Where the mind does not work

Talking on the cell phone while driving, eating and reading, or my personal favourite — chatting with wife and continuing to work — are all examples of divided attention . This term describes situations where we simultaneously, yet actively, pay attention to two tasks; I know some who can manage three or even four.

I first learnt about the concept while doing research that involved designing an experiment on ‘recall’. Our team wanted to induce imperfect recall among our subjects. One way, we thought to facilitate this, was by dividing and conquering the brain’s resources; in other words, having the subjects participating in our study do two different things simultaneously!

The divide et impera principle worked reasonably well. We were able to show that more than half of our subjects could not recall what they had seen earlier in a perfect manner.

Scattered attention

Divided attention, a notion put forth by psychologists, shows up in all spheres of life. The existence of a second task affects a person’s ability to recall information, perform any job with a lower error rate, identify patterns, distinguish between different types of sounds, and, most certainly, one’s ability to drive.

Possibly, this was one of the reasons why my mother was always against eating and reading simultaneously — though she always couched it in terms of Ganesha, Saraswati and Lakshmi.

Of course, divided attention may not be the only thing affecting one’s ability to do a job well. Other things such as anxiety or intrinsic task difficulty can also impact performance in two simultaneous tasks.

But there is a silver lining for all those habitual multi-taskers: We do have some scientific evidence showing that with practice you can do things better even with divided attention. The idea here stems from the work of George A. Miller, a pioneer in the field of cognitive psychology.

Miller, in a study in 1956, suggested that the working memory capacity of human beings (roughly to be understood as our ability to juggle facts and perform mental operations) is limited to seven units.

It means that if you are shown simple images, a geometrical object, a string of numbers or musical notes and asked to recall how many of these things you encountered, you will do fine so long as there are seven or less of these objects.

But in general, when you have to deal with multiple tasks at the same time, a cognitive constraint kicks in and affects your performance in these tasks.

Toll on Cognition

The poor are often blamed for not being focused, which leads them to making bad decisions. There are many who even consider it as an inherent character: If they worked harder, they could better their lot!

However, a study published recently in the prestigious journal Science has argued that poverty by itself imposes a heavy tax on one’s cognitive abilities. We cannot blame the poor for their lot, because their immediate financial worries leave them with much less mental “bandwidth” to deal with other problems relative to those who are better off. That, in return, gets reflected in their cognitive capacity.

The authors of the study (Anandi Mani, et al ) have estimated that being poor is equivalent to having about 13 IQ points less or a bit like losing an entire night’s sleep! How? Well, dealing with uncertain incomes and juggling finances to make ends meet is such a difficult task. The result is divided attention, making it harder to concentrate and grapple with other issues in a successful manner.

In order to establish this, the authors carried out two experiments — one with shoppers in New Jersey and the other with sugarcane farmers in Tamil Nadu.

Shoppers in a New Jersey mall were randomly assigned to either a ‘hard’ or an ‘easy’ hypothetical financial task. Once their brains were cued in to thinking about their assigned tasks, they were asked to solve standard IQ-type problems.

It turned out there wasn’t any significant difference between the rich and the poor when they were assigned to the easy task. But the poor volunteers performed significantly worse than the rich when assigned the hard task.

IQ and poverty

In Tamil Nadu, the researchers recruited 454 sugarcane growers from Villupuram and Tiruvannamalai district. The study compared their relative performance in tasks similar to the ones described at two points in time — when the same farmers were poor (pre-harvest) and rich (post-harvest).

As the main author of the study put it, “We’re finding that when he has more money he [the farmer] is more intelligent, as defined by IQ tests.” And just in case you were wondering, the study does a great job of ruling out other confounding factors such as stress and physical exhaustion.

There are two observations I would like to make at this point. First, the shoppers in New Jersey definitely would not qualify as destitute. And incidentally, since it was New Jersey, many of those shoppers might have been of Indian origin.

Second, the farmers in the Tamil Nadu case may be small, but they are not individuals living in abject poverty. Now imagine how round-the-year poverty can affect the truly poor!

The study clearly suggests some new ways to deal with poverty — given their cognitive overload, it is important to simplify things for the poor.

A policy takeaway from the study is that we need to cut red tape.

Every government programme aimed at the poor needs to have simple forms and, perhaps, proper instructions in filling these out. By simple, I do not mean the type of help the Income Tax Department offers to fill out the not-so-easy Saral forms.

Things like pushing poor families in the right direction or providing them reminders might be equally important here. Perhaps, that is too much to ask for in a country where to receive your pension you have to typically prove that you are alive by physical presence.

But simplifying the process of interaction between the government and the poor might be no less important for the war against poverty.

Something to keep in mind in this age of multi-tasking where we are constantly expected to process the more (readily available) information and deliver better results!

(The author teaches microeconomics and game theory at Louisiana State University, and is also a Visiting Professor at the School of Management, KIIT University, Bhubaneswar)

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