Resist the Tyranny of the Urgent (Part 1)

Posted on in Brain and memory, EPPP Preparation Materials, EPPP Study Tips by TSM Admin

If you are typical, when you’re studying you may suddenly remember something you want to check on Google, or an email you need to reply to, or something you want to say in an online discussion. It can be tempting to act on thatimpulse right away, especially if you think, “This will only take a minute, and if I do it now then at least I won’t forget.”

We suggest that instead of letting yourself be subject to the tyranny of the urgent—and often the not so urgent—that you keep a list of all the things you want to do online and then attend to those things later when you’re not studying. So if there is a webpage you want to look at, an email or text message you need to reply to, or a video on Youtube you think it would be fun to watch, simply jot it down on your list and return to it later, even if it has to wait a few days.

When we have a plan for something—even if it’s as simple as a things-to-do-list—then those things are less likely to flood our working memory. We can temporarily shelve the things on our list—clearing space in our working memory in the process—and know that we’re still in control. As you do this, you will be resisting the temptation to let yourself be inundated with information of immediate interest but which will have little or no relevance next year, or even next week.

Again, don’t just take my word for it, because there is a growing body of research to back this up. Here’s what the website Psyblog has this to say about the importance of avoiding interruptions as well as making plans:

In a series of studies researchers found that while trying to enjoy reading a novel (amongst other tasks), participants were frequently interrupted by intrusive thoughts about an unfinished everyday task.

But when researchers told participants to make very specific plans about that unfinished goal, while reading they experienced less intrusive thoughts about the other activity. In fact the intrusive thoughts lessened to the same level as a control group. This finding was repeated in the lab with other activities.

Making plans helps free up mental space for whatever we are doing right now, allowing us to be more efficient in the long term.

Long-Term Memory and the Dangers of Multitasking

Posted on in EPPP Preparation Materials by TSM Admin

Our long-term memory is located in the back of the brain. It is made up of information that was once stored in our short-term memory (or working memory) which is located in prefrontal cortex in the front of our brain.

One of the reasons that long-term memory is important is because it is not just a warehouse of facts, but the seat of understanding. Our ability to think deeply, creatively and reflectively is largely dependent on schemas we have built up in our long-term memory over many years. Nicholas Carr explains about this process in his book The Shallows: Continue reading →

Make the Internet Work For You

Posted on in EPPP Study Tips by TSM Admin

We have been talking a lot about ways to limit the distracting influences of the internet in general, and social networking in particular. It would be a mistake to conclude from our discussion that we think these technologies are bad, or even that they can’t be of valuable assistance as you prepare for your EPPP and afterwards in your career as a psychologist. Indeed, we have commented before that we encourage you to creatively use some of these things to your advantage rather than treating them as taboo.

Continue reading →

The “Off” Button

Posted on in EPPP Study Tips by TSM Admin

“Executive control”, Sian Beilock wrote in Psychology Today, “is an umbrella term that refers to a collection of cognitive functions—such as attention, planning, memory, initiating actions and inhibiting them. When our impulses get the best of us, a failure in executive control is often to blame.”

One way to keep our executive control sharp is to limit those things within our work environment that are likely to cause distractions for us. Thus, what we said in the previous posts about email applies equally to all social networking sites and media.

Let’s get specific. When you’re studying online for your EPPP, your Facebook page should not be open in another tab, and any other social networking media should also be turned off. This includes services like Skype which operate in the background but change color when someone is trying to contact you.

If what you are studying doesn’t require a live internet connection, then you should disconnect from the internet completely. If you do this, you may find that the ‘off’ button is the most important button in your entire study experience.

In his book The Overflowing Brain: Information Overload and the Limits of Working Memory, Torkel Klingberg cites a survey of workplaces in the United States which “found that the personnel were interrupted and distracted roughly every three minutes and that people working on a computer had on average eight windows open at the same time.” If this parallels your experience as a student, you could be unnecessarily compromising your executive control and vastly underperforming as a consequence.

If you are skeptical that we are over-emphasizing this point, try this test. Every hour you are studying, keep track of how often you use the internet on things not related to your study, even if it’s something as simple as checking your email.

Remember, every time we click a button, it represents a small break in your concentration and thus a decrease in our executive control.

Again, the issue isn’t time. It takes very little time to read a Facebook update or a Twitter message. The issue is your working memory and executive control. Every time we turn our attention, however briefly, to social networking, we are adding new stimuli into our working memory. This stimuli continues to the background of our working memory even when we have returned to the previous activity, slowing down crucial cognitive processing skills in the process.

But that’s not the only reason we should avoid letting our concentration be broken when studying. An equally important factor is that you don’t want to inadvertently train your brain to find sustained concentration difficult. Given the neuroplasticity of the brain, the more you exercise part of it, the stronger that part will become. Consequently, if we are checking Facebook or Twitter updates multiple times every hour, responding to text messages as soon as they arrive, and letting the internet function for us as an ecosystem of interruption technologies, then we are training ourselves to follow interruptions, to be distracted by small and trivial changes in our environment. We are training our brains to prioritize what Tyler Cowen has called “the short, the sweet, and the bitty.”

Internet multitaskers often pride themselves on their ability to juggle many different tasks simultaneously, supposing it to be a sign of efficiency. The irony is that it is actually a sign of inefficiency. Let me end this post by sharing the insightful words of Small and Vorgan from iBrain: Surviving the Technological Alteration of the Modern Mind:

“Though we think we can get more done when we divide our attention and multitask, we are not necessarily more efficient. Studies show that when our brains switch back and forth from one task to another, our neural circuits take a small break in between. This is a time-consuming process that reduces efficiency. It’s not unlike closing down one computer program and booting up another—it takes a few moments to shut down and start up. With each attention shift, the frontal lobe executive centers must activate different neural circuits…. Psychologist David Meyer and colleagues at the University of Michigan studied brain efficiency when volunteers quickly switch their mental workouts from identifying hsapes to solving math problems. Both tasks take longer, and mental accuracy declines, when the volunteers are required to make attention shifts, compared with when they focus on only one task for an extended period. Switching back and forth between the two tasks, like answering email while writing a memo, may decrease brain efficiency by as much as 50 percent, compared with separately completing one task before staring another one.”

Further Reading

Managing Email (part 1)

Posted on in Brain and memory, EPPP Preparation Materials, EPPP Study Tips by TSM Admin

In a previous post I quoted Nicholas Carr about the cognitive demands created by hyperlinks. Carr also makes some helpful observations about why we should avoid checking our email during the middle of any task:

“Studies of office workers who use computers reveal that they constantly stop what they’re doing to read and respond to incoming e-mails. It’s not unusual for them to glance at their in-box thirty or forty times an hour (though when asked how frequently they look, they’ll often give a much lower figure). Since each glance represents a small interruption of thought, a momentary redeployment of mental resources, the cognitive cost can be high. Psychological research long ago proved what most of us know from experience: frequent interruptions scatter our thoughts, weaken our memory, and make us tense and anxious. The more complex the train of thought we’re involved in, the greater the impairment the distractions cause. …Many studies have shown that switching between just two tasks can add substantially to our cognitive load, impeding our thinking and increasing the likelihood that we’ll overlook or misinterpret important information.” Continue reading →

Managing Email (part 2)

Posted on in EPPP Preparation Materials, EPPP Study Tips, Psychology News by TSM Admin

Another key step to efficient online learning is knowing how to manage your messaging devises.

When you’re studying online, close any email readers so you are not tempted to check for new messages when you’re supposed to be studying. This includes exiting any websites like Gmail or similar sites that can access your email. You should also turn off any panels or pop-ups that allow for instance messages and you should turn off any RSS readers. If you have a smartphone or i-phone, turn that off too, or move it to another room of the house away from where you are studying. Continue reading →

The Virtues of Printing

Posted on in EPPP Preparation Materials by TSM Admin

When you are studying online and have long sections of text to read, it is always preferable to print it or send it to a kindle, which simulates the experience of typographic reading. (If you use a kindle, it is best to use one without advertisements or easy internet accessibility).

If possible take your print-out or your kindle to another part of the house where you are physically separated from the internet.

Printing online content before you read it may seem unnecessary, even a waste of time. However, it is actually extremely important. In an article written by Robin Phillips earlier this year for Touchstone Magazine, Phillips explained how “we come to online texts with a set of expectations different from those we bring to a book. We read books cover to cover, and even when we scan them, our reading retains a sequential quality. But research has shown that most people do not read a webpage from left to right and top to bottom. Instead, they tend to skip around, scanning for relevant information.”

In chapter seven of his book The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to our Brains, Nicholas Carr has shared a body of clinical research that show that our brains process information differently depending on if we are reading off a computer screen or reading from a book (or print-out). He writes:

“A page of online text viewed through a computer screen may seem similar to a page of printed text. But scrolling or clicking through a Web document involves physical actions and sensory stimuli very different from those involved in holding and turning the pages of a book or a magazine [and this would also include pages that you have printed]. Research has shown that the cognitive act of reading draws not just on our sense of sight but also on our sense of touch. Its tactile as well as visual. ‘All reading,’ writes Anne Mangen, a Norwegian literary studies professor, is ‘multi-sensory.’ There’s ‘a crucial link’ between ‘ the sensory-motor experience of the materiality’ of a written work and ‘the cognitive processing of the text content.’ The shift from paper to screen doesn’t just change the way we navigate a piece of writing. It also influences the degree of attention we devote to it and the depth of our immersion in it.”

Gary Small and Gigi Vorgan have likewise reported on clinical experiments which show that we read the internet with a different part of the brain the part of the brain we use to read books. You can read about these experiments in chapter one of their book iBrain: Surviving the Technological Alteration of the Modern Mind.

This is separate to the question of clicking on hyperlinks. Of course, an added benefit of printing is that you can’t immediately follow every hyperlink. Even beyond this, however, the research is showing that when we read printed material it goes into a different part of the brain than when we read online material.

Managing Hyperlinks (part 3)

Posted on in EPPP Study Tips by TSM Admin

In a previous article I shared the results of studies which found that cognitive processing of a text decreases as the amount of hyperlinks increase.

It will be helpful to take a few minutes reflecting on why this is. Why should the mere presence of links decrease our concentration of a web page? Nicholas Carr has answered this question in his book The Shallows, by giving attention to what happens in the brain when a reader is confronted with a hyperlink:

The need to evaluate links and make related navigational choices…requires constant mental coordination and decision making, distracting the brain from the work of interpreting text or other information. Whenever we, as readers, come upon a link, we have to pause, for at least a split second, to allow our prefrontal cortex to evaluate whether or not we should click on it. The redirection of our mental resources, from reading words to making judgments, may be imperceptible to us—our brains are quick—but it’s been shown to impeded comprehension and retention, particularly when it’s repeated frequently. As the executive functions of the prefrontal cortex kick in, our brains become not only exercised but overtaxed.

Don’t mistake where I’m coming from in sharing this. Hyperlinks are one of the most valuable aspects of the internet, and their capacity for helping us make connections is important. Yet we must also remember that the purpose of a hyperlink isn’t simply to reference other works like the footnotes in a book: a hyperlink actually propels us towards the new source. As Carr points out elsewhere in his book, the value that hyperlinks may serve as navigational tools cannot be separated from the distractions they cause.

Precisely because of this, we encourage students on the TSM to be proactive in minimizing the distractions caused by hyperlinks.

Again, this can easily be done by copying a webpage into a Word document and then removing the font that distinguishes the links. Or it can be done more simply by copying and pasting the entire document into notepad and from notepad into a Word document. It can also be done through printing (the subject of our next post). At a minimum, however, simply avoid clicking on links your first time through. Take a second read-through to click on links and read more. This is not unlike looking up and reading references in a printed book. Normally, we would read through an entire book before we look up all the references.

Further Reading

EPPP Strategies & Tips with Dr. Taylor – Successfully Preparing for Your EPPP

Posted on in EPPP Preparation Materials, EPPP Study Tips, TSM | Video by TSM Admin

Hello to all our blog readers…We’d like to share with you today a video TSM has created to give you a short overview on some things you will want to be thinking about as you head into your EPPP preparation process…We hope you will find this video with our very own Dr. Graham Taylor, to be both informative and enjoyable. Please watch and enjoy! And Happy New Years for all us here at the Taylor Study Method!