Mind full: recent brain research offers intriguing insights into leadership and decision-making.

• Author: Rall, Jaime
• Position: LEADERSHIP

In statehouses across the country, legislators are making difficult decisions that directly affect the people they serve. Every year, lawmakers consider thousands of bills, plus countless choices about leadership, ethics and how to strengthen the legislative institution.

Meanwhile, in very different institutions, researchers in cognitive psychology, neuroscience and other disciplines are making exciting discoveries about the science of human decision-making. These intriguing, often surprising findings offer legislators and other high-stakes decision-makers practical insight into what they can do to perform at their best.

"One of the overarching discoveries about the brain is that a lot of our intuitive assumptions about how we make decisions are just wrong," says David Rock, director of the NeuroLeadership Institute, a global initiative that applies neuroscience to the art of leadership.

"If you're involved in governing," Rock says, "it's good to stay close to what we're learning about human nature."

The Myth of Multitasking

Today, many of us assume multitasking--being able to do several things at the same time--is a skill to be proud of, one that helps us accomplish more.

Think again, researchers suggest. They have found that the brain actually appears to have been designed to focus on only one thing at a time--and to ignore the rest. In a now-classic experiment, for example, researchers asked people to watch a short video of two teams passing a basketball and silently count how many times one of the teams passed the ball. While they watched, a gorilla strolled into the scene, faced the camera and thumped its chest before walking on through. About half the viewers, however, were so focused on counting that they never even noticed the gorilla in the film.

How could people miss something so obvious? At any given time, we are bombarded by countless sights, sounds and smells. To deal with this, researchers believe, our brains are designed to filter out whatever information seems unnecessary for the task at hand.

As a result, says molecular biologist John Medina, "multitasking, when it comes to paying attention, is a myth." Research indicates that when we try to think about two things at once (writing an email while listening to a colleague, for example), we're actually switching our attention back and forth--not dividing it equally--between them. This takes more time and mental energy, and we miss things. "If you try to do two things in the laboratory, it takes you 50 percent longer to finish the tasks--and you make three times more errors while you're trying to do them."

If you think you're a talented multi-tasker who can beat these odds, you might want to reconsider. A recent University of Utah study confirmed that people who multitask the most actually tend to be the worst at it, even though they "harbor the illusion they are better than average," notes senior author and psychologist David Strayer.

Other new research suggests that you don't have to be actively multitasking to be distracted. Just being able to see a cell phone was enough to interfere with cognitive performance and social interactions in experimental studies.

Digital Distractions on Overdrive

For legislators, who must keep several balls in the air at once, this may not be good news. Lawmakers and their staffs handle hundreds of emails a day, plus phone calls, impromptu meetings, streams of unexpected visitors and, increasingly, the demands of social media sites like Facebook and Twitter.

"I think people think that, because of all our mobile devices, we can get so much more done and work so much more efficiently," says Wyoming House Majority Leader Rosie Berger (R). "But I...