Is Your Brain Wide or Focused?

The ability to do multitasking is often considered a trait of professional success. The growing range of signals coming from a multiplying array of media have made the discussion of multitasking particularly relevant for today's business environments. When you pay attention to too many things, you end up paying scant attention to everything.
Such discussion concerns our daily lives, as well as our professional lives. In order to understand how the human brain manages the levels of attention devoted to various activities, while working in parallel on various tasks or devoting one's attention to different issues, a Bocconi-San Raffaele research team has studied a sample of managers and entrepreneurs with magnetic resonance imaging to understand what enables expert decision-makers to undertake multiple activities in parallel. The basic idea is simple: a manager takes important business decisions in a well-defined organizational context that allows for functional specialization, while an entrepreneur starting a new firm must pay attention to all business aspects simultaneously. Can we trace these differences at the neurological level?
To answer this question, the brains of entrepreneurs and managers were submitted to magnetic resonance imaging while they were playing a simple gambling task: among various slot machines, they had to pick the one they were obtaining the highest score from. Scores varied through time and thus players had to decide whether to focus on the same machine, or rather explore scores on the other machines available. The former case was an instance of exploitative behavior, i.e. focused behavior. The latter case was an instance of explorative behavior, i.e. geared toward seeking new solutions, by paying attention to various potentially useful information sources. Early results show a strong difference between the two groups, although they are both composed of healthy individuals and have similar composition in terms of gender, age, and educational attainment. The type of professional career thus seems a reliable indicator of neuropsychological difference.
The second finding went beyond the difference between focusedness (exploitation) and width (exploration) in managing one's attention. We looked at the neural circuits being activated to take the same kind of decision. When making exploration decisions, for example, entrepreneurs activate neural systems associated with the control of attention, resistance to immediate satisfaction and anticipation of future events. This points to the fact that entrepreneurs tend to modify more effectively, with respect to managers, the range of things to which they devote their attention, looking at the ultimate consequences of their decisions. They do not do more things in parallel, but shift from one activity to another with higher efficiency. These findings, albeit preliminary, help us understand a fundamental trait of entrepreneurial behavior, with implications for normal daily life that is ever more fragmented into manifold activities competing for our attention.