Photo by AlphaTangoBravo / Adam Baker.

There’s a conspiracy against you, and everyone is in on it. Your friends, your roommates, your significant other, your co-workers (if you’re only freelancing part-time), hell, even that guy sitting a few tables away from you at the café you like to do work in. They’re all slowing you down.

Here’s the kicker, though: they don’t know what their doing. They’re just pawns in this game. So who’s the mastermind behind this nefarious plot to kill your productivity?

Your own brain.

A recent study by Dr. Timothy Welsh, from the University of Calgary’s Kinesiology Department, shows that a person working in your field of vision on a task that’s different from your own can slow down your performance – and it’s the fault of the way our brains work.

My Own Worst Enemy

Just like we react reflexively to external stimuli (pulling our hand away from a hot pot handle, for example), our bodies also react to internal stimuli without us consciously deciding to take action (like when we cry after thinking about something sad), like a reflex to ideas. This psychological phenomenon is called the ideomotor effect, and according to the ideomotor effect of motor programming (the system by which our body structures muscle commands before a movement begins), the perception and action systems in our brains are so closely linked that “actions and the results of those actions are maintained in a common representation.” That is, when we plan to do something, that thought conjures up another thought, a representation of the outcome of whatever it is we were going to do. On the flipside, thinking about the result of an action activates the neural coding of that action.

This relationship between perception and action gets complicated in a social setting when mirror neurons come into play. These information-processing cells in the nervous system fire both when we act and when we observe actions performed by others. Essentially, these neurons “mirror” the actions of others, as though we were performing them ourselves. When we see someone do something, we automatically imagine ourselves doing the same thing (the technical term for this is response co-representation), not in the sense of a prolonged daydream, but a thought just a few milliseconds long. (Like when someone has a crumb on their face and you wipe the same spot on your face? That’s always weird. — Ed).

That may not seem like a whole lot of time (a millisecond is one thousandth of a second), but imagine working on your laptop in a busy café and think about how many people you glance at while you’re there. Couple this with the fact that when you go back to your own work, you’re also imagining the result of every action you plan to take, right down to hitting a key or clicking your mouse, for a few milliseconds, and you can see how all these little flashes can add up.

Green Means Go, Red Means Stop

In his experiment, Welsh aimed to find out if a person actually has to see the action of another person for the mirror neurons to do their thing, or if simply believing that another person is doing their work is enough. Participants in the experiment performed a spatial-compatibility task (also called a Simon task, a basic example of which you try for yourself here) in three variations: one by themselves, one with a partner (a woman working with Welsh’s team acted as the partner in all the experiments) sitting beside them and one where the partner left the room and told the participant that they would perform their part of the task in another room.

In the first partner task, the participant sat next to the partner at a computer and pressed the “z” key when a green square appeared on the screen while the partner pressed the “/” key in response to red squares on the screen. After a while, the partner told the participant that she was going to leave the room and continue pressing her key on a networked computer in another room. Instead of actually pressing the key, though, she simply ran a program that made it look like she was performing her part of the task by making the red squares disappear after a pseudorandom period of time based on her response times. So, in this final task the participant lacked visual contact and social interaction with the partner and witnessed only the effects of her actions, but not the actions themselves.

And what did we learn from this?

Drum roll please…

Dealing with Peer Pressure

After analyzing the participants’ response times in the three tasks, Welsh and his research team found that participants were slower while working next to their partner than when they worked alone or when the partner was “working” out of sight. Even though the majority of participants believed that their partner performed her task after she left the room (there were a few who didn’t buy the ruse, and their results were eliminated from the data set), evidence of response co-representation was only observed when the partner was in the same room with the participants. Welsh concludes that the actions of another person are only represented and modeled by the observer when the observer actually sees at least a portion of that action.

Now, response co-representation isn’t necessarily a bad thing, and can be helpful when one is trying to learn a technique from someone else (“watch and learn”), but as we see here, it can also cause problems when what someone observes and someone intends to do are different. Welsh thinks his results have some practical implications for the design of both physical work spaces and remote work systems. He suggests that “in a situation where speed and accuracy in performing a certain task are important” a work setting “in which people work in isolation – or at least with people who doing very similar tasks” would help productivity and that “coordinating actions through more remote systems in which neither operator can see each others’ actions” would have the same benefits.

If you like working around other people, but find you’re less productive in social settings, try to situate yourself in a way where you can’t see anyone else. People thinking you’re strange for sitting in the corner may be worth it for the increased productivity. And if you like to work in isolation, you’ve got a leg up on our more social brethren. And if you’re roommates hassle you for shutting yourself in, you can just tell them, “Hey, it’s science. Look it up.”

Reference: Welsh, T.N., Higgins, L., Ray, M., Weeks, D.J.. “Seeing vs. believing: Is believing sufficient to activate the processes of response co-representation?”. Human Movement Science, Volume 26, Issue 6, December 2007. DOI: 10.1016/j.humov.2007.06.003

Matt Soniak

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