Think you’re good at multi-tasking? Here’s how your brain compensates – and how this changes with age
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We’re all time-poor, so multi-tasking is seen as a necessity of modern living. We answer work emails while watching TV, make shopping lists in meetings and listen to podcasts when doing the dishes. We attempt to split our attention countless times a day when juggling both mundane and important tasks.
But doing two things at the same time isn’t always as productive or safe as focusing on one thing at a time.
The dilemma with multi-tasking is that when tasks become complex or energy-demanding, like driving a car while talking on the phone, our performance often drops on one or both.
Here’s why – and how our ability to multi-task changes as we age.
Doing more things, but less effectively
The issue with multi-tasking at a brain level, is that two tasks performed at the same time often compete for common neural pathways – like two intersecting streams of traffic on a road.
In particular, the brain’s planning centres in the frontal cortex (and connections to parieto-cerebellar system, among others) are needed for both motor and cognitive tasks. The more tasks rely on the same sensory system, like vision, the greater the interference.
This is why multi-tasking, such as talking on the phone, while driving can be risky. It takes longer to react to critical events, such as a car braking suddenly, and you have a higher risk of missing critical signals, such as a red light.
The more involved the phone conversation, the higher the accident risk, even when talking “hands-free”.
Generally, the more skilled you are on a primary motor task, the better able you are to juggle another task at the same time. Skilled surgeons, for example, can multitask more effectively than residents, which is reassuring in a busy operating suite.
Highly automated skills and efficient brain processes mean greater flexibility when multi-tasking.
Adults are better at multi-tasking than kids
Both brain capacity and experience endow adults with a greater capacity for multi-tasking compared with children.
You may have noticed that when you start thinking about a problem, you walk more slowly, and sometimes to a standstill if deep in thought. The ability to walk and think at the same time gets better over childhood and adolescence, as do other types of multi-tasking.
When children do these two things at once, their walking speed and smoothness both wane, particularly when also doing a memory task (like recalling a sequence of numbers), verbal fluency task (like naming animals) or a fine-motor task (like buttoning up a shirt). Alternately, outside the lab, the cognitive task might fall by wayside as the motor goal takes precedence.
Brain maturation has a lot to do with these age differences. A larger prefrontal cortex helps share cognitive resources between tasks, thereby reducing the costs. This means better capacity to maintain performance at or near single-task levels.
The white matter tract that connects our two hemispheres (the corpus callosum) also takes a long time to fully mature, placing limits on how well children can walk around and do manual tasks (like texting on a phone) together.
For a child or adult with motor skill difficulties, or developmental coordination disorder, multi-tastking errors are more common. Simply standing still while solving a visual task (like judging which of two lines is longer) is hard. When walking, it takes much longer to complete a path if it also involves cognitive effort along the way. So you can imagine how difficult walking to school could be.
What about as we approach older age?
Older adults are more prone to multi-tasking errors. When walking, for example, adding another task generally means older adults walk much slower and with less fluid movement than younger adults.
These age differences are even more pronounced when obstacles must be avoided or the path is winding or uneven.
Older adults tend to enlist more of their prefrontal cortex when walking and, especially, when multi-tasking. This creates more interference when the same brain networks are also enlisted to perform a cognitive task.
These age differences in performance of multi-tasking might be more “compensatory” than anything else, allowing older adults more time and safety when negotiating events around them.
Older people can practise and improve
Testing multi-tasking capabilities can tell clinicians about an older patient’s risk of future falls better than an assessment of walking alone, even for healthy people living in the community.
Testing can be as simple as asking someone to walk a path while either mentally subtracting by sevens, carrying a cup and saucer, or balancing a ball on a tray.
Patients can then practise and improve these abilities by, for example, pedalling an exercise bike or walking on a treadmill while composing a poem, making a shopping list, or playing a word game.
The goal is for patients to be able to divide their attention more efficiently across two tasks and to ignore distractions, improving speed and balance.
There are times when we do think better when moving
Let’s not forget that a good walk can help unclutter our mind and promote creative thought. And, some research shows walking can improve our ability to search and respond to visual events in the environment.
But often, it’s better to focus on one thing at a time
We often overlook the emotional and energy costs of multi-tasking when time-pressured. In many areas of life – home, work and school – we think it will save us time and energy. But the reality can be different.
Multi-tasking can sometimes sap our reserves and create stress, raising our cortisol levels, especially when we’re time-pressured. If such performance is sustained over long periods, it can leave you feeling fatigued or just plain empty.
Deep thinking is energy demanding by itself and so caution is sometimes warranted when acting at the same time – such as being immersed in deep thought while crossing a busy road, descending steep stairs, using power tools, or climbing a ladder.
So, pick a good time to ask someone a vexed question – perhaps not while they’re cutting vegetables with a sharp knife. Sometimes, it’s better to focus on one thing at a time.
Peter Wilson, Professor of Developmental Psychology, Australian Catholic University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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Yoga Safety: Simple Guidelines
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It’s Q&A Day at 10almonds!
Have a question or a request? You can always hit “reply” to any of our emails, or use the feedback widget at the bottom!
In cases where we’ve already covered something, we might link to what we wrote before, but will always be happy to revisit any of our topics again in the future too—there’s always more to say!
As ever: if the question/request can be answered briefly, we’ll do it here in our Q&A Thursday edition. If not, we’ll make a main feature of it shortly afterwards!
So, no question/request too big or small
❝I was wondering whether there were very simple, clear bullet points or instructions on things to be wary of in Yoga.❞
That’s quite a large topic, and not one that lends itself well to being conveyed in bullet points, but first we’ll share the article you sent us when sending this question:
Tips for Avoiding Yoga Injuries
…and next we’ll recommend the YouTube channel @livinleggings, whose videos we feature here from time to time. She (Liv) has a lot of good videos on problems/mistakes/injuries to avoid.
Here’s a great one to get you started:
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Ozempic Helps People Walk Further
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There’s often a catch-22 when it comes to exercise: it’s important for good health, and/but people with ill health usually cannot exercise much.
A recent (published today, at time of writing, the 29th of March 2025, never let it be said we don’t bring you the very most up-to-date health science!) study by Dr. Neda Rasouli et al. has shown there is a possible way through that catch-22, depending on the nature of the illness.
This study followed 792 people across 112 outpatient clinical trial sites in 20 countries in North America, Asia, and Europe, with type 2 diabetes and peripheral artery disease.
What they found
Patients taking semaglutide (specifically, 1mg Ozempic) enjoyed a 21% median increase in walking distance, as well as some bonus benefits, namely:
- Weight reduction: the semaglutide group saw a greater reduction in body weight (–4.1 kg; P < 0 .0001)
- HbA1c levels: semaglutide lowered HbA1c by 1 percentage point (P < 0.0001)
- Blood pressure: systolic blood pressure decreased by 3.2 mmHg (P = 0.0042)
You may be wondering what that “P =” means: it’s the probability of this occurring by random chance, on a scale from zero (impossible outcome) to 1 (unavoidable outcome).
For example:
“We hypothesized that singing the happy birthday song before tossing a coin would result in it landing on heads. We sang the happy birthday song and tossed the coin; it landed on heads (P = 0.5)”
In science, generally speaking anything with a probability of under 0.05 (expressed as: “P < 0.05”) is considered a statistically significant result.
All this to say, the cited figures of, for example, P < 0.0001, are very significant indeed.
On which note, that 21% median increase in walking distance? P < 0.0004.
As for side effects? Serious adverse events related to the drug occurred in 1% of the semaglutide group vs 2% in the placebo group. So, that seems quite safe indeed.
You can find the paper itself here:
Want to learn more?
Check out:
- The Doctor Who Wants Us To Exercise Less, & Move More
- Walking… Better.
- 5 Ways To Naturally Boost The “Ozempic Effect”
Take care!
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Apple vs Pear – Which is Healthier?
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Our Verdict
When comparing apple to pear, we picked the pear.
Why?
Both are great! But there’s a category that puts pears ahead of apples…
Looking at their macros first, pears contain more carbs but also more fiber. Both are low glycemic index foods, though.
In the category of vitamins, things are moderately even: apples contain more of vitamins A, B1, B6, and E, while pears contain more of vitamins B3, B9, K, and choline. That’s a 4:4 split, and the two fruits are about equal in the other vitamins they both contain.
When it comes to minerals, pears contain more calcium, copper, iron, magnesium, manganese, phosphorus, potassium, selenium, and zinc. A resounding victory for pears, as apples are not higher in any mineral.
In short, if an apple a day keeps the doctor away, a pear should keep the doctor away for about a day and a half, based on the extra nutrients ← this is slightly facetious as medicine doesn’t work like that, but you get the idea: pears simply have more to offer. Apples are still great though! Enjoy both! Diversity is good.
Want to learn more?
You might like to read:
From Apples To Bees, And High-Fructose Cs: Which Sugars Are Healthier, And Which Are Just The Same?
Take care!
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Pain Doesn’t Belong on a Scale of Zero to 10
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Over the past two years, a simple but baffling request has preceded most of my encounters with medical professionals: “Rate your pain on a scale of zero to 10.”
I trained as a physician and have asked patients the very same question thousands of times, so I think hard about how to quantify the sum of the sore hips, the prickly thighs, and the numbing, itchy pain near my left shoulder blade. I pause and then, mostly arbitrarily, choose a number. “Three or four?” I venture, knowing the real answer is long, complicated, and not measurable in this one-dimensional way.
Pain is a squirrely thing. It’s sometimes burning, sometimes drilling, sometimes a deep-in-the-muscles clenching ache. Mine can depend on my mood or how much attention I afford it and can recede nearly entirely if I’m engrossed in a film or a task. Pain can also be disabling enough to cancel vacations, or so overwhelming that it leads people to opioid addiction. Even 10+ pain can be bearable when it’s endured for good reason, like giving birth to a child. But what’s the purpose of the pains I have now, the lingering effects of a head injury?
The concept of reducing these shades of pain to a single number dates to the 1970s. But the zero-to-10 scale is ubiquitous today because of what was called a “pain revolution” in the ’90s, when intense new attention to addressing pain — primarily with opioids — was framed as progress. Doctors today have a fuller understanding of treating pain, as well as the terrible consequences of prescribing opioids so readily. What they are learning only now is how to better measure pain and treat its many forms.
About 30 years ago, physicians who championed the use of opioids gave robust new life to what had been a niche specialty: pain management. They started pushing the idea that pain should be measured at every appointment as a “fifth vital sign.” The American Pain Society went as far as copyrighting the phrase. But unlike the other vital signs — blood pressure, temperature, heart rate, and breathing rate — pain had no objective scale. How to measure the unmeasurable? The society encouraged doctors and nurses to use the zero-to-10 rating system. Around that time, the FDA approved OxyContin, a slow-release opioid painkiller made by Purdue Pharma. The drugmaker itself encouraged doctors to routinely record and treat pain, and aggressively marketed opioids as an obvious solution.
To be fair, in an era when pain was too often ignored or undertreated, the zero-to-10 rating system could be regarded as an advance. Morphine pumps were not available for those cancer patients I saw in the ’80s, even those in agonizing pain from cancer in their bones; doctors regarded pain as an inevitable part of disease. In the emergency room where I practiced in the early ’90s, prescribing even a few opioid pills was a hassle: It required asking the head nurse to unlock a special prescription pad and making a copy for the state agency that tracked prescribing patterns. Regulators (rightly) worried that handing out narcotics would lead to addiction. As a result, some patients in need of relief likely went without.
After pain doctors and opioid manufacturers campaigned for broader use of opioids — claiming that newer forms were not addictive, or much less so than previous incarnations — prescribing the drugs became far easier and were promoted for all kinds of pain, whether from knee arthritis or back problems. As a young doctor joining the “pain revolution,” I probably asked patients thousands of times to rate their pain on a scale of zero to 10 and wrote many scripts each week for pain medication, as monitoring “the fifth vital sign” quickly became routine in the medical system. In time, a zero-to-10 pain measurement became a necessary box to fill in electronic medical records. The Joint Commission on the Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations made regularly assessing pain a prerequisite for medical centers receiving federal health care dollars. Medical groups added treatment of pain to their list of patient rights, and satisfaction with pain treatment became a component of post-visit patient surveys. (A poor showing could mean lower reimbursement from some insurers.)
But this approach to pain management had clear drawbacks. Studies accumulated showing that measuring patients’ pain didn’t result in better pain control. Doctors showed little interest in or didn’t know how to respond to the recorded answer. And patients’ satisfaction with their doctors’ discussion of pain didn’t necessarily mean they got adequate treatment. At the same time, the drugs were fueling the growing opioid epidemic. Research showed that an estimated 3% to 19% of people who received a prescription for pain medication from a doctor developed an addiction.
Doctors who wanted to treat pain had few other options, though. “We had a good sense that these drugs weren’t the only way to manage pain,” Linda Porter, director of the National Institutes of Health’s Office of Pain Policy and Planning, told me. “But we didn’t have a good understanding of the complexity or alternatives.” The enthusiasm for narcotics left many varietals of pain underexplored and undertreated for years. Only in 2018, a year when nearly 50,000 Americans died of an overdose, did Congress start funding a program — the Early Phase Pain Investigation Clinical Network, or EPPIC-Net — designed to explore types of pain and find better solutions. The network connects specialists at 12 academic specialized clinical centers and is meant to jump-start new research in the field and find bespoke solutions for different kinds of pain.
A zero-to-10 scale may make sense in certain situations, such as when a nurse uses it to adjust a medication dose for a patient hospitalized after surgery or an accident. And researchers and pain specialists have tried to create better rating tools — dozens, in fact, none of which was adequate to capture pain’s complexity, a European panel of experts concluded. The Veterans Health Administration, for instance, created one that had supplemental questions and visual prompts: A rating of 5 correlated with a frown and a pain level that “interrupts some activities.” The survey took much longer to administer and produced results that were no better than the zero-to-10 system. By the 2010s, many medical organizations, including the American Medical Association and the American Academy of Family Physicians, were rejecting not just the zero-to-10 scale but the entire notion that pain could be meaningfully self-reported numerically by a patient.
In the years that opioids had dominated pain remedies, a few drugs — such as gabapentin and pregabalin for neuropathy, and lidocaine patches and creams for musculoskeletal aches — had become available. “There was a growing awareness of the incredible complexity of pain — that you would have to find the right drugs for the right patients,” Rebecca Hommer, EPPIC-Net’s interim director, told me. Researchers are now looking for biomarkers associated with different kinds of pain so that drug studies can use more objective measures to assess the medications’ effect. A better understanding of the neural pathways and neurotransmitters that create different types of pain could also help researchers design drugs to interrupt and tame them.
Any treatments that come out of this research are unlikely to be blockbusters like opioids; by design, they will be useful to fewer people. That also makes them less appealing prospects to drug companies. So EPPIC-Net is helping small drug companies, academics, and even individual doctors design and conduct early-stage trials to test the safety and efficacy of promising pain-taming molecules. That information will be handed over to drug manufacturers for late-stage trials, all with the aim of getting new drugs approved by the FDA more quickly.
The first EPPIC-Net trials are just getting underway. Finding better treatments will be no easy task, because the nervous system is a largely unexplored universe of molecules, cells, and electronic connections that interact in countless ways. The 2021 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine went to scientists who discovered the mechanisms that allow us to feel the most basic sensations: cold and hot. In comparison, pain is a hydra. A simple number might feel definitive. But it’s not helping anyone make the pain go away.
KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF—an independent source of health policy research, polling, and journalism. Learn more about KFF.
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‘It’s okay to poo at work’: new health campaign highlights a common source of anxiety
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For most people, the daily or near-daily ritual of having a bowel motion is not something we give a great deal of thought to. But for some people, the need to do a “number two” in a public toilet or at work can be beset with significant stress and anxiety.
In recognition of the discomfort people may feel around passing a bowel motion at work, the Queensland Department of Health recently launched a social media campaign with the message “It’s okay to poo at work”.
The campaign has gained significant traction on Instagram and Facebook. It has been praised by health and marketing experts for its humorous handling of a taboo topic.
A colourful Instagram post is accompanied by a caption warning of the health risks of “holding it in”, including haemorrhoids and other gastrointestinal problems. The caption also notes:
If you find it extremely difficult to poo around other people, you might have parcopresis.
Queensland Health/Instagram What is parcopresis?
Parcopresis, sometimes called “shy bowel”, occurs when people experience a difficulty or inability to poo in public toilets due to fear of perceived scrutiny by others.
People with parcopresis may find it difficult to go to the toilet in public places such as shopping centres, restaurants, at work or at school, or even at home when friends or family are around.
They may fear being judged by others about unpleasant smells or sounds when they have a bowel motion, or how long they take to go, for example.
Living with a gastrointestinal condition (at least four in ten Australians do) may contribute to parcopresis due to anxiety about the need to use a toilet frequently, and perceived judgment from others when doing so. Other factors, such as past negative experiences or accessibility challenges, may also play a role.
Some people may feel uncomfortable about using the toilet at work. Motortion Films/Shutterstock For sufferers, anxiety can present in the form of a faster heart rate, rapid breathing, sweating, muscle tension, blushing, nausea, trembling, or a combination of these symptoms. They may experience ongoing worry about situations where they may need to use a public toilet.
Living with parcopresis can affect multiple domains of life and quality of life overall. For example, sufferers may have difficulties relating to employment, relationships and social life. They might avoid travelling or attending certain events because of their symptoms.
How common is parcopresis?
We don’t really know how common parcopresis is, partly due to the difficulty of evaluating this behaviour. It’s not necessarily easy or appropriate to follow people around to track whether they use or avoid public toilets (and their reasons if they do). Also, observing individual bathroom activities may alter the person’s behaviour.
I conducted a study to try to better understand how common parcopresis is. The study involved 714 university students. I asked participants to respond to a series of vignettes, or scenarios.
In each vignette participants were advised they were at a local shopping centre and they needed to have a bowel motion. In the vignettes, the bathrooms (which had been recently cleaned) had configurations of either two or three toilet stalls. Each vignette differed by the configuration of stalls available.
The rate of avoidance was just over 14% overall. But participants were more likely to avoid using the toilet when the other stalls were occupied.
Around 10% avoided going when all toilets were available. This rose to around 25% when only the middle of three toilets was available. Men were significantly less likely to avoid going than women across all vignettes.
For those who avoided the toilet, many either said they would go home to poo, use an available disabled toilet, or come back when the bathroom was empty.
Parcopresis at work
In occupational settings, the rates of anxiety about using shared bathrooms may well be higher for a few reasons.
For example, people may feel more self-conscious about their bodily functions being heard or noticed by colleagues, compared to strangers in a public toilet.
People may also experience guilt, shame and fear about being judged by colleagues or supervisors if they need to make extended or frequent visits to the bathroom. This may particularly apply to people with a gastrointestinal condition.
Reducing restroom anxiety
Using a public toilet can understandably cause some anxiety or be unpleasant. But for a small minority of people it can be a real problem, causing severe distress and affecting their ability to engage in activities of daily living.
If doing a poo in a toilet at work or another public setting causes you anxiety, be kind to yourself. A number of strategies might help:
- identify and challenge negative thoughts about using public toilets and remind yourself that using the bathroom is normal, and that most people are not paying attention to others in the toilets
- try to manage stress through relaxation techniques such as deep breathing and progressive muscle relaxation, which involves tensing and relaxing different muscles around the body
- engaging in gradual exposure can be helpful, which means visiting public toilets at different times and locations, so you can develop greater confidence in using them
- use grounding or distraction techniques while going to the toilet. These might include listening to music, watching something on your phone, or focusing on your breathing.
If you feel parcopresis is having a significant impact on your life, talk to your GP or a psychologist who can help identify appropriate approaches to treatment. This might include cognitive behavioural therapy.
Simon Robert Knowles, Associate Professor and Clinical Psychologist, Swinburne University of Technology
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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True Age – by Dr. Morgan Levine
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Yesterday’s book review (Counterclockwise) was about psychological factors affecting physical aging (progression or reversal thereof); today we have a book about the physiological factors affecting physical aging (progression or reversal thereof).
Dr. Levine is first and foremost a gerontological epigeneticist, and a lot of this book touches on her research in that field and that of her colleagues.
She does also discuss direct environmental factors also though, and—as you might well expect—lifestyle factors.
Regular readers of 10almonds are unlikely to gain anything new in the category of lifestyle matters, but a lot of the other material will be enlightening, especially with regard to the things that might at first glance seem set in stone, but we can in fact modify, and thus “choose our own adventure” when it comes to how the rest of our life plays out, healthwise (so: choose wisely!).
The book is mostly an overview on the (at time of writing: 2022) current state of affairs in the world of longevity research, and although it’s not a “how to” manual, there is plenty in the category of practical takeaways to be gleaned too.
The style is is mostly light pop science, but with a lot of hard science woven in—she is a good explainer, and has clearly made a notable effort to explain complex concepts in simple ways, while still delivering the complex concepts too (i.e. not overly “dumbing down”).
Bottom line: if you’d like to know about what can be done to increase your healthspan and general longevity, this book has a lot of answers!
Click here to check out True Age, and shift yours in the direction you prefer!
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