this unfair expectation on your neural circuits

to just flip to task B. You're also acknowledging

that task B is going to take five to 10 minutes to drop

into fully.

We already talked about that.

But you're going to shorten that five to 10 minutes

by deliberately introducing a transition period.

What comes in that transition period and its duration

is important.

First, let's deal with the duration.

How long should the transition period be?

That is going to scale directly with how long you

are in a deep trench of focus for task A. Let's

assume task A was something that was kind of light for you.

Maybe, you're just handling some email.

Maybe, you're talking to a coworker.

Maybe, you were at a board meeting

and it was kind of light.

The stuff was just OK.

You're used to this stuff.

This is stuff that you do all the time.

Now, you're headed back to your desk

or you're headed to your next class.

Or perhaps, you did a workout that morning

and now, you're going to head to your place of work.

Or maybe, you're leaving work and you're

going to engage with family.

You know need to switch all these cognitive operations.

You need to dump the stuff that you were just

doing cognitively, and you now need

to do a bunch of other things.

Context is switching.

Task is switching.

Just ask yourself, how deeply was I

entrenched in that other activity?

Was my mind flitting to other things?

If I was in a deep trench of attention for that given thing,

then you should give yourself slightly longer

for this transition period, maybe five or even 10 minutes

if you have that time.

Even if you give yourself as short as 60 to 90 seconds

of transition and you just designate it as transition,

you're going to benefit in terms of your ability

to do the next task.

To be very clear, if you were in kind of a light task

or something that didn't have much cognitive demand,

then the transition period can be fairly short.

It can be just a couple of minutes.

Rather, if you were in a deep trench of attention,

you really engaged in that first task,

I suggest giving yourself a couple

of minutes or more, maybe as much as five to 10 minutes.

But you might not have that much time.

In which case, give yourself any kind of transition,

even if it's 10 seconds.

I certainly have had times in my life,

in particular when I was a new assistant professor before I

got tenure, where I remember sitting down

to work on a grant.

I'd get two lines out.

Someone would knock on the door.

Hey, where are the whatever, the 30 mil syringes?

Where do we keep the buffers?

Did we get this thing in?

And then, I'd have to shift my attention

and go back to writing.

I'd be distracted by something else again.

Which is not to say that people were distracting me unfairly.

It was simply the case that, at that time,

my life required being involved in a lot more things

than it did as my career progressed,

at least in the short term.

The point being that if you are deeply engaged in an activity,

give yourself a little bit longer in the transition period

between them.

If you are sort of superficially involved in an activity,

you need less of a transition period.

But you need a transition period.

What should come during that transition period?

The most important thing to arrive in that transition

period is a relative lack of attention to anything new.

This is what's so destructive about the phone.

Keep in mind, I am not one of these people that thinks

that smartphones are terrible.

In fact, I use mine plural, very often, all day, often.

Not necessarily during deep cognitive

focus, but in between those bouts of focus,

I have to text message people.

I do work on there.

I'm on social media, so certainly

not demonizing the smartphone.

However, if you finish a given activity--

whether or not it's cognitive or physical activity--

and you are headed to something else that requires you do a new

task, and that task requires significant amounts

of attention and focus, then you would do very well to allow

yourself a period of anywhere from two minutes to maybe,

as long as 10 minutes--

I know this is going to be very hard for people--

but two minutes to as long as 10 minutes

where you are not looking at your phone.

You're not texting.

You're not on social media.

You're not foraging for anything.

In fact, you're trying to limit the total amount of information

that you're bringing into your nervous system.

Now, you don't have to walk around with eyes closed

and try and not hear and not see.

Let's be practical, folks.

That's impossible to do anyway.

You can't shut down your brain while awake.

You can go into states of deeper relaxation.

There's a non-sleep deep rest, which we'll

talk about in a little bit.

But you can't shut off your brain deliberately,

not in any healthy way that is.

But by introducing these transition zones, or transition

periods as we'll call them, of two to 10 minutes

between different tasks, and making sure

that within those transition periods,

you are not bringing in new information-- again,

another context and what are you really doing?

You're ensuring that you're not going from task A to task B

to task C.

What we're talking about here is trying

to limit your task switching between task A and task B

and not introducing another task in between.

You might think that looking at your phone is not a task.

It's so easy.

It's so reflexive.

But it is.

It's bringing in a lot of new context,

in particular pictures and movies which

are tremendous stimulus for the nervous system

and anchoring your attention.

It's bringing in new ideas, new thoughts

that no matter how hard you try, are

going to intrude into your ability to perform task B. When

people say, how do I get better at task switching,

I immediately want to say, please

don't introduce yet more tasks.

Switching from one task to another is hard enough already.

Don't introduce another task in between.

Some of you might take this to mean

that you shouldn't have a conversation

with a coworker after a meeting while walking down the hall.

I'm not saying that.

I still encourage people to be social.

I encourage people to engage in workplace environments.

However, I will say, after many years

of working in laboratories that at times were quite

large, if you walk into the lab and there

are a lot of different things going on,

one of the things that you learn how to do,

if you're going to get good at your craft,

is to not pay attention to what's

going on with everyone crowded around a computer looking

at who's winning at the World Cup.

I'm not trying to insult soccer players here.

I enjoy soccer, both playing it and observing it.

But one has to scruff themselves a little bit in trying

to limit their attention to a number of different things

in the environment, and really go from task A

to task B in a really dedicated way.

Short lists benefit certain people.

I know a lot of people are list makers out there.

They like to put two or three things, or maybe 20 things

that they're going to accomplish each day.

One of the best tools that I ever

learned, both for the sake of task switching

but also for sake of just getting things

done on a consistent basis--

I picked up while I was a master's student

at Berkeley-- a very accomplished professor

at that time told me that he writes down every day three

things that he's going to accomplish

and only three things, never more than three.

He also included other activities.

In fact, he was quite active in his physical life.

He rode his bike to campus.

He also was a runner.

He also went to the gym.

He did not include those on his list of three things.

He would write down no more than three critical things

to do each day.

He had three critical tasks.

I've employed that method as well.

I'll write down one, sometimes two, most often three,

but if I can, just one or two tasks that I

need to complete each day.

Everything else is considered part of the,

let's just say, automaticity function

of my day, things that I already know how to do.

They don't require a ton of cognitive focus.

But I limit the things that require

a lot of cognitive focus to three things per day.

However, those three things per day

can take up many, many hours each

and certainly, on the whole.

There are additional things that one

can do to improve your ability to task switch.

One of the things that I found particularly beneficial

is not a meditation, but rather, is a perceptual exercise.

This is a perceptual exercise that I

learned about when I was a graduate student,

but in a totally different context.

It has to do with the way that your visual system

and the parts of your brain that parse time

are related to one another and influence one another.

The reason this tool makes sense for improving your ability

to task switch is because it turns out

that where you focus your visual attention strongly

influences the way that your brain parses time.

I'll describe the tool first.

And then, I'll get a little bit into the underlying mechanisms.

Again, I'll get deep into the underlying mechanisms, as well

as the tool, as well as additional tools,

in a future episode about task switching on the Huberman Lab

podcast.

If you were to, for instance, close your eyes

and not look at anything in your external environment

and just concentrate, for instance,

on your breathing or the feeling on the surface of your skin--

I know this is starting to sound like meditation, but trust me,

it's not meditation--

your perception of time, that is, how finely you

are slicing time, would be distinctly different

than if you were to open your eyes

and focus on a faraway location, say way off in the horizon,

and not focus on your bodily sensations.

Similarly, if you were to focus your attention

on some intermediate location, maybe,

let's say, 20 feet away and simultaneously,

focus on your internal bodily sensations

or the surface of your skin, your perception of time how

quickly time was passing would also

be different than if you closed your eyes

or if you were looking at some distant location.

The perceptual tool for task switching is a very simple one.

It's one that frankly, I do every morning

and have for many years now and at least, for me, has really

enhanced my ability to task switch.

That is, just take a couple of minutes.

This really only takes about two or three minutes.

Typically, what I will do is, I'll start by closing my eyes.

I should mention, I typically do this

in an environment where ideally, I

can see off into the distance, perhaps from a balcony

if I'm in an apartment or a house, ideally outdoors.

But if I'm indoors, I'll still do this.

I'll just look as far off into the distance

as I can when that step is required.

I start off by closing my eyes and essentially not looking

at anything, but directing my brain's focus

to either the surface of my body,

just what it feels like, what it's in contact with or not

in contact with, maybe my breathing.

Then, I'll open my eyes and I will

focus on some location on my body but my bodily surface,

like my hand at some distance.

I'll focus my attention there maybe

for just five to 15 seconds.

I should mention that the first station,

as I call them, where my eyes were closed

and I was focusing on my bodily sensations,

I also just do that for about five to 15 seconds.

I don't count specifically, just roughly five to 15 seconds.

Second station, you're looking at the surface of your hand.

If you like, you can also concentrate on your breathing.

But typically, people will just focus on some specific location

on their hand.

Then, I'll typically lower my hand.

Then, I'll look off into the distance, maybe

five to 10 feet.

It doesn't really matter.

Focus my visual attention there.

Try and hold that focus for five to 15 seconds.

Then, I'll look further off in the distance, maybe, further

still off into the distance.

Ultimately, what I try and do is look at a location

as far off into the distance as I possibly can.

I'm also trying to pay attention to my breathing

at the same time, just as a way of calibrating

my location to the location that I'm looking at

and how great that is.

Then typically, I'll close my eyes

and return my attention to my immediate environment

and my breathing just in the location I'm in.

The entire thing only takes about two minutes.

Again, starting with eyes closed, focusing on self five

to 15 seconds.

Then, eyes open, focusing on surface of one's body, that is,

focusing one's visual attention five to 15 seconds maybe

10 feet away, then maybe, 50 feet away.

If you're in the metric system, meters works just as well.

These distances do not have to be precise.

And then, off to the horizon and then,

back to one's immediate location by closing one's eyes.

What is happening when one does this perceptual exercise?

Again, it's a perceptual exercise.

It's a visual perceptual exercise.

What's happening is, you are shifting

your visual focus, obviously.

But you're also shifting the way in which you

fine slice or thick slice time.

Your ability to recognize, consciously, whether or not

your thin slicing or thick slicing time is much harder

to get a grasp of than it is to get a grasp of whether

or not you're looking at your hand or off in the distance.

That's kind of obvious.

But what we know for sure is that as you

shift your attention from your immediate environment

out to different designated locations in your environment,

and your time perception shifts accordingly,

you're essentially training your brain

to shift visual focus and the way in which you

process in the time domain.

This is important in the context of task switching,

because so much of task switching

is not just to understand OK, I'm

going from reading to running or from running to reading

and the different types of operations that are required

in one case versus the other, but also,

a shift in the neural circuits that underlie

your perception of time.

Again, this is a topic that deserves a much more

elaborate discussion.

So much of our ability to execute a task

with high proficiency has to do with getting

our thinking and our actions into the correct time domain.

When I say time domain, I know a number of people

can get confused because time is time.

People think, what do you mean by time domain?

Space domain makes sense.

Here, I'm not talking about outer space,

whether or not you're looking in one location or another close

to your body or far away from your body

are different domains of space.

But the time domain is a little trickier for most people

to understand.

Just think of it this way.

When you see a slow motion movie, what you're seeing

is a movie that was shot at a high frame

rate, many frames per second.

The typical smartphone shoots movies

at about 60 frames per second, some older ones,

30 frames per second.

The slow-mo function on your smartphone

is actually a high frame rate function.

You took the same movie, but you took it at a higher frame rate.

You've got a lot more images.

Therefore, you can generate slow motion.

With your visual system, when you

focus very close in to your body or you're

focused on bodily sensations in your immediate environment,

you are fine slicing in the time domain

more so than when you are looking

further off in the distance.

Similarly, when you engage in one type of task,

like a board meeting or a Zoom meeting

or a conversation with friends, you

are in a very different set of neural circuit functions

than when you sit down to read or learn math or lift weights

or go to therapy or go for a walk with your dog,

for instance.

Now, it should be clear why when you move from task to task

you want to A, introduce a transition period.

It can be very brief.

Maybe, you don't even have time for the two minute transition

period.

You just say, OK.

I'm in a transition period between task A and task

B. I'm moving from this thing to that thing.

I just need like 10 seconds.

I'm going to recognize.

I'm going to count down 10 to one or one up to 10.

It doesn't matter.

This is transition time.

But this is not a time to look at my phone

or to be in lots of different time domains.

You might say, well, does that mean

I shouldn't look at the horizon while I'm

walking from my meeting back to my desk?

No.

That's not the way that your brain works.

It doesn't anchor to things that just happen

to be in your environment unless they're of particular interest.

What I'm saying is, set a transition period between tasks

ideally, two maybe as long as 10 minutes.

I'm also saying that when you switch between tasks,

or when you initiate your first major task of the day,

please expect--

do expect-- a period in which it's

hard to get into the groove, so to speak.

In addition to that, I recommend having some of practice.

I described the practice that I've

used for some period of time now, at least for me

to great success, where you are deliberately

shifting your visual attention between different locations

close to you and far away.

You're doing that as a perceptual practice.

Again, the whole thing only takes about two minutes,

maybe three minutes.

You don't even need to do it every day.

I happen to do it every day, but I miss the occasional day

here and there.

Even if you were to do this perceptual practice once a week

or three times a week, I'm certain that you'll benefit.

Because in doing that perceptual practice,

there's also an immediate recognition

of the sorts of shifts that your brain is required

to engage in any time you move from task A to task B

or from task B to task C. You start

to see and feel, literally see and feel,

the way that transition occurs.

It takes a little bit of time.

But you can accelerate that transition

if you understand that oh, when I'm looking here and engaging

in this type of behavior or sets of tasks

and then, I'm now going to be expected

to do another task in a completely

different type of environment, the brain is going

to be required to shift over the neural circuits that

are active and less active in order to do that.

You can accelerate that process by practicing

it using that perceptual tool that I described.

There, I covered some specific tools

that one can use to enhance one's ability to task switch,

touching on a bit of the underlying neurobiology

and why transition periods are useful, if not required.

If you think about there's always a transition period when

task switching, but here, you're taking conscious control

over that transition period.

There are additional tools for enhancing one's ability

to task switch.

They tend to be somewhat specific for the certain kinds

of cognitive or physical tasks that one needs to do.

The example of chess boxing that I gave earlier,

a great example of task switching

at its extreme, terrible example of a practice

space-time bridging.

Very safe, I can't think of any way in which it

might be dangerous, although please don't do it

while driving or while operating any other machinery.

By all accounts, very safe, zero cost.

We talked about some of the other tools

for task switching as well.

Thank you for joining for the beginning

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