Musings on Interruption III.

You know when you’re on the phone with someone and then another call comes in? There’s that moment of panic where you look at the complicated set of directions on the screen: end and accept, send to voicemail, or hold and accept. And suddenly the brain completely stops working. Head empty, no thoughts. The focus dedicated to whatever conversation was happening is now completely lost, and a new focus must be placed on the buzzing phone in your hand. And even after you make the decision of what to do with the incoming call, how long does it take to come back to the initial topic.

Oftentimes, interruptions are thought of as bad, such as this phone call debacle. Interruptions can make me feel dumb, because I wasn’t prepared to think in such a way before the interruption occured. Studies show that interruptions do make us dumber. When the brain switches between 2 tasks, then the performance on both of them suffer. Especially in our technology driven world, interruptions and task-toggling are a constant threat. Gloria Mark of the University of California, Irvine, found that a typical office worker gets only 11 minutes between each interruption, while it takes an average of 25 minutes to return to the original task after an interruption.

It is truly mind boggling how many interruptions this year has brought for all of humanity. I mourn how much brain power I’ve lost to the year 2020. However, there is still hope for us yet. I believe the brain can take these interruptions and adapt, maybe performing even better than before. 

Alessandro Acquisti, a professor of information technology, and the psychologist Eyal Peer at Carnegie Mellon conducted an experiment on the loss of brain power due to interruption. Participants were asked to read a short passage and answer questions about it. Group 1 just completed the test, while Groups 2 and 3 were told that they “might be contacted with further instructions” via instant messaging at any time during the test. Group 2 was interrupted twice during the evaluation, while Group 3 wasn’t actually interrupted at all, even though they were told that they would be. 

As expected,Group 1 performed 20% better than Group 2. But to the researchers' surprise, Group 3, who were told that they would be interrupted and weren’t, performed even better than Group 1, who were just left to take the test in peace. Somehow, the test-takers in Group 3 stored up extra brain power in preparation for a distraction that never came. Or perhaps the expectation of interruption served as an unconscious deadline to make them perform better. 

At least for myself, all the interruptions that this year has brought makes me expect that more are on the way. But maybe that’s a good thing. Since this year has thrown so many interruptions at us, perhaps we can come out the other side performing even better than “normal”. And maybe one day, I’ll know exactly what to do when my phone tells me I have another call coming in.

Natasha Schuyler, Art Editor