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Matt Mullenweg speaks with neuroscientist Dr. Adam Gazzaley, co-author of the 2016 book The Distracted Mind: Ancient Brains in a High-Tech World, about how our brains work, particularly during times like the current pandemic. How does the brain handle internal and external stimuli, and what do we know about the effect of practices like meditation, exercise, nutrition, and sleep? 

Gazzaley obtained an M.D. and Ph.D. in Neuroscience at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York, completed Neurology residency at the University of Pennsylvania, and postdoctoral training in cognitive neuroscience at University of California, Berkeley. He is currently the David Dolby Distinguished Professor of Neurology, Physiology and Psychiatry at University of California, San Francisco, and the Founder & Executive Director of Neuroscape, a translational neuroscience center at UCSF.

Gazzaley co-authored The Distracted Mind with Larry D. Rosen, and he’s a scientist who enjoys seeing his work solve real-world problems. He’s also founded startups, including Akili Interactive and Sensync, to build technology products that enhance learning, mindfulness, and well-being. More can be found at his website, gazzaley.com. 

A full transcript of the episode is below.

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(Intro Music)

MATT MULLENWEG: Hello everybody and welcome back to the Distributed Podcast. We’ve all had to make so many adjustments in recent weeks and some of them quite radical. I hope that wherever you are and wherever you might be tuning in from this process has been going smoothly for you, or at least as painlessly as one might hope under these circumstances. 

In conversations with my colleagues at Automattic and with people at many other companies, both distributed and not, one common thread I keep seeing is how difficult it has been to stay focused in recent weeks. I have been struggling with this as well. We’ve been dealing with non-stop bad news. Many of us have either been directly affected by Covid 19 or know people who have, either health-wise, financially, or socially. Even more of us have had to learn how to work from a new or dramatically changed environment. 

So for this episode, I wanted to talk to someone who knows a lot about focus, distraction, and changing our work habits. I couldn’t think of any person more fitting than neuroscientist — and my friend — Adam Gazzaley. 

[music]

MATT:  Welcome, Adam.

ADAM GAZZALEY: Thank you, great to be here, Matt. 

MATT: Just to set the stage a little bit for listeners who might not be familiar with your work, you have written.. is it over 130 academic papers?

ADAM: Yes, yes. Peer reviewed, more scientific-style papers, correct. 

MATT: Even some on the cover of Nature, which is like Sports Illustrated for scientists.

ADAM: [laugher] Yes. My musician friends would say it’s my Rolling Stone cover. But yes, that was several years ago, but it was an exciting one.

MATT: How would you describe the area of your passion that you’ve devoted your life’s work to?

ADAM: It has migrated, maybe evolved, as I like to think of it, over the last 30 years, but yes, it’s been pretty much exactly… I would say 2020 is 30 years since I’ve been in the neuroscience world. I started grad school in 1990 in New York City at Mt. Sinai. I was trained as both a neuroscientist and a neurologist, so both the clinical and the scientific side. 

And my research has always had some common elements, a focus on plasticity of the brain, or the ability of our brain to remodel and optimize its function in response to the environment. I focused on neural networks, which is the phenomena that our brain doesn’t work as just these isolated islands but really as an interconnected network of communication that’s constantly and dynamically changing all the time. And aging has been a main aspect of my research. 

And I preserved those focus areas through the last 30 years although I’ve moved from animal research, looking under a microscope at the beginning days, all the way to today where I focus on human research using functional brain imaging and tools to understand how the human brain interacts with the environment around us.

MATT: Was there any particular personal experience that brought you to attention and focus?

ADAM: My research focus when I was a graduate student was more on memory systems and how they change with aging. After I finished my residency in neurology and moved to San Francisco to work at Berkeley and study human neuroscience, I became very interested in what I can do as a scientist that was most relevant to people, not just what was relevant to other neuroscientists or was following an iterative path across the field, but what did people actually care about in their lives. 

So this was like mid-2000s, like say 2003-2004, when I was moving my research into cognitive neuroscience, using tools such as functional brain imaging, non-invasive brain stimulation. And I became very fascinated by how people interacted with their environment in ways that were positive for their performance and their mental health and ways that were negative. 

And at that time there wasn’t a lot of understanding about the impact of interference in our performance, things like distraction and multitasking weren’t really in the zeitgeist yet of how they may impair our abilities. At that time it was considered a badge of honor if you were a good multitasker, whatever that may mean. 

And so I was really fascinated by the idea of doing research on a topic that spoke to people so directly about things that were relevant to their lives. And so around 2005, I really turned my own sites full time into studying attention in the brain, specifically how we manage interference successfully and unsuccessfully. 

MATT: At a physical level what happens when we pay attention to something?

ADAM: Well attention is such a fascinating concept and one that is worthy of an hour just to unpack it. But just to not go off on an incredibly long tangent as I try to answer that question, I’ll be very specific by what I mean by attention because attention has many, many different aspects to it. 

What I assume you meant by that is what we call top-down attention, goal-directed attention. We also have this amazing ability to pay attention to things that are not in our goals. We call that bottom-up attention. It’s how we survived is that you could pick up a very subtle trace, even if you didn’t intend to, of a threat or food or a mate in the environment. This is largely what drives other animals’ attentional processing. 

MATT: Do those signals make it all the way to the frontal lobe or are they handled some place lower?

ADAM: A lot of those signals are just handled even at the brainstem, some of them even in the spinal cord. You could prick your finger and withdraw without it even going into your brain, a lot of that can happen very local, very reflexive, input-output circuits. 

The frontal lobe, which you mentioned, is the most evolved part of the human brain and it is really the seat of the top-down attention. And other animals have it to some degree but most of what we might look at an animal as goal-directed behavior, many of it is not, it’s really this complex but very reflexive response to environmental stimuli.

But the top-down attention, that very human-based attention, is the one where we decided based upon our goals and decisions that we make about what we pay attention to and what we ignore. And when we do that, you’re right, it is a process that is driven by neural networks that really involve the prefrontal cortex. And when we look at it inside an MRI scanner with EEG  — and this is what I’ve been doing for almost 15 years now, 15 years actually just this year —  is that we see that there is communication between brain areas that involve the prefrontal cortex and whatever other areas are involved in the operation. 

So, for example, if your attentional focus is a visual one, or maybe a visual and auditory one, then we see a network that involves the prefrontal cortex, which allows you to maintain that focus with visual cortical areas and auditory cortical areas. But it may also involve connections with the hippocampus if it involves memory, which it almost certainly does, or the amygdala if it has emotional content. 

And so that’s how we pay attention is that we activate these networks that have all the different component systems associated with whatever you’re engaged in. And what we find is that that network is maintained unless you are distracted or you multitask. But that is essentially what happens physically or neurally, which is a chemical and physical and physiological process in your brain.

MATT: This is a place where I was saying that you have a whole book on this cal