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

Welcome to the huberman live podcast where we discuss science and science based tools for everyday life. I'm Andrew huberman. And I'm a professor of neurobiology and Ophthalmology at Stanford school of medicine.

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can still hear the first 20 minutes of today's episode and determine whether or not becoming a premium subscriber is for you. So, without further Ado, let's get to answering your questions. The first question is about task switching and the specific question is, is

there a way to get better at task switching?

Well, 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. So all of us, well, unless it's been removed, have an area of our

brain called the prefrontal cortex. The words prefrontal cortex actually refers to fairly varied real

estate within the human brain. So 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

Ignition

and directing action with holding action, these kinds of things. But 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. So one of the simplest ways to describe this is that when you took math in high school, 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.

But there were some features of all three of those

classes that were the same. In the sense, that presumably you have to sit in a chair for all of those classes, you followed a certain set of rules that pertain to all three of those different classes even though they're different subjects. But

then there were certain rules

that pertain just to mathematics certain rules that you followed. Because of 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.

ER was a little more lakhs. For instance, maybe there was a teacher, 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

He to switch the types of cognitive operations as the name suggests, depending on what

sorts of things you're trying to learn or understand. And

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, but 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,

Err,

most often it has to do with people performing, one

particular type of mental or physical operation which say they are. 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. Now in the

Laboratory experiment situation. This is most typically been

carried out the following way. People are going to do one cognitive tasks, 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. So these can be made increasingly difficult, you get the idea and then

perhaps a tone is played or they'll get

get a signal from the experimenter and then they need to

switch their task to doing something quite different. But also cognitive, that's the most typical Arrangement or another typical arrangement in a task switching experiment. Is that the subject? 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 tasks.

You were not 0, but fewer experiments have examined task, switching between physical

and cognitive tasks. Okay. Now, there are these kind of outrageous examples that you can find on the internet. And by the way, I don't suggest that anyone go engaging these examples in real life of kind of extreme

task-switching, one of the most notable ones would

be chessboxing believe. You're not this exists where two people will enter a ring and they will sit down at a

table and they will play chess

for a given period of time.

So they're entirely focused on playing chess, then a buzzer will go off

the chest table. We clear the chairs will be cleared, and

they will be expected to box literally fight for around of say, a minute to three minutes and then go back to chest. Then the boxing so-called chessboxing again. I'm not suggesting people chest box, but I know that many people have challenges with task switching and here I can raise my hand and say that I am one such person. I've always had a pretty good ability to

Up into deep focus

after a period of time. You know, I like everybody else takes a little bit time to get into a book chapter or two, get into a mode of physical exercise. But once I'm doing

something, I tend to be very, very focused

on that. And 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 I often times 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 and as

a consequence I've had to seek out and

Meant

certain tools to improve my ability to tasks which so 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. And 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. So how can we get better at task switching? Well, short of having somebody scruffy by the neck and force you to stop whatever activity you're doing and engage.

The next activity that you're doing, one of the best things that we can do to support our

ability to 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, right? 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 5 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.

Has or even as

mild Focus. Because 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. Now 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, okay? So 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, okay?

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 you know 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 needed.

To be in, then you can't find them in your waiting waiting. Where are you, where are you? And, you know, you're going to commit that information to memory and you're going to act

on it. 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 5 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 and perhaps, indeed, they have clinically diagnosed

Possible attention deficit hyperactivity disorder or some other form of attention, deficit disorder, 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 and this is also true for physical

tasks, right? If you go to the gym to work out or you're heading out on a run

or 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 and 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 can forget about other

activities that you need to do in the rest of your day.

I mean, that's just completely unfair and it doesn't

match at all the way that your neural circuits

work. So 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.

Vehicle to the actual underlying biology. Okay, so 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 be following tasks. A, if you

try and go immediately from

task a task, be

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.

Now

this I find fascinating because what this means is that there are top-down influences, there are literally things that we can

Ourselves based on an understanding of the underlying mechanisms that allow us to test which better. And the 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 be

knowing and designating that a transition period, even a very brief one where you are not trying to perform tasks be and that you've designated this as a transition

period. I'm not

trying to focus on the next thing that I need to.

My

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. All right, 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 and you're not placing this unfair expectation on your neural circuits to just flip to task B and you're also acknowledging that

Task. B is going to take 5

to 10 minutes to drop into fully. We already talked about that but you're going to shorten that 5 to 10 minutes

by deliberately introducing, a transition period and what comes in that

transition period and its duration is important. So first, let's deal with the duration. How long should the transition period be?

Well, that is going to scale directly with how long you were

in a deep trench of focus for task a but

let's assume task a was something that was kind of light for you. Maybe you're just handling some

Maybe you're talking to a co-worker maybe you were at a board meeting and it was kind

of light, you know, the stuff was just okay that you're used to this stuff. This is stuff that you do all the time. Now you're headed back to your desk your head, you to your next class or perhaps you did work out that morning and now you're going to head to your work place of work,

or maybe you're leaving work, and you're going to engage with family. And, you know, you 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. Tasks is switching.

Well, just ask yourself. How Deeply was I entrenched in that. Other activity

was my mind flitting to other

things. Or if I was in a deep trench of

attention for that given thing.

Well, then you should give yourself slightly

longer for this transition period. Maybe five, or even ten minutes if you have that time.

But even if you give yourself a short as 60 to 90 seconds of

transition and you just doesn't designate, excuse me, as transition, you're going to benefit.

Terms of your ability to do the next task.

So to be very clear if you were in kind of a light task or something that didn't have much cognitive demand. Well 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 engage 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, right? I certainly have had times in my life.

Particular, when I was a new

assistant professor meaning, before I got tenure, where I

remember sitting down to work on a grand, I get two lines out, someone would knock on the

door, where are the whatever,

the 30 ml syringe is, where do we

keep the buffers? Or, you know, where's the, you know, did we get this thing into? Okay and then I have to shift my attention, I go back to writing and then be, you know, 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. So

the point being that if you are deeply engaged in 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.

Well, the

most important thing to arrive in that transition period is a

relative lack of attention to anything new.

This is what so destructive about the phone and 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 their, 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 to do a new task. And that, that task requires

Significant amount of attention and focus.

Well, then you would do very well to allow yourself a period of anywhere from 2 minutes to maybe as long as ten minutes. I know there's gonna 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 not here and not see. Let's be practical folks. That's impossible to do.

Anyway, 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. Okay, not in any healthy way, that is.

But by introducing these transition

zones or transition periods as we'll call them

of 2 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 do you really do?

Well you're ensuring that you're not going from task

a to task B to task C,

right? What we're talking about here is trying to limit your task switching

between tasks a and task B and not introducing, another task in

between. And you might think that looking at your phone, is

not a task, right? 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,

So that no

matter how hard you try are going to intrude into your ability to perform tasks be. So when people

say, how do I get better at task-switching?

I immediately want to say,

please don't introduce yet, more tasks. Right.

Switching from one task to another is hard enough already. Don't introduce another task in between.

Now, some of you might take this to mean

that you shouldn't have a conversation with a co-worker 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

Jin, workplace environments. However, I will say after many years of working in Laboratories that, at times were quite large, and you walk into the lab and there's 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 like 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 sort of scruff themselves, a little bit and trying to limit

Their attention to a number of different things in the

environment and really go from task a to task, be in a really dedicated way.

Shortlists 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

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 an only three things, never more than three, now

he also included other activities. In fact, he was quite active in his physical life. So 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, but he would write down no more than three critical things to do each day. So he had three critical

tasks so I've employed that method as well. I'll write down

one sometimes two most often three but if I can just

at one or two

tasks that I need to complete each day

and 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 limited 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. Okay, now there are additional things that one can do to improve your ability to task switching. One of the things that I found particularly beneficial is not a meditation but rather

is a perceptual.

Our size and this is a perceptual exercise that I

learned about when I was a graduate

student, but in a totally different context and 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.

Now, the reason this tool makes sense for improving your ability tasks, which is because turns out that where you focus, your visual attention, strongly influences, the way that your brain

parses time, so

I'll describe the tool first and then I'll get a

A bit into the underlying mechanisms but 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.

So 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. Then 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 close your eyes, or if you were looking at some distant location. So, the

perceptual tool for

Switching is a very simple one, it's one that frankly I do every morning and have for many years.

Now, at least for me, has really enhanced my ability to test, which

and that is to just take a couple of minutes. And this really only

takes about two or three minutes. And

typically, what I will do is I'll start by closing my eyes. Oh, 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 an apartment or 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. So, but I

start off by closing my eyes and especially not looking at anything but directing my brains

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.

And I'll Focus my attention there maybe for just

5 to 15 seconds. I should mention that the first station as I call them, where my eyes were closed and I was focusing, my bodily Sensations. I also just do that for about 5 to 15 seconds, and I don't count specifically. I'm just kind of rough roughly 5 to 15

seconds. Okay, so second station you're looking at the surface of your hand and if you like, you can also concentrate on your

breathing. But typically people just focus on some specific location on their hand. Then I'll typically lower my

And then I'll look off into the distance. Maybe five to ten feet doesn't really matter Focus. My visual attention

there. Try and hold that Focus for 5 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 in the distance, into the distance, scuse me, as I possibly

can. And I'm also

trying to pay attention 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

a. So, the entire thing only takes about two minutes again. Starting

with eyes closed, focusing on self 5 to 15 seconds, then eyes open, focusing on surface of one's body. That is focusing, one's visual attention 5 to 15 seconds,

maybe 10 feet away, then maybe 50

feet away. If you're in the metric system. OK, M folks 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. Now, what is happening when one does this perceptual

exercise? And again it's a

perceptual Exodus of visual perceptual exercise.

Well what's happening is you are shifting your

visual Focus, obviously,

but you're also Shifting the way in

which you find slice or thick slice time now your ability to

Honestly, whether or not you're thin slicing or thick,

slicing time is

much harder to get a grasp of then it is to get a

grasp of whether or not you're looking at your hand or often 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, your essentially training your brain, to shift visual focus and the way in which you process in the time domain. And this is important in the context of

task switching because

So much of task-switching is not just to understand. Okay, 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.

And again this is a topic that deserves a much more elaborate discussion. But so much of our ability to execute a

task with high proficiency,

in C has to do with getting

our thinking, and our actions into the correct time domain. Now, when I say time domain, I know a number of people can get confused because

time is time, right? People think how, what do you mean by time

domain space domain make

sense? Here, I'm not sure about outer space whether or not you're looking in one location or another close to your body or far away from your body or different domains of space.

But the time domain is a little trickier for most people to understand. So, just think of it this way when you see a slow,

In movie. What you're seeing is a movie that was shot at a high frame rate, many frames per

second. Okay, 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 higher frame rates. You got a lot

more images,

therefore you can generate

slow motion. So 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,