Zoom Fatigue

Julia Skylar reports that video conferencing products such as Zoom can be especially fatiguing to the human brain, especially when a number of tiny images are projected which don't provide the non-verbal clues embedded in face-to-face communication. Skylar cites Andrew Franklin for the following insights:

[The attempt at multi-tasking] leads to problems in which group video chats become less collaborative and more like siloed panels, in which only two people at a time talk while the rest listen. Because each participant is using one audio stream and is aware of all the other voices, parallel conversations are impossible. If you view a single speaker at a time, you can’t recognize how non-active participants are behaving—something you would normally pick up with peripheral vision.

For some people, the prolonged split in attention creates a perplexing sense of being drained while having accomplished nothing. The brain becomes overwhelmed by unfamiliar excess stimuli while being hyper-focused on searching for non-verbal cues that it can’t find.

That’s why a traditional phone call may be less taxing on the brain, Franklin says, because it delivers on a small promise: to convey only a voice (paras. 12-14).

-DD