Lex Fridman: belief

Transcript context

…I’m still trying to figure out the flourishing per se, but education, I mean, being in science is enormously enabling of ADHD. It’s like you’re constantly looking for new things. You’re constantly seeking that dopamine hit, and that’s great. They tolerate your being late for things. Nobody’s going to die if you screw up. It’s nice. It’s not like being a doctor or something where you have to be much more responsible and focused. You could just freely follow your curiosity, which is just great. But what I’d say is that I’m learning now about so many things, like about how to structure my activities more and basically say, okay, if I’m going to be… Email is the big one that kills me right now, I’m just constantly shifting between email and my activities. And what happens is that I don’t actually get the email. I just look at my email and I get stressed, because I’m like, oh, I have to think about this. Let me get back to it. And I go back to something else. And so, I’ve just got fragmentary memories of everything. So what I’m trying to do is set aside a timer. This is my email time, this is my writing time, this is my goofing off time. And so, blocking these things off, you give yourself the goofing off time. Sometimes I do that and sometimes I have to be flexible, and go like, okay, I’m definitely not focusing. I’m going to give myself the down time, and it’s an investment. It’s not like wasting time. It’s an investment in my attention later on. And I’m very much with Cal Newport on this. He wrote Deep Work and a lot of other amazing books. He talks about task switching as the thing that really destroys productivity. So switching, it doesn’t even matter from what to what, but checking social media, checking email, maybe switching to a phone call, and then doing work and then switching. Even switching between if you’re reading a paper, switching from paper to paper to paper, because curiosity and whatever the dopamine hit from the attention switch, limiting that, because otherwise your brain is just not capable to really load it in, and really do that deep deliberation I think that’s required to remember things, and to really think through things. Yeah, I mean, you probably see this, I imagine in AI conferences, but definitely in neuroscience conferences, it’s now the norm that people have their laptops out during talks, and conceivably they’re writing notes. But in fact, what often happens if you look at people, and we can speak from a little bit of personal experience, is you’re checking email, or I’m working on my own talk. But often, it’s like you’re doing things that are not paying attention, and I have this illusion, well, I’m paying attention and then I’m going back. And then, what happens is I don’t remember anything from that day. It just kind of vanished, because what happens, I’m creating all these artificial event boundaries. I’m losing all this executive function every time I switch, I’m getting a few seconds slower and I’m catching up mentally to what’s happening. And so, instead of being in a model where you’re meaningfully integrating everything and predicting and generating this kind of rich model, I’m just catching up. And so yeah, there’s great research by Melina Uncapher and Anthony Wagner on multitasking, that people can look up that talks about just how bad it is for memory, and it’s becoming worse and worse of a problem.…

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