Neuroknitting (or what making a giant blanket taught me about writing)

My middle names honour my grandmothers on both sides of my family tree. My mother’s mother is the only one I have any memories of, though, and I’ll always be a bit wistful over the fact I never had the chance to know her in her prime.

She was born in 1915, and, in her prime, she was: mother to four young children, owner and manager of a wool shop, a talented and incessant baker with a cake on the go at all times, and the keeper of an apparently flawless home. She did all that, juggled all those jobs and wore all those hats whilst also, according to my mum, knitting literally all the time. Effectively, she was a master multitasker.

It must have been something impressive to witness. And even though I never got to see it for myself, I pay tribute to her prowess in many ways. In the cakes I create and the pride I have in my home. In the way I prioritise my family, and the way I always strive to live the life I want regardless of what norms I’m apparently meant to be adhering to. And, perhaps most surprising to an outsider, in the way I work.

Sometimes, as I think is the case for most of us, I struggle to maintain focus. I say sometimes, but what I mean is all the goddamned time. Instead of paying attention to the task at hand, my mind is derailed by dreams I’ve had recently, or else steps through the world of whatever novel I’m reading. Or I might mindlessly pick up my phone and begin to scroll without even realising I’m doing it. Or I’ll forego focus entirely in favour of falling down an irrelevant internet rabbit hole.

I learned tips and tricks to try and help my attention affliction. Timers were good - half an hour of uninterrupted time on a single task flew by, and after those 30 minutes were up I ‘d often gathered enough curiosity to carry on without too much carrying on. But this didn’t work well if I was on a particularly call-heavy day, or if I needed space to ideate around a challenge. Obviously, removing my phone from my vicinity meant I couldn’t thoughtlessly doomscroll, but the lack of a phone didn’t really equate to full focus. Good old fashioned peer pressure worked occasionally, but as my partner works best in solitude this was at the cost of his productivity and was therefore unreliable.

So I hunted for a different tactic. Something I could pull out when I needed to maintain a huge amount of focus on a single task, but that was flexible enough to work in short time blocks too. What I came up with, almost by accident, was neuroknitting.

Neuroknitting (n.)

The intricate and simultaneous engagement of cognitive and manual processes, wherein the mind and hands collaboratively undertake distinct complementary tasks to maximise productivity.

You won’t have heard of neuroknitting before*. Because neuroknitting is something I have made up. But it sums up my focus process neatly. And I love a good portmanteau.

Neuroknitting had me sailing through my masters final project crunch time, and it’s boosted me over many a block in my fiction writing, and many a less than inspiring freelance project, since. And my grandmother is the one who made it possible.

As I said, I never got to see my grandmother in her prime. In fact, for most of the time our lives overlapped, she was discomposed by dementia. Dementia stole her sense of time. My mum became my grandmother’s sister, and I became my mother. Dementia stole her sense of reality. The TV became a window, and Alan Titchmarsh became my grandmother’s gardener. She was often quietly incensed because Alan very rarely did her garden how she wanted it. Dementia stole lots of things, but, happily, she was usually blissfully unaware that it was even happening.

One of the things dementia didn’t steal, which I remember finding surprising at the time, was her ability to knit.

If you learn to knit as a child, or if it’s a skill you choose to hone, at any point, to the point of muscle memory recall, it becomes part of your procedural memory. The areas of the brain responsible for procedural memory, particularly the basal ganglia and the cerebellum, fare better in Alzheimer’s patients than other parts of their memory stores. Their relative stability in an otherwise unstable brain is the reason a dementia patient might forget what year it is but still know how to play the piano or bake a loaf of bread.

And so my grandmother, with her TV/window and her interchangeable loved ones and her endless good cheer, taught me how to knit. I cherished the time with her, and I’ve always kept the skill needle sharp. In fact, I fashion handmade gifts for people all year round.

One of these gifts, made back in 2021, was a blanket for my much-pestered partner. Here is a photo of the blanket because I am VERY proud of it.

It’s made up of 349 individually knitted squares, all of which were made using the same pattern. Each square took me just over half an hour to knit. Which means that this single item took me around two hundred hours to create.

Two hundred hours. The same pattern, over and over again, for two hundred hours. I worked out how long the whole pattern would take me after finishing the first half a dozen squares, at which point Christmas, still months away, seemed alarmingly close. I realised that I wouldn’t just have to knit in a spare evening here and there, I’d need to have my needles out almost all the time.

If you’re not a knitter this probably sounds boring beyond words. Even if you are a knitter it might still sound like an unpleasant slog. But because the physical skills needed to knit are embedded so deeply into my procedural memory, I can literally knit a simple, repetitive pattern like this one with my eyes closed. Which, as I quickly found out, makes it the perfect accompaniment to finding creative flow.

If you’re not familiar with flow, it’s “the sense of having stepped out of the routines of everyday life into a different reality”. For me, flow feels like I am nothing more than the vehicle for a story that’s already been written by some other Rhian. Writing becomes fluid and fluent, and finished pages suddenly appear almost without my conscious contribution. When I’m writing in flow I never know where I’m going, but I’m always excited to find out afterwards.

Realising that neuroknitting delivered flow meant I could bin those annoying timers and easily focus on whatever I was working on. No need to crash a café or interrupt my partner, I was already on the ball.

With neuroknitting to help me, I whizzed through writing my masters final piece and edited it into something I’m really proud of creating. During the writing process, I’d pen a few lines and then knit a few rows, alternating between keyboard and needles for hours. Then, when each section was complete, I used a text-to-voice tool to read it to me as I knitted, making edits where they were needed. This might sound unbelievable if you see writing and knitting simultaneously as multitasking. But it isn’t multitasking - it’s neuroknitting. For me, knitting spends virtually no cognitive cash (or CogniCoins, if you will), and quiets my busy brain in just the right way.

This distinction is what makes neuroknitting distinct from standard multitasking. I’m terrible at multitasking. Multitasking isn’t what this post is advocating for. Because, and I don’t mean to offend here, you’re terrible at multitasking too.

The non-neuroknitting version of multitasking, where you’re trying to flit back and forth between two cognitively draining activities, reduces productivity by as much as 40%. Neuropsychologists have actually rebranded “multitasking” as “task switching”, because our brains are literally incapable of focussing on two tasks at once.

Task switching costs time and energy, and makes the completion of each individual activity you’re splitting your attention between take longer. Task switching eats up lots of CogniCoins, activating the pre-frontal cortex, the posterior parietal lobe, the anterior cingulate gyrus and the pre-motor cortex just to pivot from one function to another. Which is downright inefficient when you’re trying to get stuff done.

I think part of the problem here, and part of the reason we think we’re good at task switching when we’re actually rubbish at it, is our addiction to tech. Our whole lives are smartphone saturated, and double-screening is standard. Which makes task switching really hard to avoid. I even triple screen sometimes - sort of watching something on TV, sort of reading something on my laptop and sort of thumbing through something else on my phone. What can I say, I’m desperate for dopamine.

Chronic multimedia task switchers (those people who are probably double-screening their way through this blog post) are consistently worse at several aspects of cognitive ability testing, even though they think they’re good at doing two things at once. They don’t filter out distractions well, their short-term memory is shot to pieces, and switching between distinct functions takes longer. And that poor cognitive score continues long after you put the damned phone down, especially for men. Grown up task switching guys have been shown in this study to have a similar IQ score to an 8 year old. Not ideal if you’re splitting your attention between anything remotely important.

A counterintuitive study from Psychological Science did show that giving people the illusion they’re multitasking can boost their performance by upping engagement in whatever task is being completed. All the study participants were given the same two tests, shown side by side on a split screen, and were told to complete them simultaneously. For half of the participants, the two halves of the screen had visual differences that implied the tests were from two distinct studies. For the rest, the two halves of the screen were visually identical, implying that they were completing one single test.

The people who thought they were completing two distinct tasks performed better in the tests because they were more engaged in the task. But that one lonely positive that backs up task switching as fruitful has a massive caveat.

“To be clear, these findings do not suggest that we should all start multitasking to improve our performance. Rather, the research indicates that for a given activity, it’s the belief that we’re multitasking that can influence how well we do.”

That the belief we’re multitasking actually does make us more productive probably has something to do with the way people trick themselves into believing they’re good at task switching. In a study from the University of Utah, David Strayer found that people who task switch whilst driving aren’t just more likely to miss something in the few seconds they’re glancing at a phone or sat nav. In fact, “that distraction depleted participants’ ability to pay attention to their driving for a least half a minute after the distraction had ended”. And guess who performed worst in the study? Those people who self-identified as “above average” at multitasking.

So, task switching clogs up your brain with loads of mental clutter, which not only diverts your attention in the moment, but costs you CogniCoins afterwards. But neuroknitting is less about trying to do two things at once, and more about giving yourself real-time meditative mediation and rumination space. It’s about cultivating the right environment to partly shut off deliberate thought, which “can yield unexpected insights from ideas incubating in the subconscious background”. It’s about making space for the shower thought without actually having to get in the shower.

And, in case you’re not into handicrafts, neuroknitting needn’t actually be writing and knitting simultaneously. For some people, doodling whilst they work might be the answer to growing their miniscule attention spans. This study from Jackie Andrade at the University of Plymouth proved that doodling aids concentration and memory recall to an incredible degree. So you could run with that as your version of neuroknitting.

For other people, rhythmically thwacking a practice drum pad on their desk with these cool pencils might unlock hitherto unseen creative prowess. The choice is yours, and should be rooted in whatever physical occupation you could complete in your sleep.

But, however you choose to simultaneously engage your cognitive and manual processes to uplift your focus, you should probably still call it neuroknitting. Because it is a Good Word™.

*Unless you’ve come across a piece of research from MTG researcher Sebastian Mealla who, in collaboration with artists Varvara Guljajeva and Mar Canet, made a collection of scarves with “knitic” - an open hardware knitting machine that translates brainwaves into physical garments. Which is pretty neat, but not the same thing at all.