A silent emergency: The rise in suicides among UK doctors
Faced with high-pressure workloads, bullying and poor support structures, medics are at least twice as likely to die by suicide than the general population.
Warning: This story contains details about suicide that some readers may find disturbing. If you or a loved one is experiencing suicidal thoughts, help and support are available. Visit Befrienders Worldwide for more information about support services.
London, United Kingdom – In the early 1980s when Amandip Sidhu was growing up in Harrow, a suburb on the fringe of northwest London, his South Asian family was one of only a handful of non-white households in the area. Having spent some of his childhood in East Africa, where his father was a civil servant, Amandip and his family keenly felt the racist microaggressions that were common across the United Kingdom at the time.
This early experience of prejudice profoundly changed his brother Jagdip, who was five and a half years older than him. Jagdip decided that the best way to beat discrimination was to prove that he was better than his peers. “He was very much the golden boy, and everyone loved him,” Amandip says.
After leaving secondary school with top grades, Jagdip went on to tertiary college, which was at the time a prerequisite for entrance into university. Just to outdo himself, he made a request to the college to be allowed to take four subjects instead of the maximum three for his exams. The request was rejected, but Jagdip refused to be deterred. He bought himself a textbook and taught himself physics, eventually scoring straight As.
Amandip found it tough being continually compared with his accomplished sibling. “I’m not academically gifted, and my dad would have a go at me about it sometimes,” he says. “And my brother would step in and say, ‘Look, just leave him alone.’ He was the only person my dad would listen to.”
Jagdip sailed through medical school, his scholastic record peppered with awards. Then he started work at Ealing Hospital in West London. Amandip recalls how his brother bought a new pair of shoes and, a short time after he started work, showed him his feet. They were bleeding and covered in blisters. Amandip was shocked, but Jagdip was pleased. He was so busy at the hospital that he had been rushing around for 10 miles (16km) a day.
“He felt it was a badge of honour, the fact that his shoes were worn out, that he didn’t have anything to eat or drink or even go to the toilet,” Amandip explains. It was almost as if these were accepted symbols of the dedication needed to be considered a good doctor by the profession and health systems.
[Richard Smith/Al Jazeera]
Over almost 25 years, Jagdip established a reputation as an excellent doctor. He became the clinical lead for cardiology at a hospital in Kent and was tasked with spearheading several large projects, including one at a teaching hospital in London. “Until today, I still run into people who tell me he was the best they’d ever worked with, that he never got a diagnosis wrong,” Amandip says.
While many other consultants decided to take on private commercial work, Jagdip was committed to serving the majority of his patients under the publicly funded National Health Service (NHS). He felt strongly that he had a responsibility towards those who needed urgent healthcare but couldn’t pay for it. But his clinic lists were far longer than his colleagues, and there simply were not enough resources to support the overwhelming number of patients. Jagdip felt like he had to take every single one of them on.
But the cracks were beginning to show. In mid-November 2018, Jagdip told Amandip that he was scared of what was happening to him. “He was listening to his colleague talk about a case and said his brain couldn’t even function.”
Sign up for Al Jazeera
Coronavirus and Health Newsletter
Medical developments, troubling variants, the human impact—it’s all here.
Please check your email to confirm your subscription
Amandip gave his brother advice he now regrets. “I said he should see the occupational health service at the hospital, which was probably the wrong thing to do,” he says. Deeming Jagdip overworked, the hospital put him on leave for six months. In his severely distressed state, Amandip believes, Jagdip perceived this to be a punitive measure.
The Sunday after Jagdip was signed off sick, Amandip went to visit him. He says his brother was completely broken. It was only the second time he’d seen him cry. The first was at their father’s funeral. “He couldn’t look me in the eye. He felt so ashamed. It was his whole life. Being signed off work was like a draconian punishment to him, to say that you can no longer be the person you are.”
The next day, Amandip sent Jagdip a message to check on him. Jagdip responded and said he was resting. Unbeknownst to Amandip, his brother was actually tidying up his financial affairs.
Then, the following day, November 27, at around 2:30pm, Amandip received an email. True to the perfectionism that had defined him since childhood, Jagdip’s message consisted of a long list of instructions on what to do with his house and his insurance policies. “You’ll find me at Beachy Head with the car,” the note ended. Beachy Head, the highest chalk sea cliff in the UK, has been a well-known location for suicides since the 1600s. Amandip felt a punch to the gut: His brother was saying goodbye.
Amandip drove straight to Beachy Head from London, where he lives. The area was already swarming with search dogs, helicopters and officers from the coastguard. He sat waiting in silence until a policeman told him that they had found Jagdip’s body.
A numbness came over him during the hourlong drive home. “I showered, went to bed and thought I’d process it later,” he says. At 3am, he woke up and started sobbing as his wife held him. “That’s when it really hit me that my brother was dead,” he says.
Dr Jagdip Sidhu was 47 years old.
[Richard Smith/Al Jazeera]
Alarming statistics
Around the world, doctors are two to five times more likely than the general population to die by suicide with female and junior doctors especially high risk. The most recent data from the Office of National Statistics indicate that in the UK alone, 72 medical professionals (including doctors, nurses, therapy professionals, dentists and midwives) took their own lives in 2020 – that is more than one per week. Suicide is also rife among nurses: More than 360 attempted suicide in 2022.
Factors contributing to the high suicide rate within the medical community are well established. Among them are immense, high-pressure workloads, bullying and harassment within a rigidly hierarchical work culture, sleep deprivation, poor support structures and limited resources for employees veering towards burnout.
An unprecedented austerity squeeze on the NHS, which began in 2010 after the government said cuts to public expenditures were needed to resolve the UK’s budget deficit, ramped up pressure on healthcare professionals as hospitals were forced to cut back on front-line services. At roughly the same time, from 2009 to 2019, hospital admissions rose by 20 percent every year while the number of people awaiting treatment increased almost twofold from 2.2 million to 4.3 million.
Then came the COVID-19 pandemic, which further exacerbated the stresses on an already overwhelmed and underfunded healthcare system.
While there isn’t a lot of data to prove or disprove a link between government funding cuts and the working conditions of doctors and nurses, Kevin Teoh, an organisational psychologist who worked on a research paper (PDF) about the mental health of UK doctors, says “there are a few proxy measures we can look at” to measure the impact.
“We see higher stress levels among NHS staff at hospitals where there are also high bed-occupancy rates and emergency admissions. When there’s a decrease in funding to social services and to welfare, the NHS ends up picking up the slack,” he explains.
“With cuts, there are more patients who have been waiting longer, and their conditions may be more complex,” says Gail Kinman, also an occupational health psychologist and Kevin’s co-author on the paper. “There are fewer of you [doctors], less equipment and resources, but you still need to do your job under massive pressure at the level that is expected of you. … Healthcare staff end up shouldering the expectation that they should sacrifice themselves, their health and their personal lives for their patients.”
As a result, she says: “Burnout is happening at a much younger age [among doctors] when it used to happen later in their careers.”
And, she adds: “They may not necessarily recognise the symptoms or know how to get support.”
Those left behind
On a February morning last year, Dr Clare Gerada, a psychiatrist by training and president of the Royal College of General Practitioners, greets people over Zoom. “I know we have some new faces joining us today,” she says. “You can just sit and listen. There’s no pressure at all to speak. This is not a group that you would by choice want to belong to.”
Every participant in this online support session has lost somebody to suicide or sudden accidental death. All of the deceased were doctors. The age range of the bereaved is large. One woman is in her mid-20s, and there’s also a couple in their 80s who have been attending the group for about three years. Strikingly, several individuals are medical professionals themselves. The mood is relaxed as people begin to engage in small talk. The older couple has been bird-watching in “a place that our daughter loved very much as well”, the woman explains.
Over the course of the next one and a half hours, the group members speak frankly of their grief and loneliness. There is no real structure to the meeting, but the tears and the jokes flow freely. Many of the participants are angry at how their loved ones were treated within the healthcare system in which they worked.
A middle-aged man has remained silent through most of the call but smiles in encouragement whenever a new participant speaks. He turns on his microphone. It would have been his wife’s birthday today, he says shakily. “It’s a hard time for me,” he adds as his face crumples.
Clare steps in. “I’m putting my arm around you,” she tells him gently. She mentions having heard on a podcast that often when suicide happens, we mark the person’s death as if their whole life is defined by the means of their death rather than everything else that happened before. “But actually, you had a whole life together. You loved each other, had fun together, cried together.”
The session ends on a hopeful note with Clare reflecting on the elderly couple’s comparison of the group to the bird-watching community that they are part of. “This is like a bird sanctuary – people fly away, but sometimes they come back and make everyone else feel supported.”
Suicide at work
A longtime advocate of improving the wellbeing of doctors, Clare served as medical director of the Practitioner Health Programme, the largest publicly funded physician health service in the world, from 2008 until March 2022. The programme has now seen more than 17,000 doctors for mental health or addiction problems, a number that Clare says is “rapidly climbing”. She set up the bereavement group in 2018. “Doctors tend to also have doctors in their family, and they’d come to me and ask to be put in touch with people who have had similar experiences,” she explains.
Clare initially advertised the group via social media, filled with apprehension about the potential reception. “I was very frightened,” she recalls, “because it’s obviously very emotional. But I knew I had to do it.” Now she calls it the most rewarding thing she’s done in her career. During the first in-person meeting, she recalls, nobody spoke. Attendees just cried, but all of them were able to find solace in the knowledge that they had shared similar experiences of grief. At the time of the interview, the group was 80-strong, representing about 60 doctors who died by suicide. There’s never any obligation to stay, and some leave after one session while others have stayed since the beginning.
Listening to their stories over the years has helped Clare make a few observations about doctor suicides. One of those is that they often take place at work. “People tend to kill themselves in the place they feel has harmed them,” she says. “So it’d be their medical school or the hospital, in the car park or the lavatories.”
[Richard Smith/Al Jazeera]
Clare worries that the increasingly alienating nature of healthcare jobs will drive even more doctors towards depression. Over the past 30 years as a general practitioner, she feels that her relationship with her patients has become much less personal. While she used to know patients, their families and the community where her surgery was based, she is now increasingly being sent out on call to areas that are farther away, where every patient is a stranger she won’t meet again. This has primarily been due to the transition towards hospital-based care rather than a more community-centric model. The rise in digital consultations, especially during the pandemic, has only exacerbated Clare’s sense of detachment from the people she is serving.
“I feel like a gig economy worker,” she says wryly. “We’re being treated as commodities, and patients are like the customers. I’m watching my profession disintegrate, and it’s no wonder that we’re collectively getting quite depressed. It wouldn’t take much to tip somebody over the edge.”
Doctors needing care
Soon after the death of his brother, Amandip set up Doctors in Distress, a charity (previously chaired by Clare and where she officially became a patron this month) that aims to protect mental health and prevent suicide by running support groups for health practitioners before they reach the point of psychological distress. “These are built like therapy groups, but they’re not therapy. They’re run by trained facilitators and group analysts,” says Amandip, who isn’t a trained healthcare worker but works in logistics for clinical trials.
A report into Jagdip’s suicide was commissioned by Dartford and Gravesham NHS Trust, which runs the hospital where he worked. It concluded that “the question of where responsibility lies for his unsustainable workload is difficult” and called out “the failure of the wider NHS to devote time and attention to the development of clinicians in non-technical professional skills – sometimes called soft skills – such as resilience, self-awareness, situational-awareness, and the capacity for self-care”.
Through Doctors in Distress, Amandip wants to give other doctors something that he feels would have saved his brother: a safe, non-judgemental space where they can speak about the emotional impact of their work.
During the pandemic, the charity organised several group sessions for doctors who had caught long COVID and were in isolation. Bringing them together helped to alleviate the loneliness and make them feel better, he says. In addition, the charity runs a group for Black doctors, where they can share their experiences of racism at work. Nurses and other health workers have also contacted them to seek help. At the time of writing, the charity has helped more than 2,500 healthcare professionals, most of them doctors.
Doctors in Distress operates independently of the NHS, which Amandip says is crucial. “If the cause of your distress is your employer, the last place you want to go to solve that is with your employer,” he explains. He knows that fear of regulatory action is very real among doctors because they worry they will not be allowed to practise.
Anthony Omo, the director of fitness to practise at the General Medical Council, which maintains the register of medical practitioners in the UK, told Al Jazeera in a statement: “A mental health illness is not, in itself, a GMC matter. There’s no need for us to get involved or even know about a doctor’s health condition if they’re getting appropriate medical treatment and support, managing their practice safely and maintaining a good level of care for patients. It is important doctors are encouraged and empowered to seek and follow treatment, as they would want for their own patients.”
Yet doctors who spoke to Al Jazeera revealed that anxiety over possible punitive measures for those seeking help for mental health issues continues to prevail.
Amandip hopes his organisation can help tackle what he considers endemic problems in medical culture. “The medical profession and healthcare system put a lot of emphasis on doctors giving care to others,” he says. “But there are no systems or attitudes that allow them to care for themselves or each other. They’ve been put on a pedestal their whole lives, and they’re instilled with this sense that they can never fail.”
‘You never think it’s going to happen to you’
Grief and a desire to improve support for healthcare workers also spurred Liam Barnes to set up a charity for members of the UK’s medical and emergency services after losing his cousin Laura Hyde to suicide in August 2016. She was 27.
The two had been close growing up. Liam, who works in marketing, smiles when he talks about her most distinctive trait: “She had a laugh like Janice from [the sitcom] Friends. You always knew where she was in the building.”
Laura had been a nurse with the navy. “She could have done any corporate job, but she chose to be a military nurse because she had a burning desire to help others,” Liam says. Years on, he’s come to the conclusion that a combination of factors drove Laura to suicide. She worked on average 60 to 70 hours a week and was affected by her observations of bullying in the workplace. Then there was a difficult breakup.
Liam is still haunted by regret over his last interactions with Laura. The month before her death, he had planned to visit her. But work got in the way, and he decided to postpone his trip. “So I never got the chance to see her,” he says. “You never think it’s going to happen to you. The Christmases come round and the birthdays and the anniversaries, and they’re not there. And that’s only when it becomes real.”
Along with his mother, who trained as a mental health nurse, Liam built a website where he uploaded information on self-help strategies for healthcare professionals suffering from emotional distress. The response was staggering: About 11,000 people visited the page in the first week. Realising that there was a lot more they could do, they set up the Laura Hyde Foundation.
Today, their organisation has helped provide access to mental health support for more than 8,000 medical personnel – including nurses, doctors, paramedics and care workers. But the steadily burgeoning need for its services is cause for concern, Liam says. Requests for advice and assistance are pouring in from one demographic in particular: student nurses and student midwives. Many found themselves unable to continue with their education during the COVID-19 pandemic but were not covered by their employers for mental health support until they had qualified.
As he speaks over Zoom, he receives another email from a student nurse asking for help. “Our data for 2020 shows that 17 medical students who came to us had tried to take their own lives before,” he says.
From doctor to patient
One medical student – a man in his mid-20s who did not want to be named in this article – started blogging during his first year at the medical faculty of one of London’s top universities when he found himself so burned-out that he stopped eating or drinking and rarely left his accommodation.
Diagnosed with depression and psychosis, he spent a week in a psychiatric ward. That was in 2016. His blog, initially started as an attempt to air his frustrations, became a channel through which other medical students and healthcare professionals who were struggling could speak to one another and share advice and anecdotes.
“I was in a dark place because I couldn’t find any other doctors who were willing to talk about their experience of poor mental health,” he says. While on the psychiatric unit, he ran into a classmate who mistakenly assumed he was there on placement. “And they said to me, ‘Isn’t everyone here really mad?’ I snapped and went, ‘Actually, I’m here as a patient.’”
[Richard Smith/Al Jazeera]
The callousness of his classmate’s comment was for him an indicator of how doctors are expected to be physically and spiritually indestructible. “We’re meant to be doing the healing, not be the ones succumbing to illness. You’re just expected to deal with it, and if you can’t, it’s a sign of weakness,” he says.
He says switching roles from doctor to patient made him more empathetic. “As a psych patient, you’re cut off from the outside world. Nobody wants anything to do with you,” he says.
For several years, he ran a website called The Depressed Med Student, which chronicled the ostracisation he faced from fellow students he had considered friends. He has taken a break from running the website since October to focus on other things in life. He graduated and became a junior doctor in 2020.
Life as a junior doctor hasn’t gotten easier. The hours are gruelling – shifts begin at 7.30am, and he usually works until 8.30pm – and his typical workweek is six days long. As a junior doctor, he is expected to do “absolutely everything” on the wards he is assigned to, he says, and when he cannot finish those tasks because of an emergency, he describes being shouted at by his superiors as par for the course. “It’s really tiring,” he adds.
He also describes the bullying and racism he encountered in medical school as a British Pakistani and recounts one incident in particular. While working in the oncology department of a London hospital, he incorrectly answered a question posed by someone he calls “a really big name [in the field]”. He says the consultant turned around and asked: “Which backward, sand-worshipping country are you from?” The other students laughed nervously, he says. “They knew that if they said anything else, it would damage their careers completely. And if I tried to raise it, no one would take my side.”
The top-down toxicity of medical culture, he believes, is due to the fact that the doctors on the highest rungs of the ladder know they can say and do anything in the workplace with impunity as long as they continue to perform their high-risk, life-saving work well. “They’re untouchable,” he reflects, “because they’re the only people in the world who can perform that specific procedure.”
But there have been bright spots. He is appreciative of the kindness he’s received from some senior doctors, and his eyes light up when he talks about his placement in gynaecology, where he delivered a baby for the first time. He’s also developed ways of dealing with the deaths of patients, something he struggled with as a student. “Every time a patient dies, there’s a huge feeling of guilt. You keep wondering if there’s anything else you could have done. Now when that happens, I just go away from everyone else for a bit and sit down and think. And this sounds bad, but now I just have to put it at the back of my mind and move on. You have to do that in order to do this job.”
Psychologist Gail Kinman believes that being surrounded by death is not in itself a particular risk factor for poor mental health among medical professionals because “often doctors can do what we might consider to be the most stressful parts of the job because that’s what they’re trained to do and what they expect”.
What makes it much harder for them, she says, “are the organisational constraints such as short staffing and the sort of culture doctors need to work within”.
For people like Amandip, the focus remains on intervening before doctors are pushed to the brink. “It does get very emotional and very hard,” he says. “But what keeps me motivated is the memory of my brother and how he died. It’d be wrong if I didn’t persevere with this.”
Resources:
If you or someone you know is at risk of suicide, these organisations may be able to help:
In the UK and Ireland, contact Samaritans on 116 123 or email jo@samaritans.org.
No common definition of ‘parental alienation’ – paper
A policy paper published by the Department of Justice has made several recommendations aimed at addressing what has been called ‘parental alienation’.
This follows the publication today (25 May) of the results of a public consultation and a research report on the issue commissioned by the department.
Parental alienation refers to a process through which a child becomes estranged from a parent as the result of psychological manipulation by the other parent.
It may also refer to situations where one parent is wrongfully wielding influence to turn a child against the other parent.
Assessment ‘challenges’
The research found that, while there was evidence of the use of the term in Irish courts, there was no common definition or description of it.
The report also found that the scientific basis for the concept, and for studies identifying its existence, lacked methodological rigour.
It said that there had been “challenges” in relation to assessing parental alienation, particularly through the assessment or expert-report process used in family courts (often known as section 32 reports or section 47 reports).
The report found that the courts had ordered “a narrow range of interventions” in cases where parental alienation was alleged to have occurred.
These included family and parent-oriented therapeutic interventions and directions and, in other jurisdictions, transfer of custody.
Public consultation
The department has also published the findings of a public consultation on the concept of parental alienation.
It said that fewer than 20% of individual respondents called for legislative change on the issue, and that the nature of the suggested changes was mixed.
“Overall, the research all suggested that the means to address parental alienation lie in improvements to the Irish family-courts and family-justice system,” said Minister for Justice Simon Harris.
Give priority to children’s voices being heard and considered by the court, and support them in their journey through the system,
Examine how expert reports are conducted, what they contain and how assessors are appointed, and provide additional training for those tasked with compiling assessments,
Review assessment tools currently available to the courts, with a view to making recommendations to improve them,
Support and extend family-support services — including alternative dispute resolution — and make them more accessible,
Improve the training and awareness amongst legal professionals and others involved in high-conflict proceedings to increase their understanding of concepts and descriptors associated with behaviours of parents and children in these situations,
Actions to establish, and in some areas improve, data collection on family justice issues.
Minister Harris said that, while he was aware that parental alienation was a contested issue, he recognised that many of those who responded to the consultation felt that they had been alienated from their children.
“Reflecting the complex nature of the issue, the recommendations contained in the policy paper which I brought to Government this week underpin the need to see the matter through a broader family-justice lens,” he stated.
In a new column for BBC Culture, Hephzibah Anderson explains that it’s not just self-help books that can improve our well-being – fiction can cure us too.
Article continues below
F
For authors of self-help guides, no human problem is too great or too small. Want to become fitter, richer or happier in 2015? There are books for it – shelves upon shelves of them. Hoping for increased efficiency, decisiveness and creativity in the months ahead? There are titles for that too.
As we knuckle down to our New Year’s resolutions, we’ll turn in droves to self-help books, hoping to find our own best selves in their pages. But a book needn’t hector or lecture to leave its imprint. The truth is that all good literature changes us, and a growing body of research suggests you might do better browsing through fiction for support in battling life’s challenges. Think of it less as self-help than ‘shelf help’.
Reading has been proven to sharpen analytical thinking, enabling us to better discern patterns – a handy tool when it comes to the often baffling behaviour of ourselves and others. But fiction in particular can make you more socially able and empathetic. Last year, the Journal of Applied Social Psychology published a paper showing how reading Harry Potter made young people in the UK and Italy more positively disposed towards stigmatised minorities such as refugees. And in 2013, psychologists at the New School for Social Research found that literary fiction enhanced people’s ability to register and read others’ emotions.
We think of novels as places in which to lose ourselves, but when we emerge, we take with us inspiration from our favourite characters. A 2012 study by researchers at Ohio State University found that this process could actually change a reader’s behaviour. In one experiment, participants strongly identifying with a fictional character who overcame obstacles to vote proved significantly more likely to vote in a real election.
Well-read
They may not promise transformation in seven easy steps, but gripping novels can inform and motivate, short stories can console and trigger self-reflection, and poetry has been shown to engage parts of the brain linked to memory. Sometimes an author helps by simply taking your mind off a problem, immersing you so fully in another’s world and outlook that you transcend yourself, returning recharged and determined.
As Aristotle noted in his Poetics, poetry – by which he meant fiction in general – is more serious than history. While the historian is preoccupied with what happened when, fiction allows us to see what could happen, exercising our imaginations and often our sense of morality along the way.
A story needn’t lift your heart in order to lift your mood. As author Jane Smiley confides in Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel, “Many people, myself among them, feel better at the mere sight of a book”. Experiencing the trials and tribulations of a fictional character can even open us up to problems we’ve been ignoring, sparking rewarding conversations – or offering a way into one that’s proving daunting or difficult. And whatever the fix you find yourself in, there’s always a book to remind you that others have been there before, it’s just a question of finding it.
A reading cure
That’s where bibliotherapy comes in. Practised around the world by psychologists, social workers, and counselors along with librarians, it’s become something of a buzzword in the past few years, drawing scholarly researchers and bloggers alike. Alain de Botton’s London-based School of Life even has a quartet of resident ‘bibliotherapists’, including Ella Berthoud and Susan Elderkin, whose book The Novel Cure: An A-Z of Literary Remedies is a thrifty alternative to the school’s £80 ($120) consultations.
Yet the notion of books as remedies for emotional disorders isn’t as new-fangled as you might imagine. The ancient Greeks posted signs above library doors, informing readers that they were entering a healing place for the soul. And in the 19th Century, doctors and psychiatric nurses doled out everything from the Bible to travel literature and works in ancient languages.
(Thinkstock)
Dorland’s Illustrated Medical Dictionary first acknowledged bibliotherapy in 1941, defining the term as “the employment of books and the reading of them in the treatment of nervous diseases”, but according to the Oxford English Dictionary, it first popped up in print in 1920, in Christopher Morley’s The Haunted Bookshop.
Set in a world still reeling from World War One, the novel pairs a screwball rom-com involving a young adman and the heiress to a prune empire, with a German plot to blow up the US president. It’s a period piece, really, but its backdrop – a second-hand bookstore in Brooklyn called Parnassus at Home – remains a bibliophile’s paradise, fragrant with the scent of “mellowed paper and leather” and tobacco from the pipe that its owner, Mr Mifflin, puffs away on day and night.
Mifflin is not just a bookseller, though, he’s a “practitioner of bibliotherapy”. As he explains it, “My pleasure is to prescribe books for such patients as drop in here and are willing to tell me their symptoms… There is no one so grateful as the man to whom you have given just the book his soul needed and he never knew it.”
Mifflin already knew what researchers at the University of Sussex have since attempted to quantify: that reading is a more efficacious stress reliever than listening to music, going for a walk or sitting down with a nice cup of tea. After just six minutes with a book – any book – their subjects found stress was reduced by up to 68 per cent. With the right book, that really could be time well spent.
That’s why we’re launching our very own bibliotherapy column. Send us an email to tell us what ails and what irks you, be it broken resolutions or a broken heart, whether you’re feeling lost in life or stuck in your career. I’ll recommend you some books old and new, mostly though not exclusively fiction, that are sure to speak to your predicament, offering insights and encouragement as well as a little escapism. And at the very least, you’ll discover some great new titles. To quote the sign in Mr Mifflin’s bookshop, “Malnutrition of the reading faculty is a serious thing. Let us prescribe for you”.
If you would like to comment on this story or anything else you have seen on BBC Culture, head over to our Facebook page or message us on Twitter.
According to psychologist Steven Pinker, “language is a window to the human mind.”
Language reveals that our long-term memory storage is sizable, but that we mostly remember in abstractions. It also shows that the human mind has the ability to be infinitely creative, and that we are likely born with an ingrained recipe for language learning.
“Language is a miracle of the natural world,” Pinker told Big Think in 2012, “because it allows us to exchange an unlimited number of ideas using a finite set of mental tools.”
Steven Pinker, the Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard University, has been studying language for more than four decades, yet he’s not particularly interested in language per se. Instead, he views it “as a window to the human mind.”
“It’s the trait that most conspicuously distinguishes humans from other species,” he told Big Think in a popular lecture from 2012.
Complex language can be found in every single human society, in remarkable diversity. We take it for granted, but it’s truly miraculous. Just think: Through coordinated hisses, grunts, and squeaks, ideas are shared. People will sit and listen for hours — in rapt attention — to another human simply talking, and be transported.
“I could cause you to be thinking thoughts about a vast array of topics, anything from the latest developments in your favorite reality show to theories of the origin of the universe,” Pinker said.
In his lecture, Pinker made clear what language is not. It is not writing. While all cultures have language, not all have transcribed it. Language is also not thought, exactly. Babies can think and communicate without speech.Moreover, many of us frequently think in visuals, not in words written on a mental chalkboard.
At its most essential, language is a system of words, rules, and interfaces (our mouth, ears, and brain), Pinker said.
Now, what does it reveal about our mind?
For one, it suggests that we mostly remember in gists and abstractions. Imagine sitting down for a lengthy lecture, Pinker described.
“If I were to ask you to reproduce any sentence that I have uttered, you would be incapable of doing so. What sticks in memory is far more abstract than the actual sentences, something that we can call meaning or content or semantics.”
Language also showcases the sizable capacity of human long-term memory.
“A typical high school graduate has a vocabulary of around 60,000 words, which works out to a rate of learning of about one new word every two hours starting from the age of one,” Pinker said.
Third, language reveals the human mind’s near-infinite creativity.
“Except for a small number of clichéd formulas, just about any sentence that you produce or understand is a brand new combination produced for the first time perhaps in your life, perhaps even in the history of the species,” Pinker noted. “It shows that when we know a language, we haven’t just memorized a very long list of sentences, but rather have internalized a grammar or algorithm or recipe for combining elements into brand new assemblies.”
This internalized algorithm may be present in the mind from birth, though the idea is controversial. Influential linguist Noam Chomsky is the chief architect behind the theory. Pinker explained his reasoning.
Subscribe for counterintuitive, surprising, and impactful stories delivered to your inbox every Thursday
Fields marked with an * are required
“If you look at what goes into the ears of a child and look at the talent they end up with as adults, there is a big chasm between them that can only be filled in by assuming that the child has a lot of knowledge of the way that language works already built in.”
It’s a bit of a gaps-based argument, but it is evinced by neuroscientific and psychological work in the lab. Furthermore, the notion is seductive because it feels right, especially to any parent who’s been amazed at how their young child learned language by seemingly just absorbing it from their audible surroundings.
So where does all of this leave us? It leaves us in awe of the grand power of language and the ability of the human mind to wield it.
“Language is a miracle of the natural world,” Pinker concluded, “because it allows us to exchange an unlimited number of ideas using a finite set of mental tools. Those mental tools comprise a large lexicon of memorized words and a powerful mental grammar that can combine them.”
A Man for All Seasons – the Life and Times of Clement Attlee blogs.lse.ac.uk /politicsandpolicy/the-life-and-times-of-clement-attlee/ LSE lecturer, First World War veteran, Labour Leader, and then Prime Minister, Clement Attlee’s achievements have often been overlooked. In fact, a common view has been that Attlee was a passenger in history – lucky to be in the right place at the right time. But how much of this is true? Focusing on Attlee’s association with the LSE, John Bew and Michael Cox re-investigate his life and times.
The gallons of ink spilled on Winston Churchill – and the huge appetite for books about him – have created something of an imbalance in our understanding of twentieth-century Britain. Not only does Clement Attlee’s life deserve to have a rightful place alongside the Churchill legend, it is also more emblematic, and more representative, of Britain in his time. The story of Attlee is also much more dramatic than he himself ever made out – and not without an element of heroism. Here was a man born in the governing class who devoted his life to the service of the poor, who was carried off the battlefield three times in the First World War, who stood shoulder to shoulder with Churchill as Britain’s darkest moment, and then triumphed over him at the general election of 1945. In many ways we still live in a world of Attlee’s creation. His government of 1945-51 was the most radical in history, and gave Britain the NHS, National Insurance, NATO and the atomic bomb. Both during his lifetime and afterwards, however, Attlee has had an odd relationship with the British left – particularly intellectuals of the left. For them, his greatest crime was what Nye Bevan called his ‘suburban middle class values’, or his resort to sporting clichés about fair play. This, after all, was a pipe and slippers man who compared socialism to gardening.
In so far as Attlee is discussed on the left, he has often been damned with faint praise – as a lucky leader, blessed with a talented cabinet, a good chairman but ultimately, in Hugh Dalton’s phrase, ‘a little mouse’. Even some of the eulogies for the Attlee government are pointedly selective in what they celebrate. Typical of such cherry-picking was The Spirit of ’45, the 2013 documentary film by Ken Loach, based on footage from the election of that year. This focused, rightly, on the creation of the NHS, the provision of social housing and the nationalisation of the mines but barely touched on foreign affairs – failing to mention Ernie Bevin, the foreign secretary, or the $3 billion from America’s Marshall Plan that enabled many of these changes. Its hero was more Nye Bevan, the Minister of Health and Housing, than the prime minister himself. In fairness to Loach, Attlee’s stiff public persona as recorded on contemporary newsreel did not lend itself easily to dramatisation, particularly when contrasted to Bevan’s penchant for theatre and bombast. The prevailing view of Attlee that we have been left with, therefore, is of a passenger in history.
To his critics, he was just lucky to be in the right place at the right time – to inherit the force of the Labour movement. So his greatest sin was passivity. ‘It’s a good title,’ said Bevan when Attlee’s autobiography, As it Happened, appeared in 1954. ‘Things happened to him. He never did anything.’ In 1967, just after his death, The Economist commented of Attlee that he ‘stayed in his shell’. This much is true. But the mistake, particularly common on the left in particular, was to assume that there was nothing in that shell. ‘In parliament or in the public he was nothing other than himself’, said. The Economist, that is, he was ‘middle class with no ambitions to be anything else… a thinking man with no pretensions to be an intellectual.’
Yet this most underrated of men, who according to Kingsley Martin, later editor of The New Statesman, had a ‘deceptive capacity for not being noticed’, was appointed tutor in December 1912 in the newly established Department of Social Science and Administration at LSE. He lectured on two topics: local authorities and what is described in his file as a ‘summary of agencies’. Modest though the new Department may have been in its original ambitions, its impact was to be very great indeed. Directed by the great economic historian RH Tawney, and funded by the extraordinary Indian industrialist and philanthropist Sir Ratan Tata, the new Department, in effect, launched social work and social administration as a serious academic subject in Great Britain. Indeed, even before the A Man for All Seasons – the Life and Times of Clement Attlee | British … http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/politicsandpolicy/the-life-and-times-of-clement-at…outbreak of war, it managed to publish a series of path-breaking studies – a couple by Tawney himself, one by Arthur Greenwood on the health of schoolchildren, (Greenwood later became a Labour Minister of Health), another two by ME Buckley (one on school meals and nutrition), and yet another by one of the early stalwarts of LSE, the great statistician, AL Bowley, who authored a comparative study of working-class conditions in four northern towns.
Attlee himself did not publish anything of significance at this stage. However, he could at least take comfort from the fact that he now had a paying job which in 1912 secured him the grand sum of £75, and in 1913, £150 – plus 2 and half guineas per lecture! Moreover, he had secured the position against some very strong opposition, most obviously from the young Cambridge economist, Hugh Dalton who had earlier been awarded a prestigious scholarship at the School. Dalton might have thought – and almost certainly did – that he was a literal shoe-in for the new job in the new Department. But not for the first time did he underestimate Attlee. Later of course, Dalton did get a full-time position lecturing at the School in the Economics department. But the earlier defeat clearly hurt his not inconsiderable ego. Typically, Attlee believed that he had secured the post because he had what he termed ‘a good practical knowledge of social conditions’; Dalton, a talented but extremely vain man was not so sure and attributed it to the fact that he had not yet qualified as a barrister. But there was nothing else that Attlee had over him – or so Dalton thought. Dalton always believed that the moment would arrive when he would overtake Attlee. But that moment never came. Many others would make the same mistake.
Even though he had been appointed to LSE by one of the School’s founders, Sidney Webb (who apparently told Dalton that Attlee got the post because he would ‘stick to it’ and Dalton ‘wouldn’t’!) Attlee was never entirely at one with the Webbs themselves – Beatrice Webb in particular. ‘I do not think that she was really at ease with ordinary people,’ he commented on Beatrice Webb. ‘She was too much the intellectual and did not understand the thought processes of people with a different background from her own.’ In particular, Attlee felt that she underestimated the extent to which ‘a movement such as that of the British Labour Party is influenced by sentiment.’ What could the Wells’s or the Webb’s say to the Lancashire miners with whom Attlee would serve throughout the First World War – for whom God, country, community, and trade union came before Marx?
Nevertheless, Attlee returned to the School after the First World War to join what was now called the Ratan Tata Department of Social Science and Administration teaching one class a week and editing a series of books in what became known as ‘The Social Service Library’. But the situation was far from ideal. For one thing there was a (temporary) decline in student numbers and so salaries would have to be adjusted downwards. Attlee’s, it seems, was reduced by a £100.00; he later complained that he simply ‘could not live on his present salary’. Meanwhile, the book series was not doing as well as expected. Indeed, by 1921 there was talk of discontinuing it altogether. And to make matters more complicated still, Attlee’s own book in the series The Social Worker (1920) appears to have created something of stir forcing his academic boss to ‘write a letter of regret’ to the ‘Charity Organization Society’.
Finally, to cap it all, Attlee himself was becoming more and more involved in politics outside the School, spending most of his time as Mayor of Stepney as a campaigner and an administrator of milk and water socialism. In 1922 Attlee was of course elected MP for Limehouse in the East End of London, and it was by now obvious that he could no longer continue at the School. But he only formally resigned in January 1923, and thereafter continued doing a few lectures (at £3.30 a lecture) well into Spring of the same year. Two years later he also collaborated with an LSE lecturer – William A Robson (later editor of Political Quarterly) – in authoring a study on local government and the important role that needed to be played by the town councillor, the title of the book, in keeping alive what the two authors called ‘the thin flicker of the civic spirit’ based on the ‘enhancement and development of the civic conscience’.
Even if Attlee’s formal association with the School was a short one, it was while he was at LSE that he completed his study on The Social Worker. The title may not inspire but the book itself is an important one in understanding Attlee’s world view. Interestingly, and perhaps significantly, his study does not begin with a description of what the social worker actually does – that comes later – but rather a discussion of Blake, Keats and Shelley and their poetic critique of industrial society. From here Attlee moves on to make a powerful case both for social service as a ‘call for change’ and the social worker as someone whose role is not just to administer charity to the poor but to advance the cause of justice in a new world where older, more traditional assumptions about the limited role of the state no longer held true.
Over the course of his career, Attlee continued to talk in terms of duties and rights – but had come to believe that the Victorian liberal concept of citizenship had been discredited. British citizenship must A Man for All Seasons – the Life and Times of Clement Attlee | British … http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/politicsandpolicy/the-life-and-times-of-clement-at… continue to evolve he believed. This was a process of evolution that marked Britain out, in Attlee’s mind, as the most civilised nation in the world. During the war, every single citizen had been asked to make sacrifices for the greater national good. It had been urged, he said, ‘and by none so loudly as by those whose conception of citizenship had not previously been highly developed, that it was the duty of every man to do services in the trenches or munition works’ in order to achieve victory. Those who had refused to fight on the grounds of individual conscience, such as his brother Tom, had been excluded from the community. After the war, then, these citizens also expected a fuller conception of rights.
In a telling passage, which provides a clue to the Attlee credo, he quoted the work of Professor EJ Urwick, his head of faculty at LSE. Urwick’s 1912 book A Philosophy of Social Progress bemoaned the way in which, because of the emphasis on individual liberty in the prevailing economic theories of the nineteenth century, the citizenship idea had been pushed into the background by individualism and the atomisation of society. As he had written: “In our modern life the sense of unity is not realised, and all the pervading duties of citizenship are lost sight of in the wilderness of interests of both individuals and groups. Our extraordinarily complex life, our far too numerous activities, our strong assertion of individual liberty which we very imperfectly understand, and the assumed importance our occupation as self-seekers and self-developers – all these things tend to drive the citizen idea into the background. Yet in theory and also in fact it is still the necessary and single basis of social duty and social morality.” In a prophetic passage in The Social Worker, Attlee condemned the ‘revolutionary idealist’ who would ‘criticise and condemn all methods of social advance that do not directly square with his formulae and will repeat his shibboleths without any attempt to work out their practical application’. The ‘dreamer must keep his feet on the earth and the thinker must come out of his study’. Such words are as important today as ever.
Note: the above was originally published on the LSE History blog. A podcast of the LSE IDEAS event on which the above draws is available here. About the Authors John Bew is Professor at King’s College London and author of Attlee’s best-selling biography, Citizen Clem: A Biography of Attlee. Michael Cox is Director of LSE IDEAS.
An international team led by Chinese scientists just built the most complete atlas of the macaque monkey cortex to date. The outermost layer of the brain, the cortex houses many of our treasured cognitive functions: the ability to reason, make decisions, and adapt to ever-changing environments on the fly.
Compared to other animals, primates—including humans—have a massively expanded cortex. Scientist have long thought this evolutionary quirk is what gives our brains the ability to manage complex computations.
But how?
The secret may be hidden in the cortex’s many cell types and how they organize. A key theme in biology is “structure determines function.” Like building a computer from scratch, each component and its placement and wiring can alter performance.
Cataloging the precise location of every cell in the monkey cortex could help decode—and perhaps digitally recreate—the rules that make the primate cortex a computational powerhouse.
The study, published in Cell, also tapped into a relatively new tool for brain mapping. Called Stereo-seq, the technology extracts genetic information—the transcriptome—from multiple cells at once, adding a new data layer to each cell’s position.
The team created a molecular fingerprint for each cell by recording the activity of roughly 500 genes. Then, thanks to a hefty dose of AI, they categorized nearly 1.5 million cells from 143 regions into distinct cell types and mapped their location in the cortex.
The project has already yielded some insights. Brain cells tend to act in cliques. Some types prefer the company of certain other cells, suggesting they form local neural networks. Neurons that either ramp up or dampen overall brain activity also have preferred spots, with their numbers changing between cortical regions and depth.
Also, when compared to a mouse brain atlas, the new map found several cell types specific to primates huddled together in one layer of the cortex.
“The cell composition of the brain and its spatial distribution are the basic issues of brain science, and its importance is similar to the DNA base sequence discovered by human genome sequencing,” said study author Dr. Chengyu Li at the Chinese Academy of Sciences. The macaque cerebral cortex is like ours, and this study offers the most complete map of its kind.
An Enigmatic Neural Cake
The cortex is an elaborate six-layered structure packed with different types of neurons and other brain cells.
Neurons are usually the star of the show: these electrically-activated cells connect into neural networks to process information. The two main types help balance the brain’s overall activity level. Glutamatergic cells are excitatory, ramping up the brain’s computation. GABAergic cells are inhibitory, lowering network activity.
Non-neural cells complete the picture. Some help protect the brain from infections. Others support neural metabolism and clean up molecular waste. They aren’t side characters: recent studies show they play a critical role in the shaping of neural networks in early development and for battling neurodegenerative disorders like Alzheimer’s.
The new study mainly focused on these brain cells.
Slicing and Dicing
The team analyzed brains from three adult male macaque monkeys. With over six billion cells, their brains are evolutionarily close to ours.
To start, the team carefully sliced the brain from front to back with several expert cuts. One, roughly the thickness of printer paper, was used to sequence each cell’s genetic profile.
Other slices, adjacent to the thicker blocks to maintain spatial integrity, were even thinner. To half of these, the team added a glow-in-the-dark dye that grabs onto proteins dotting the outside of the neurons. This step makes it easy to spot distinct anatomical locations in the cortex.
The second batch of ultra-thin slices had their genetic data extracted by way of the new Stereo-seq tool. Think of this step working like a digital camera, but instead of capturing pixels, it captures gene expression data from each cell in the form of messenger RNA (mRNA). The resulting “transcriptome” is a snapshot of all active genes for any cell at any moment.
The goal here is to image each cell’s transcriptome while maintaining information about each cell’s physical location. Like a camera sensor, the process starts with a silicon chip roughly the size of two stamps. The newly designed chip has a far wider field of view than previous iterations—like a phone on panoramic mode—making it easier to scan larger brain regions.
Dotted on each chip are 2D arrays of DNA nanoballs to grab onto mRNA. Cell membranes were stained with dyes to help the team match a transcriptome fingerprint to its host.
Using multiple AI algorithms, the team mashed all these datasets into the world’s first three-dimensional, single-cell atlas of the macaque cortex. Each cell type is detailed in the map, along with a three-level taxonomy that illustrates how cells differ through the cortex.
For example, a type of excitatory neuron in layers two and three in the cortex expresses a “master regulator” gene for stress signaling in the brain. All three of the brain’s main cells—glutamate, GABA, and non-neuron cells—correlate with the cortex’s structural hierarchy, with some more abundant across its regions and depths.
A Resource for Evolution
The cortex expanded tremendously in primates and is often viewed as the seat of higher cognition. In another analysis, the team compared the monkey brain map to existing mouse and human atlases to dig up new cell types specific to primates.
The test pinpointed a group of excitatory cells in the fourth layer of the primate cortex that are absent in mice.The cells were highly concentrated in the front of the brain—an area supporting higher cognition—with genes previously linked to language, brain development, and autism.
The team made the resource free to anyone. It provides a cornucopia of data for tackling the age-old question of how structure leads to intelligence—and when, why, and how our brains stutter in neurological diseases. Dr. Xun Xu said the results may also “promote breakthroughs in the field of brain science, such as in brain-inspired intelligence and brain-computer interfaces.”
All of the dataset is open source. Play with it here.
Shelly Xuelai Fan is a neuroscientist-turned-science writer. She completed her PhD in neuroscience at the University of British Columbia, where she developed novel treatments for neurodegeneration. While studying biological brains, she became fascinated with AI and all things biotech. Following graduation, she moved to UCSF to study blood-based factors that rejuvenate aged brains. She is the co-founder of Vantastic Media, a media venture that explores science stories through text and video, and runs the award-winning blog NeuroFantastic.com. Her first book, “Will AI Replace Us?” (Thames & Hudson) was published in 2019.
Calvin Newport and Derek Thompson discuss why the ability to perform deep, focused work is becoming rare at exactly the same time it is becoming most valuable in our economy
Calvin Newport is a computer science professor at Georgetown University and the author of, among other books, Deep Work and A World Without Email. At the heart of so much of Newport’s work is this incredibly rich mystery: Why hasn’t the internet produced more geniuses? One possibility is that the productivity tools ironically inhibit our productivity. The average white-collar worker in marketing, advertising, finance, and media now spends up to 60 percent of the workweek engaged in electronic communication. In a recent survey, Microsoft found that video meetings had taken up so much of the day that a significant share of its workforce was logging online between 9 and 10 p.m. to finish their actual non-email, non-meeting work. In response to this relentless need to loop back and back and back, Newport came up with what he called the Deep Work Hypothesis: He said to learn hard things quickly, you must focus intensely without distraction. But the ability to perform this kind of deep, focused work is becoming rare at exactly the same time it is becoming most valuable in our economy. In this conversation, we talk about deep work and shallow work, how our productivity tools make us less productive, and how to actually get things done.
In the following excerpt, Calvin Newport walks Derek through his own tools for productivity and explains the breakdown of the digital workplace.
Derek Thompson: Before we get to your diagnosis of the state of the digital workplace, I want to know a little bit about how a productivity expert structures their workday. So you are a professor, which I imagine includes teaching responsibilities and research and administrative duties. You are, as you said, a New Yorker writer. You’re a book writer. You’re a husband, you’re a father. I know it might seem like I’m kind of putting the cart before the horse here by asking you to disclose the medicine before we discuss the disease of our harried minds. But what is notable about your workday, the way you work, that most listeners who do, let’s call it laptop work, like you, might find your strategy distinctive?
Calvin Newport: I’ll preface the description of what I do with just the explanation. So what is the connection with what I just said, which is I write about technology, its impact on our world and productivity? It’s because one of the biggest impacts of technology in our world in the last, let’s say decade and a half, has actually been the way that new technologies in the workplace and new technologies in our personal life distract us, exhaust us, and keep us away from being able to do work that we love. I’m a computer scientist. Why do I talk about productivity? Because when you study technology and its impact, you can’t get away from the way technology seems to pull on our attention, the way technology seems to try to destabilize our ability to do good work. So that’s what led me to the productivity world.
So then, what do I do? Well, I’m a big believer in what I call multi-scale planning, which at its core is all about having some intention and control about where your time goes. So what it’s rejecting is the reactive approach, which right now has become the default but has become more of a default in the last 15 years than it ever was before because distracting technologies push us into a mode of reactivity. What’s in my inbox? What’s on my Slack? What’s on my phone? What can I do in the moment? What message can I send? What thing can I respond to? I reject that. And the way I try to reject that is through multi-scale planning.
So you start at, let’s say, the scale of a semester, or the scale of a quarter, if you’re not in an academic context, and say, “OK, I want a plan. What am I doing this summer?” Or “I want to plan. What are the big things I’m working on for this fall?” You then use that strategic plan, quarterly plan, semester plan, whatever you want to call it. You look at that at the next scale, which is weekly. So at the beginning of every week, you say, “OK, let me look at that big-picture plan, use that to help inform a plan I’m going to make for the week ahead.” And now you’re actually looking at your concrete calendar. What is scheduled? “Tuesday is busy. Oh, I’m teaching, I’ve got these meetings. Thursday’s pretty open before noon, so that might be a good day to catch up on whatever it happens to be.” If you’re looking at your concrete calendar, you create a plan for the week. So I’ll actually usually type this out, plain text file, nothing fancy.
Then you use your weekly plan when you get to the scale of the day, and you make a plan for each day where you now consult that weekly plan. And when you’re planning at the scale of the day, I like to do what I call time blocking. I actually look at the available hours during my workday, and I block them off. “OK, this hour I’m working on this. This specific half hour I’m doing that. All right, for this two-hour stretch here, I’m going to work on this project.” So it’s actually giving every minute of your day a job as opposed to going into your day and saying, “What should I work on next? Who needs me? I’m a little bit exhausted, so let me load up the inbox real quick,” or something like this.
So at all scales, we’re talking from semester down to weekly down to daily, each scale informs the next. And the whole idea behind all of this is, I am trying to give my time a mission. I’m trying to look at my time and say, “What’s the best thing to do with this? What’s the best way to make use of this?” It’s active instead of reactive. And that’s really the backbone of how I approach and try to balance all this different work.
Thompson: That’s so interesting, this concept of fractionally scheduling your time. And when you were mentioning the idea that the laptop and the phone screen can trigger this sense of reactivity, that really struck a chord with me. There have been so many times where I’ll sit down and I think I know what I want to accomplish at my desk on that morning, but then email is shouting and Twitter is shouting and LinkedIn is shouting and Slack is shouting. And then of course, I should probably check the news, and maybe I should listen to that podcast. And oh, that article or that tweet launched a tab, which launched a tab, which launched a tab. That reactivity of the internet, to use some of your language, essentially schedules our time for us.
And you’re saying, if you preschedule your time before you reach the computer, you can ward off, you can foreclose the possibility of being scheduled by these screaming devices. I think the best way to begin to talk about your diagnosis of why the digital workplace has broken is to draw up a term from your book A World Without Email. And that term is the hyperactive hive-mind workflow. Tell us what that term is referring to. What is the hyperactive hive-mind workflow?
Newport: Yeah, this is what’s critical about what we were just talking about. In 1992, if you said, “I’m just going to show up at my office, and I will let the day unfold as it unfolds,” you would actually probably be OK. I mean, there were some distractions, you might spend some more time at the coffee carafe than you might want to. But ultimately, you’d think, “I don’t have much to do here sitting on my desk. All right, let me pull something out, let me work on it.” It’s really more of a contemporary issue that now we have all these different sources pulling at our attention, that if you just approach your day saying, “What do I want to work on next?” you can actually lose your whole day. And the hyperactive hive mind is why.
So that’s my name. I’m putting a name on something that was before not named. But it is implicitly the way we have decided, in laptop work, to use your term, to collaborate and coordinate our efforts. And the hyperactive hive mind says, we have these low-friction digital communication tools. So at first it was email, then we get Slack and Teams, but it’s all the same idea, low-friction digital communication tools. Let’s just work things out on the fly. So if I need something from someone, I’ll just shoot them a message. We’ll go back and forth: “Hey, what time is this meeting?” “Do you know about this?” “Hey, what’s going on with this client that just called?” We’ll figure things out with back-and-forth unscheduling ad hoc message. And that’s called the hyperactive hive mind, that’s the name I gave to it.
Now, it’s a very natural mode of collaboration if you’re in a small group of people. It’s how a small group of people in the same physical location would coordinate themselves. I would just talk to you, you would talk to me, we’d go back and forth ad hoc. Digital communication like email or Slack made it possible to scale that up to lots of people, to whole organizations, the people who are spread out over many different locations.
And my argument is that this implicit decision we made to switch to the hyperactive hive mind is at the core of many woes in modern knowledge work. Having to maintain all of these ongoing back-and-forth conversations requires that we have to keep monitoring these communication channels. I do not have the ability to say, “Let me wait until 3 o’clock to check my inbox for the first time” if there are 12 conversations going on. And some of these conversations might have to have four or five back-and-forths to reach a decision, and that decision has to be reached today. And so I have to keep monitoring my inbox to see when your next message comes in. Because I’ve got to volley that back over the proverbial net pretty quickly because we have to get this back-and-forth four or five times to reach a decision by close of business.
This excerpt was edited for clarity. Listen to the rest of the episode here and follow the Plain English feed on Spotify.
Please check your email to confirm your subscription
Share
Tweet
Email
Share
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/72427691/1392532726.0.jpg)
