Maria Rampa: Hi, I’m Maria Rampa and welcome to this episode of Engineering Reimagined.
Today’s episode is the first of a two-part series where Aurecon’s Chief Executive – Australia, Todd Battley sits down with Professor Jason Mattingley from the Queensland Brain Institute to chat about the brain, technology and how we make decisions in an increasingly distracted world.
Have you ever felt exhausted after spending an afternoon scrolling your phone on the couch, even though you technically ‘did nothing’?
Today’s conversation is a fascinating look into how distraction, particularly the kind baked into our modern digital lives, robs us of more than just time. It drains our energy, fragments our attention, and quietly erodes our capacity for the kind of deep, focused work that sparks real breakthroughs.
Todd and Jason unpack the hidden costs of multitasking, the science behind cognitive load, the challenges of modern work environments, and how the power of counterfactual thinking – those ‘what if’ questions – sits at the very heart of innovation and complex problem solving.
So stay tuned as we unpack deep work techniques, how to build mental clarity in a distracted world, and ask: what does it really take to think deeply, act deliberately, and innovate meaningfully in the age of interruption?
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Todd Battley: Professor Mattingly, welcome, great to have you here at UQ's fantastic podcast studio. So thanks for having us.
Jason Mattingley: You're welcome.
Todd Battley: I've read your bio and had a look at some of your work. What inspired you to get into all of this?
Jason Mattingley: It probably started when I was in secondary school, actually, and a year 11 student. I had a very inspiring teacher. I did a unit in psychology, knew nothing about it, and he was just a fantastic person. He brought human thinking and human cognition and the brain into my consciousness for the first time. And on the back of that one term unit, I then went to Monash University and did a science degree, but particularly I wanted to focus on psychology and neuroscience. So that was the initial inspiration.
But then, later in my training as a clinical neuropsychologist. So these are people who diagnose and help manage people who have had brain conditions, brain injuries or brain diseases. And I just found that absolutely fascinating as well. Dealing with people who had had a stroke or perhaps had dementia or had a head injury, and really for the first time seeing how complex the brain is and all these things that we take for granted.
The fact that we're sitting here now having a conversation and hopefully you understand what I'm telling you and you're processing that and you’re probably thinking of the next question to ask. I was seeing people, actually quite young people in their 40s and 50s, who'd had a stroke, couldn't do that anymore. They couldn't understand what was being said to them. Or they could understand, but they couldn't find the words to express themselves. Or they'd lost the ability to read. Or they weren't able to recognise common objects anymore. A cup or a set of keys. And I thought, this is what I want to devote my life to, trying to understand how the brain makes us conscious and allows us to do all the amazing things that we do.
Todd Battley: You've been thinking and then researching about the brain for a long period of time, but I reckon and hazard a guess, that the average person is now perhaps more aware of, certainly mental health, but actually the brain and sleep more than ever. Do you have a view as to why that's tripped over from your world into the public domain?
Jason Mattingley: I think there's a variety of factors. So one you mentioned, which is now people generally are more aware of mental health. It's talked about. It's not a taboo topic anymore. So I think that's really helped. On the radio, on podcasts and so on, you hear more from people working in the neuroscience and psychology fields and part of that benefits public understanding. The other one more recently is the rise of artificial intelligence, AI, it's the hot topic currently, and all of the original AI work was developed by scientists with an interest in the brain. They were trying to model the basic structure of a brain, an animal brain, human brain, and put that in silico, as it were, put that into a computer and see, can we mimic some of the core functions of a human brain in a computer?
Todd Battley: We've certainly entered the age of AI in the mainstream, and you can't have a conversation with someone in a professional setting or even in a social setting where it doesn't come up. One of the things I've noticed in myself is, I feel like I'm much more easily distracted than I perhaps once was. I see that all the time. I occasionally sit down for a movie and a three hour movie feels like a commitment, whereas maybe it didn't once. Have you observed something similar? How are we adapting to all the distractions in our life, and is that having an impact on our ability to concentrate and focus?
Jason Mattingley: I think it is. I think the science suggests that it is, and you're right. I went to the movies on the weekend, Mission: Impossible. Fantastic movie, but it is a big time commitment, and I found the same thing, two or three times during the movie, went for my phone, and I was thinking, why am I turning my phone on? And it was to see if an email or a message had arrived. I didn't need to be doing that. It was nine o'clock on a Sunday night. That's an experience we can probably all relate to. And it's very much a technology-driven thing that we expect more of ourselves. We expect to be able to do multitasking, be able to have three or four plates spinning at the same time. And depending on the jobs we do, sometimes we have to have those plates spinning at the same time.
But that does come at a cost. It means we're rapidly switching between one set of rules and another set of rules or one set of behaviours and another set. And the science tells us that when we have to switch between tasks like that, when we have to apply a new rule set to what we're doing, there's a cost involved. The brain doesn't just switch from one to another automatically. That's effortful, and it's distracting to have to do. That task you've switched to, there's a bit of a slowness and it takes time to catch up with what you should be doing. And if you're then doing that five or six or seven times in an hour, and that might be I'm supposed to be, interacting with this spreadsheet or writing some code, but meanwhile I'm checking my Instagram, that's going to exert a cost. And why do we do it? Why do we get into the habit of checking these things? Because the algorithms that drive them are tailored to reward you with more of what you expect.
So if you've been looking at footy scores or tracking rugby or whatever it happens to be, it'll feed you more of that stuff. And it's very passive, it's very easy. You just let it wash over you, there's no real challenge involved. And real work does require some degree of effort. Humans, it's probably true of all animals, we like to conserve effort. And so, we do things that are rewarding and they often are things that just distract us from the core business of getting on with what we should be doing.
Todd Battley: If we look at that, that effort, is that why, if I've done nothing all afternoon but I've laid on the couch and flicked through my phone, I feel exhausted?
Jason Mattingley: Exhausted. Yeah, that's right. Well, you’re getting lots of little dopamine hits in your brain, that neurotransmitter that's involved in reward processing, flooding your brain with lots of little rewards all the way through. And it's not the way that your reward system's set up. Normally, you'd get one reward after a lengthy period of effort, and then another lengthy period effort and you get a reward after that as well, but here you're sort of flooding the system with trivial rewards, if you like, rewards…
Todd Battley: Unearned.
Jason Mattingley: Unearned, exactly, not for really hard work. And I think that's a problem. I don't think humans have lost the capacity to focus, but a better way of putting it is, they've got out of the habit of doing it for lengthy periods and what you described and what I was describing at the movies, it's a lot about habit formation. It's important to be mindful and always try to create a strategy for yourself that says, “I've been swiping for 10 minutes, it's time to stop that now, it's time put that aside,” rather than getting caught up in the vortex.
Todd Battley: I have a university-age son who's actually developed a bit of a technique for himself when he's trying to study. He's quite a good student, he cares about his grades, and he'll go and put his phone somewhere else in the house, which sometimes causes another issue because you can't find the phone at the end of it. But nevertheless, it's not with him in the study and he sort of disappears into his work and comes up a few hours later and he feels good about it. Is that the kind of thing we need to be thinking about more, being deliberate?
Jason Mattingley: I think so. I use the term mindful, but just being deliberate, having a strategy, not reacting to the world as it happens to you but saying, you know, I'm an active agent in the world, I get to determine how I spend my time. We often talk about, when you're trying to do a challenging problem, using counterfactual reasoning. So, these are the sort of what-if type questions. So you see something in front of you, you're trying to evaluate something. It's always good to say, well, I think this, but what if that or what if that, you know, exploring alternatives. And if you're constantly being distracted by the phone or whatever it is. You just don't have an opportunity to get into that sort of cycle of counterfactual, active reasoning, hypothesis testing. And if you're distracted too often, you never really get to that deep level.
Todd Battley: If I just reflect on a modern workplace, which is set up with technology at the centre of much of what knowledge workers are doing. But they're often deep work tasks, but the workstation we set up for everybody has a myriad of distractions. And it's not even one thing to turn off, it's actually about five things. And I just wonder whether you're seeing a shift in even the sort of thinking about that. Are you aware of where people are looking at how we're structuring work and maybe walking some of those things back?
Jason Mattingley: When I think of my own workday, if I'm at the computer and I'm writing a scientific paper or I'm doing an analysis or doing some coding or something, I will have my email open. But I turn off the little auditory warnings. So I know that the email is going to be accumulating, but I don't want those cues distracting me. There is a necessity for some amount of parallel processing, and people need to be accessible in an active workplace. We can't just all shut the doors to our office and sit there for eight hours doing a solid day's work. You need to be available. But I think in workplaces, it's good to give people some quiet, unstructured time without interruptions. Those interruptions are needed occasionally, but if they can be predictable interruptions, I think that's really helpful. So knowing, this day ahead I've got a committee meeting at two o'clock and I've something else at four o'clock, but up until then, I'll turn off the interruptions and I'll make sure that I'm not accessible to my colleagues during this period. Sometimes it might only be half an hour at a time, but even that's valuable.
Todd Battley: This interruption and distraction actually costs us in energy. I'm keen to dig into this counterfactual thinking because that's something I think probably go to the heart of innovation and other things. It takes us out of what we've always done to what might be. Can you explain what is happening in your brain when that's going on?
Jason Mattingley: Yeah, absolutely. So I mentioned hypothesis testing before, and I think counterfactual reasoning is that. It's saying, the future has different possible paths. The work I'm doing at the moment has a particular goal. But what if I make the wrong decision now? Or what if the evidence I've got in front of me is biased or inaccurate in some way? And it's making that explicit, rather than just saying, well, let's see how it works out. You actively create the future scenarios. So, one is the goal, it's success. Another one is near success, not quite. And then there is the disaster scenarios where things go right off the rails. And counterfactual reasoning is explicitly entertaining all of those possibilities, one at a time and asking, what would happen if this was the outcome? What might've led to that outcome? What are the decision points or the forks in the road leading to that? And being very explicit about how you would deal with each of those beforehand.
And actually, we were talking about AI before. I think this is one place where AI can have a real role to play in helping structure people's thinking around counterfactual reasoning. So, you can give a system, a trained system, different scenarios, different possible goals, and get it to tell you, what are the risks in getting to the goal that you're looking for, what are the possible branching off or falling off points, where might things go wrong? So it's a nice way of running simulations of the future, and see what those possible outcomes might look like.
Todd Battley: I'm interested in the human part to start with, is there anything that we can do to give that exploration a better chance for us to be a little more innovative, be creative, to entertain an alternate future, anything that you've come across in your work, where you've seen that be really effective?
Jason Mattingley: If you're looking at any kind of goal you're trying to achieve. It's good initially to just look at all of the factors that are at play, all of the evidence that's going to help you make the right kind of decision, and looking at outcomes with maybe the emotional factors taken out, at least initially. I'm not saying we want to become robots, robotic in the way that we make decisions, because emotions are there for a reason. They help us judge, sort of moral rights and wrongs, those kinds of things. But initially, maybe it is good to think a little bit like a robot initially and say, these are the outcomes of a possible future and now when I look at those outcomes, which ones are actually acceptable to me, based on my principles, the principles of the company, the good of society, the profit bottom line, whatever it happens to be. This is what an AI system won't give you, is those moral values or the emotional elements that we still bring uniquely as humans.
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Maria Rampa: We hope you enjoyed this episode of Engineering Reimagined.
What a fascinating insight into our brain activity and function, it’s so interesting to hear how our cognitive abilities are evolving in an ever-demanding and distracting world. Stay tuned for part two where Todd and Jason discuss how to make better decisions in an age of distraction and the downfalls of relying on ‘gut feelings’.
If you enjoyed this episode, hit subscribe on Apple or Spotify and don’t forget to follow Aurecon on your favourite social media platform to stay up to date and join the conversation.
Until next time, thanks for listening.
How do we focus in a world full of digital distractions?
Aurecon’s Chief Executive – Australia Todd Battley sits down with Professor Jason Mattingley from the Queensland Brain Institute to chat about how the brain, technology and how we make decisions in an increasingly distracted world.
In this first part of a two-part series, they’ll explore how digital distractions are draining our energy and fragmenting our attention, making it harder to engage in the deep, focused work that leads to breakthroughs.
“We often talk about when you're trying to do a challenging problem using counterfactual reasoning. So these are the sort of what-if type questions. So you see something in front of you, you're trying to evaluate something. It's always good to say, well, I think this, but what if that or what if that, you know, exploring alternatives. And if you're constantly being distracted by the phone or whatever it is. You just don't have an opportunity to get into that sort of cycle of counterfactual, active reasoning, hypothesis testing. And if you're distracted too often, you never really get to that deep level.” – Professor Jason Mattingley
Todd and Jason unpack why multitasking and constant notifications wear us down mentally, why scrolling through your phone can leave you feeling exhausted, and strategies to resist constant distractions.
