{"id":238,"date":"2017-12-04T10:00:09","date_gmt":"2017-12-04T10:00:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/react\/?p=238"},"modified":"2018-04-30T09:12:25","modified_gmt":"2018-04-30T08:12:25","slug":"perceptual-load-and-the-magic-of-science-podcasts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/react\/perceptual-load-and-the-magic-of-science-podcasts\/","title":{"rendered":"Perceptual Load and the magic of Science Podcasts"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Leonie Schittenhelm<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

One of the many joys of being a PhD student? Data analysis. Endless hours of data analysis. During the last year of my PhD I have progressively become quicker and also slowly coaxed my computer to do more and more of the really boring stuff, such as ordering things and applying the same analysis over and over, for me. But still, I spend about 1-2 days of my week coping with the data my experiments generate. And with that I\u2019m not even at the top end of what a lot of my PhD pals have to deal with on a weekly and monthly basis. So what to do when a hard drive full of data, a noisy office and the knowledge that you will have to sit at it until you\u2019re finished because you want to have something to show to your supervisor the next day await you? Easy: Podcasts, especially of the scientific variety.<\/p>\n

Okay, bear with me on this one. \u2018I can\u2019t concentrate when I\u2019m listening to people talk on the desk behind me, why should it be different when I\u2019m listening to people in my headphones?\u2019 I hear you say. And \u2013 while I do get your point, office gossip is the best and worst at the same time \u2013 to that I have just one answer: Science proves me right. Before I explain that a bit further we have to go back to roughly last year, when I hadn\u2019t quite figured out yet how to make my computer do the really boring stuff for me yet. And by really boring I mean resizing tiny pictures of my data so they tidily fit into a grid and in line with a lot of other tiny pictures of my data. What I didn\u2019t get was that even though I was staring for so long at this data, I still made a lot of silly mistakes that would usually occur to me only when presenting my data to others. And even worse, everything took me hours upon unenjoyable hours. All of this because I kept getting distracted from the task at hand: analysing my data quickly and accurately, formatting it in a logical way.<\/p>\n

In comes perceptual load theory, a term coined by the psychologist Nili Lavie in the mid-nineties. The basic gist of perceptual load theory is that you have a certain amount of attention to give at any one moment. If you perform tasks that are termed \u2018High load\u2019, such as giving a presentation or doing a really difficult reagent calculation in your head, all of your attention is taken up by this one task, meaning there is little to none that can take your attention from this task. One of the most famous experiments on this involved a person in a gorilla costume and countless test subjects who, when tasked with a high-load visual task, could simply not remember even seeing the brown fluffy individual walking right through their field of vision. On the other hand, if the main task at hand is low-load, for example me when formatting my data so it fit a grid, your mind diverts the rest of the available attention to other less important things. This not only makes you less competent at the task at hand, it also means it takes you longer to complete because you become constantly distracted.<\/p>\n

And why podcasts, you may ask? Okay, here this becomes less science and more personal preference. I did find that listening to people talk, often even learning something new in the process, provided exactly the right mix of attention to data versus attention to listening to keep my focus and enjoy myself in the process. And with so many science-themed podcasts to choose from, you\u2019re really spoiled for choice. Here a short list of my absolute favourites:<\/p>\n