To sum up: When the physicians multitasked beyond the point where the stress was motivating, they kept their patients in the hospital longer than they would have otherwise, and were less effective at treating their problems.
Multitasking puts a strain on our cognitive resources. Sometimes this pressure inspires us to think more, think faster, and switch our mental focus more often. As is the case in quiet emergency rooms, when we are understimulated our minds operate at a slower, less efficient pace. Increasing cognitive demands invigorates us, and we are capable of rising to meet moderate challenges when we ask ourselves to tackle more than just the minimal. But there is a tipping point. When we try to tackle too much simultaneously, multitasking backfires.
How to Free Up Brain Space
Excessive multitasking can place a heavy burden on our cognitive system that we may be ill-equipped to manage. But even if we try to craft a lifestyle where we live in that sweet spot, balancing cognitive interest against ability, we will find ourselves in situations that demand we do more in less time. How do we optimize our performance when pushed beyond the brink? The work of a team of Spanish neuroscientists found a way to beat the burnout.
They tested Brazilian soccer player Neymar da Silva Santos Júnior when he was practicing some elementary footwork. In case you don’t know him, Neymar is one of the world’s best soccer players. He’s been recognized as player of the year—more than once in fact—in every league he’s played for. In 2017, he transferred from Barcelona to Paris Saint-Germain. His new team paid the equivalent of $262 million to simply buy him out of his last contract, more than doubling the previous record for a contract buyout. And the deal set Neymar’s salary at just shy of one million dollars. Per week.
To test whether Neymar’s brain behaves differently from the brains of athletes with less experience, they looked at what was going on when he moved his feet. They compared the patterns of his brain activity with those of four other professional soccer players who played for the Second Division in the Spanish soccer league (La Liga); two Spanish national-level swimmers about the same age; and one amateur soccer player.
Each athlete took a turn lying in an fMRI scanner and moving their feet in time with a metronome, as if they were running. The researchers also made a video measuring how much the athletes were moving their feet. In watching those films later, they ensured that any differences in brain activity they saw among the athletes could not have been the result of differences in what the athletes were doing with their bodies; regardless of their experience, their feet moved in the same ways in these testing conditions.
Despite these similarities below their ankles, the researchers found that Neymar’s brain was less active than everyone else’s. In particular, Neymar showed relatively little activity across a smaller surface area in motor-cortical regions that process foot movements. In other words, the amount of neurological real estate and processing power used to move his feet was far less than that of the other professional and amateur soccer players, and the swimmers (who don’t train to use their feet in the same way). There is something special about what practice does—not only to Neymar’s brain, but to all of our brains. If we practice, make habitual, or routinize parts of what we’re doing, we free up mental resources that can then be spent elsewhere. In the end, we can handle more and experience fewer of the negative consequences of multitasking, because any one job doesn’t require as much brainpower.
Despite how extraordinary he is on the field, the minimal computational power that Neymar’s brain requires to move his feet is not unusual. In fact, experts in many professions show less activity in areas of their brain that seem to be specific to their craft. For example, when moving their fingers, professional concert pianists showed less brain activity in areas of their motor cortex than people who were not musicians. Professional Formula One drivers showed less brain activity in areas specific to vision and spatial relationships than amateur drivers while playing a video game that required they react quickly when something popped up on the screen in their peripheral field of vision. Expert air-pistol athletes showed less brain activity when shooting, particularly in areas that specialize in vision, attention, and motor movements compared to people who had never competed in the sport. Members of the Ladies Professional Golf Association showed less brain activity in these areas as well, compared to amateur golfers, just before taking a swing off the tee. And when envisioning themselves drumming, professional percussionists showed less activity in areas of their brain responsible for syncing up auditory and visual information, compared to people without much experience.
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Over lunch one afternoon, I was asking Suzanne Dikker, a colleague of mine at New York University, what she thought the takeaway was from these studies. Not so subtly, I threw in a question out of personal curiosity.
“What’s been happening to my brain over all the months I’ve been practicing?”
“I don’t know,” she laughed. “I’m not that kind of doctor.”
I wasn’t sitting on a chaise longue. We weren’t talking about my childhood relationship with my mother (which was really quite lovely, except for a few teenage years that were admittedly my fault). But I was asking her to conjecture about me—someone she hadn’t studied. Despite that, her actual expertise wasn’t too far off. Dikker is a neuroscientist who investigates changes in brain rhythms as people live their lives outside of the usual stuffy, cloistered testing lab. Dikker explained to me that it’s not that the brains of experts are smaller, or that there are real physical differences between their brains and those of novices. Instead, to perform as well as experts can at that moment, novices have to engage more of their brain and make those regions work harder than would those of a seasoned pro. With expertise comes neural efficiency, which frees up cognitive resources that can be spent elsewhere. Experts can multitask better than beginners because, in part, they have more brainpower available to handle what comes their way.
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For me personally, these results were a call to hit the woodshed. If I worked hard to nail this one song, playing it would eventually be less taxing mentally and I could perform it even better with the extra cognitive resources I’d gain. But to acquire that expertise, I’d have to dive deep into a relatively shallow pool. The cliché applies here: How do you get to Carnegie Hall? Practice, practice, practice.
So, about two weeks out from the party at which I would debut my drumming chops, I finally came to accept that fitting practice around and on top of my existing workload wasn’t going to work for me. Layering practice on top of an already full schedule wasn’t bringing me the quality of improvement that I needed. I knew what the problem was, and I knew the solution. In all honesty, I didn’t really like the drums—because I couldn’t make my limbs do what I wanted them to. I was procrastinating, avoiding the concentrated effort I knew I needed to put in; but practice was the only solution.