The most scares resource on the planet is attention and its one of the most important aspect of life for any creature. Imagine a deer not paying attention to it’s surrounding in a jungle; it won’t even be able to survive next 24 hours. He has to pay attention to everything around him where in survival is the first demand on attention. Now everything around us needs our brain’s processing at any given time in our waking conditions. Our brain need to process vision, sound and keep assessing the situation which in itself is a huge demand on resource.
The generic processing capacity of the conscious mind has been estimated (by the researcher Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, independently, by Bell Labs engineer Robert Lucky) at 120-126 Bits/ second or 7 bits at a time. To understand it better we need about 60 bits/second of brain power to understand the talks from a person and that’s why it become impossible to understand more than two or three person at a time. Perhaps that’s why most of us perform very badly at multitasking.
It literally takes brain’s resources to process information and one need to be conscious about it to utilize it to it’s optimum levels. Mihaly also gave the concept of “FLOW”. In Csikszentmihalyi’s own words, flow is “A state in which people are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter; the experience is so enjoyable that people will continue to do it even at great cost, for the sheer sake of doing it” (1990). Flow is a great state for creativity and out of box thinking.
These days lot of talks are going on for multitasking but when we try and understand it in terms of brain’s processing power we do understand that why so many people fail miserably in multitasking and why focus is important. If we are finding it difficult to write an email and listen to a conversation simultaneously we may not be able to do justice to either of the task and there are high chances that we do a mediocre job at both the task. Even it might take higher time to do it together than it would take if, both things are done one after other. So at times we are just wasting time and doing a shabby job in the name of multitasking
When we have high attention seeking task in hand it’s always better not to do multitasking. It should be attempted only with very routine tasks which we already have expertise. Brain’s processing power and attention is the reason why talking on mobile and driving don’t go hand in hand.
So next time someone tells you to pay attention understand that you are actually paying in terms of brain’s processing power.
Leadership Insights 