Thread by @therealRYC

Why is it becoming harder to #remember things you have recently read? New work nature.com/articles/s4158… out in @nature from Anthony Wagner's group @Stanford explore how multi-media #multitasking impacts a specific axis of #attention that in turn, impacts our #memory📱🧠🧵1/11

When we're reading a book and simultaneously checking our #twitter or #finsta feeds, we're not actually multitasking - we're task-switching! We switch our focus from one goal to another, interrupting our train of thought and scattering our #attention 2/11

Researchers are beginning to understand that #attention prepares us to perform actions that align with our #goals. But if we're switching tasks all the time (reading a book while scrolling on finsta), that means our goals are also shifting! How does that affect our #memory? 3/11

To answer this, Kevin Madore and colleagues in the Wagner lab set up an experiment where people were shown objects, and after some delay, were asked questions about how the objects compared to the previous object or whether the objects had ever been seen before 4/11

The hypothesis was that to get the question right, your brain has to remember not only previous objects, but also has to be paying attention so that when the question comes, you can encode the question into a goal and answer it correctly 5/11

By measuring brain activity in regions responsible for attention and goal-encoding, Madore et al. found that lapses in attention right before a question was prompted (i.e. mind wandering) prevented neural firing patterns from translating the question into an actual goal 6/11

Unable to encode the goal, participants made more errors on the memory task, suggesting that being in an attentional state prepares you to learn new information that you might need to remember, even before you encounter it! 7/11

Additionally, the authors found that participants who were more zoned into the task even before the questions came were also the people who did the best on a sustained attention task. This in turn, predicted how well they would do on the memory task! 8/11

Finally, participants who frequently used multiple forms of #socialmedia simultaneously in their daily lives showed brain activity associated with mind-wandering right before the task, had a harder time sustaining attention, and performed worse on the memory test 9/11

These findings suggest that our attentional state has a major impact on our memory and how well we will learn something, and that media multi-tasking like checking our twitter feeds impairs our baseline attentional state in a way that generalizes to all parts of our lives!! 10/11

The practical implication is that when scrolling on social media, we should set aside time to have a scroll bonanza, rather than frequently check our phone while doing deep work. For me, studies like this anchor "common sense" advice in data, motivating me to enact change 11/11🧵