Something else from the cutting room floor…

Too much disruption – we are making stupid mistakes

Another issue related to the explosion of information is attention. Interruption science is the study of why people get distracted and how best to interrupt people. The discipline has its roots in the 1800s when psychologists found that telegraph operators made mistakes when they were interrupted. Work done by a Russian researcher called Bluma Zeigarnik in the 1920s then found people who were interrupted towards the end of a specific problem tended to carry on, whereas those who were interrupted earlier on had problems returning to the task at hand. This was interesting but hardly important because at the time very few people had jobs that were high-stress, information rich or time sensitive. This slowly changed and by the early 1990s, the high-speed processing power of computers made multi-tasking and rapid response an everyday feature of modern office life. By the mid-1990s many people were juggling email, mobile phones, faxes and other forms of communication, most of which (they thought) required an instant response. Before there was only a fixed phone line and the post to worry about. But as Nicholas Carr points out, a scattered attention means defused concentration.

Finding why people get interrupted and inventing new ways to better interrupt people may still sound trivial but it’s not. Mary Czerwinski, for example, was hired by Lockheed in the late 1980s to work on ways to interrupt astronauts on the International Space Station. She found text messages were routinely ignored but coloured graphics, especially where the colour had a specific meaning, were not.  What is the relevance of this research to people with their feet planted firmly back on Earth?

The answer is we are now subjected to a torrent of interruptions at work, at home and in between. Life has, in the words of Gloria Mark, a human-computer interaction scientist at the University of California, become “interrupt driven”. For example, in one of her studies she found that, in an office, people are, on average, interrupted every eleven minutes and that each time such interruptions happen it takes twenty-five minutes for people to fully return to their original task. Technologically driven interruptions are causing havoc with our short-term memory to the point where we can’t remember what we’re supposed to be doing.

Interestingly, another finding of both Mark and Czerwinski is that the size of a computer screen greatly influences the working memory of their human operatives.

In one study, one group of participants was given a 125-inch screen while another group received 42-inch screens. Individuals with a 42-inch screen completed tasks 10% faster with some people being as much as 44% more speedy.

Of course, being interrupted is not usually that important but sometimes it can be life threatening. For instance, an Australian study led by Professor Enrico Coiera at the University of New South Wales found that 80% of clinical staff’s time in a hospital was spent on communications, so the opportunity to really screw up is real. Moreover, Coiera found that, on average, clinicians were interrupted at least eleven times each hour and found that they frequently forgot to do things or ended up doing things twice. Clearly a combination of multi-tasking, reduced memory, and constant interruption can be deadly in some instances.

The key point here is human brain can handle frantic activity for short periods of time. Indeed, the brain works extremely well in extremis. If you are facing a potentially life threatening situation, the brain cuts out non-essential information in order to concentrate on those factors that really matter. But the issue is that these short bursts of frantic activity have become normal, They are how a great many people now spend their entire days.

—

Taken from (but not put back in to) Future Minds, due out October 2010.