Hello, I’m Dr. Jeff Kingsley and welcome to another edition of Riding in Cars With Researchers. Today we’re going to talk about cognitive overload – what it is and why you should care. I believe I mentioned the concept of cognitive overload when I was doing the video on vicious versus virtuous cycles and I know I’ve spoken about it at several of the recent conferences where I’ve been presenting.

What is Cognitive Overload?

Cognitive overload is a very real phenomenon. It’s a phenomenon that basically means the more input in a given period, the lower the output. The more things I pay attention to at the same time, the less I’m able to maintain my concentration and produce a high-quality output. There is great data that shows that multitasking isn’t real. Human beings cannot multitask. It’s artificial to think that you can do multiple things with concentration at the same moment in time. Your concentration actually has to shift focus from one thing to another. Unconscious behavior, however, continues because that doesn’t require your conscious focus. It just simply happens.

But cognitive overload is real. Imagine a neurosurgeon in the midst of neurosurgery and people are asking this person to solve complicated math equations at the same time, while there’s music in the background (that the surgeon doesn’t really like) and nurses are talking about completely different things (sidebar conversations), and somebody else is reading the surgeons text messages to him. Quality would go down. Cognitive overload. Doctors struggle with this all day, every day.

Examples of Cognitive Overload

One of our Investigators had an appointment with me at 4pm. I called him at 4 to discuss a non-alcoholic fatty liver disease trial that we’re coming up on; to discuss the protocol, his review of the protocol and patient populations and the use of the Fibroscan device. So, we had this appointment at 4:00pm and he was prepping for that appointment, but when I called him at 4 he asked if he could call me back as he was on his way to the OR. He was on his way into the OR, unplanned, because a surgeon was operating on a patient and found a very large gallstone and needed him to determine if he could take it out as an outpatient procedure or if they needed to pivot and remove the gall stone in the midst of a different procedure that they were there to do at that time. This doctor is a gastroenterologist and he’s seeing outpatients, he’s doing hospital rounds, he’s doing procedures (endoscopies), and has on-call responsibilities. He’s a Principal Investigator and he has to pay attention to I/E criteria and he’s got an inbox filled with emails from me, CRAs, and project managers and from venders with usernames and passwords. All of that is cognitive overload.

When I started this video today, I was thinking about doing a video on cognitive overload and I was at the entrance ramp. I was at a stoplight and I was getting ready to hit the record button, but I didn’t. Why? Well because I would be moving down an entrance ramp with the 20 other cars that were around me and then merging onto a highway while driving and thinking through cognitive overload and trying to have a coherent message. And I knew that my quality would go down if I tried to do so. I made a conscious decision to wait until I was already on the highway to press the record button and then I could begin having a conversation with you.