During lockdowns everyone had to deal with issues ranging from noise, interruptions, and the stress of multitasking to isolation, uncertainty, and the

Not remotely cool: The science of “Zoom fatigue”

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2024-10-17 16:30:09

During lockdowns everyone had to deal with issues ranging from noise, interruptions, and the stress of multitasking to isolation, uncertainty, and the disappearance of comforting routines. These interfered with the ability to focus. The brain can spend energy trying to filter out distractions, but at a high cost, particularly for those already sleep deprived or overwhelmed. One couldn’t be vigilant about the pandemic or the latest political kerfuffle and still get things done as efficiently as before. Only a few months into 2020, “Zoom fatigue” became a discussion topic. Most complaints were about sound or video dropping out because of poor connectivity. But video callers speak about 15 percent louder than they do in person, need effort to focus and shift attention while looking on-screen at a dozen or more participants, and must constantly gauge whether they are coming across as engaged. All this requires extra emotional effort compared to face-to-face conversation. As a result, virtual meetings went from novelty to a source of exhaustion.

The cognitive load of online meetings eats up your capacity to think, too. When face-to-face we process a slew of signals without having to consciously think about them: facial expression, gesture, posture, vocal tone and rhythm, and the distance between speakers. We read body language and make emotional judgments about whether others are credible or not. This is easy to do in person, whereas video chats force us to work to glean the same cues. This consumes a lot of energy. Recall that compared to electronic devices, the human brain operates at ridiculously slow speeds of about 120 bits (approximately 15 bytes) per second. Listening to one person takes about 60 bits per second of brainpower, or half our available bandwidth. Trying to follow two people speaking at once is fairly impossible for the same reason multitaskers fare poorly: attempting to handle two or more simultaneous tasks quickly maxes out our fixed operating bandwidth.