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EdSurge
Is Learning on Zoom the Same as In Person? Not to Your Brain
By Stephen Noonoo
Sep 15, 2020
At this point the Zoom call has almost come to define learning and
working in the age of COVID-19. But a few months ago, people began
realizing that all these video calls were making them tired—exhausted
even—more so than a day of in-person class or all-day meetings. The
phenomena even has a name: Zoom fatigue. And it’s backed by some pretty
interesting brain science.
According to scientists, the cause of Zoom fatigue “is that technology
can disrupt our normal intricate human communication methods that have
been finely tuned over centuries to help humans survive,” writes Brenda
Wiederhold in a thought-provoking editorial in the journal
Cyberpsychology, Behavior and Social Networking. As it turns out, live
Zoom calls aren’t as live as we think they are.
Wiederhold is a licensed clinical psychologist who uses advanced
technology, such as virtual reality, to treat patients who experience
trauma or stress and also runs the nonprofit Interactive Media
Institute. She joins us on the EdSurge podcast this week to discuss how
we can combat Zoom fatigue, and she offers a glimpse into her work in
virtual reality, weighing in on whether it may one day replace
communication as we know it.
EdSurge: Can you briefly explain what Zoom fatigue is and why it’s a thing?
Wiederhold: Sure. So it’s when you feel tired, anxious or worried after
you overuse video conferencing. Part of the reason is there’s a slight
lag. No matter how good your internet is, no matter how fast it is, it
seems we have this millisecond—maybe a few milliseconds—delay. So the
communication isn’t in real time, even though it seems like it is. Our
brains subconsciously pick up on the fact that things aren’t quite
right. And the fact that things are out of sync and we’re accustomed to
them being in sync when it’s face-to-face communication, our brains try
to look for ways to overcome that lack of synchrony. After a few calls
a day, it starts to become exhausting.
I hear the term synchronous learning in education a lot to refer to
Zoom calls where the teacher is on with a class of students and they’re
learning live. But synchronous might not be so synchronous after all?
That’s correct. So face to face, we have synchronous communication. We
also have other things that help us feel good when we’re face to face
in conversations. We have releases of dopamine. We have the hormone
oxytocin being secreted. Those are feel-good hormones. Then we have all
the body language and the cues. You see a person just barely move their
eyes, do a micro-expression, things like that. We can pick this up very
easily in person, but we don’t always pick up those little nuances when
we’re on a Zoom call. And if we do pick them up, they’re out of sync.
You see a person smiling after they smiled.
There is also an element of multitasking as we’re constantly looking around the screen, searching people’s faces.
When clients that tell me they’re getting Zoom fatigue, I tell them
first and foremost don’t multitask. If you’re on a call, be on a
call—don’t be looking at your phone, don’t be looking at your email.
Also, if, if you’re on a work call and somebody asks you a question and
you haven’t been paying attention, it becomes a little bit
embarrassing. The chat function can be distracting to some people, but
it can also be a nice place to send document links.
I also tell people to maybe turn off their big [monitors]. I found this
worked for me too. I was doing a lot of calls and some people, when
they’re larger than life and looking right at you, it’s just an
automatic response to go, ‘Oh my God. There’s this giant floating head
on my screen.’ If I leave my laptop on, then it doesn’t seem as
disconcerting to have the person on your screen. They’re not as close
as they are on a 50-inch screen.
From what I remember, you wrote it triggers this part of our brain that
almost sees it as a threat to have a giant head in front of us.
Correct. It’s what we call the fight-or-flight response. Again, this is
subconscious. When we have prolonged eye contact with that large
appearance, our bodies get flooded with cortisol, the stress hormone.
And we automatically think there’s danger, even though consciously,
rationally we know there’s no danger. But just for that split second,
our bodies rev up, and they’re going to either fight or flight.
So we could be getting cortisol rushes in the middle of Zoom meetings? That seems wild to me.
It’s very wild. I have regular Zoom meetings with colleagues, and we
all agreed after the first few weeks that we didn’t want to fix our
hair and the guys have to put on a tie and the women have to put on a
little makeup to do this. We agreed not to have our cameras on anymore.
And it was pretty amazing. Just that little thing. We started reporting
to each other that we weren’t as tired after the Zooms.
There were some simple fixes that you wrote about, including just
bringing your camera up to eye level. Can you explain how that works?
Sure. So newscasters have done this naturally for a long time, but
really it’s probably not natural for them in the beginning. It’s what
we call learned behavior. Like anything else, you create a behavior or
a habit by doing it over and over. So when you do a Zoom call, you’re
automatically drawn to those smiling faces, but you need to really be
looking at your camera. And so if you put your computer where your
camera is right at eye level, you’re going to be more prone to look
right at that camera and to the other person. It seems like you’re
looking at them. And so that’s going to bring in a little bit more of
that social connection.
That could be really big for teachers who need to hold their students’ attention and create an authority presence.
Exactly. And there’s other things, like when you’re doing a call with
your camera on, you want to really have your neck, shoulders and head
all in the frame. You don’t want to be seated too low. So you want to
kind of frame just the upper part of you in that frame. Teachers may
need to move their seats higher or adjust their computer. They will
want to look at lighting, make sure that you’re not in a dark room. You
don’t want the lighting coming from behind you. You’d rather have it in
front of you. You want to speak louder than you normally would. So that
kind of tends to make people think you have more self confidence or
authority, and you’re projecting better. Plus it makes you better
understood and more audible.
When you talked about learned behaviors before, does that mean that
this is something that will appear strange or unnatural to educators?
Is this something that they need to practice?
With time, most of these things will become easier. It’s just like
public speaking. I have a lot of patients that have a fear of public
speaking, even on a Zoom call. It’s not so easy to speak if there’s
five, 10, 20 people on the call, but it becomes easier over time as you
practice. One of the skills I teach all of my patients that come in,
whether it’s a 5-year old child with autism or whether it’s an elite
performer, is how to do diaphragmatic breathing. So teaching them just
to slow down their physiology, by doing that nice, slow, controlled
breathing, and then having that carry over and make them appear calmer.
Once their brains start feeling calmer and their body’s following, or
their bodies feel calmer and their brains follow, they exude that calm
to the rest of the people on the call. So teachers can learn that and
start to feel more comfortable.
To listen to the full EdSurge podcast click here
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