Since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, we have been forced to distance ourselves physically from other people. As a result, we have started using videoconferencing tools a lot more. In fact, we are talking so much online, that some people say we have Zoom fatigue, or more generally, videoconferencing fatigue. Somehow, we feel that these video calls cost way more energy than face-to-face talks. Whether we're teaching, having meetings, or just catching up. I've seen a range of articles on news websites where experts provide plausible explanations. However, there is little to no scientific evidence to back up any of their claims. 

Zoom fatigue has entered our society at an incredibly high rate. Google it an you will get over 200,000 results. That is a lot for a term that we likely never used until a few weeks ago. Strangely though, nobody really knows what Zoom fatigue is. It essentially boils down to a feeling of exhaustion we associate with a lot of videoconferencing meetings. While that is a perfectly natural starting point, it does not give us much in terms of definitions. And if we want to give a scientfic explanation, we need to know what we are talking about first, as well as what we are NOT talking about.

if you use the academic version of Google, Google Scholar, you will get only six results, and some are accidental: Google gives you something like "... Zoom. Fatigue ..." That's no surpise. Research takes time to be published, and Zoom fatigue is a recent phenomenon. There simply has not been time to do adequate research on it. While understandable, that also means alarm bells should start ringing when you read explanations for Zoom fatigue: How can scientists possibly know what it is and how it works, if they have not done the research?

Just to emphasize: the fact that we haven't studied it, does not mean Zoom fatigue is not real. It does mean that any explanation of how it works is tentative at best.

For now, let us go with our commonsense understanding of Zoom fatigue: we feel mentally exhausted and that is a result of too many video calls. The question we want to answer is why would video calls cause us to feel mentally exhausted?

Clearly, video calls are not always a problem. Business, particularly those who engage extensively in what is called distributed work, have been using videoconferencing for decades. Despite that, there have been no previous large-scale complaints about video calls causing mental exhaustion. In fact, if we read the scientific literature on distributed work, we find that video calls are seen as an important tool to mitigate the psychological effects of social isolation. Working alone is hard for humans and video calls allow us to connect with people. Furthermore, companies like Google have had video portals for a while now. These are essentially "always on" video calls. But the way they are used, has not caused mental exhaustion.

The cause would seem to be the sheer number of video calls we are having right now. However, nobody knows what number that is. Not only that, there is a range of issues that are left unaddressed. How many video calls is too much? What is the first point where we start noticing it? When does it become so taxing that we just no longer have the energy to continue? How much does the type of call (work, teaching, informal) matter? I could keep asking these questions, but the point should be clear: we are trying to explain a phenomenon without having any real information.

If we look at the explanations given, you can put them in two categories: psychological and interactional. The first category focuses on how video calls supposedly affect our brain and mental state, and why having a lot of them would therefore be taxing. The second category focuses on how video calls differ from face-to-face conversations, and similarly, tries to explain the mental exhaustion from those differences. Neither type of explanation, however, goes beyond basic speculation.

Let's look at some psychology first. One explanation is that video calls require us to multi-task more than we can handle. We are looking at a lot of people at the same time (4 in Microsoft Teams, but a lot more in Zoom), when we should only focus on one. Normally all those other people would be in our peripheral vision, where they would be less distracting. However, at the same time, if only the speaker is visible, that's also no good, because then you cannot see what everybody else is doing, which again you would notice in your peripheral vision. And all this overwhelms the brain.

Now fun fact, it is entirely unclear if this indeed is what overwhelms the brain. While I don't doubt that multitasking is hard, there are no neurological studies that have measured how human brains react to these kinds of conversations. The anecdotal evidence actually suggests the opposite. All those family meetings with large groups of people run of well, and people are enjoying them, even people who go through a lot of Zoom meetings. Now I'm not saying that therefore video calls are not overtaxing our brain, but the evidence points both ways. Therefore, we cannot just extrapolate from what psychological theory tells us. 

The second type of explanation is interactional, which is actually my area of expertise: I've been investigating video calls in medicine for nearly two years now. You'd think interactional explanations would be great, because we actually already know quite a bit about how video calls work, and we know a lot about how face-to-face conversations work. Alas, they are just as speculative as the psychological explanations.

Let's unpack. The interactional explanations focus on a few aspects. One, the continuous delay (lag) in video calls makes it hard to have a smooth conversation, which can be annoying. Two, we cannot have eye contact with other people, since the camera is above or below the screen. Three, we cannot use all our non-verbal behaviour, but because we can see each other, our brains are still trying to use them.

All these points are definitely true. Research on silence in conversation goes back decades, and there is good evidence that we have more trouble with setting up a smooth conversation by video. Similarly, it is obvious that we struggle with where to look in a video call and our gestures cannot always be seen. However, how much this actually exhausts us is a secondary question. Nobody has ever investigated this. 

The main problem here is that people are making claims about how our brain works, without having any way of connecting our behaviour to any responses in our brains. The explanations sound nice and plausible, but they are not supported by any evidence whatsoever. It makes for a nice story, but we should stick to what we know.

To close off, let me propose an entirely different explanation. We were not built to live on video calls only. There is some evidence that when we talk remotely, we lack what could be called "social presence", that feeling of being together. This feeling, whatever it may be precisely, is important to us. Since COVID-19 and the lockdown in most countries, we have lost the ability to connect with our friends, family and colleagues face-to-face. We are not exhausted from all the Zoom calls, because Zoom is exhausting, but because using ONLY Zoom is exhausting.

We are living in a time of massive stress and anxiety. Some of us (your truly among them) live almost completely isolated from other people. I go out less than once a week for my shopping, and the face-to-face interaction with the cashier is all I have to sustain myself. Others live with partners and children, and are now forced to see each other all the time. This can create tensions even in good relationships, let alone when things are less then ideal, either in the relationship or in society at large. Anybody would feel exhaustion at some point.

Of course, I am just as most speculating about the cause of our exhaustion. In fact, that is the point. Without evidence, any explanation is as good as another - okay, any explanation that is not supernatural. Is Zoom Fatigue real? Possibly. But just because we feel exhausted now and are having a lot of video calls, there is no reason the two have to be causally related: Zoom does not have to be the cause of our fatigue. Ice cream consumption and murder both increase by about the same rate during the summer, but eating ice cream generally does not cause you to go into a murderous rage. Moral of the story: just because a scientist can provide a nice story and the BBC or National Geographic publishes it, that does not mean it's true.

Language seems an amazing way to express ourselves. Through language, we can communicate on a far more refined level, than would be possible if we were to rely on just symbols. Indeed, it may be that language made it possible for us as a species to learn from each other on an unprecedented scale, and that language in that way drove human cultural evolution from smashing stones to building skyscrapers.
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The reality is that language is not that great a communication system. In fact,we seem to need language in order to learn language. We need to understand each other before we can start using language to refine that shared understanding. Which seems paradoxical, because it would seem that language is what makes it possible for us to understand each other in the first place. Chicken and the egg. What came first in human evolution: shared understanding or language?

I am not going to answer that question, mostly because I’m not a linguistic anthropologist and it’s way beyond my comprehension. But I do know this: we need a shared understanding to talk. Language only works because we share so much knowledge with our conversational partners. It’s not just knowledge about the language we speak, but knowledge about the culture, country and world we grew up and live in. We make sense of the language that people use, based on this vast array of “common ground”. Language is efficient, only because we can leave most things we would need to communicate unspoken. If we had to make everything explicit , we would never stop speaking.

The problem is that things can go wrong. When we mishear or misunderstand something our conversational partners say, and we don’t realise that, then that misapprehension will shape the rest of the conversation. Fortunately, humans are very good at noticing when things go wrong. When a speaker asks a question, the answer is often enough to make them realise whether or not they were understood. This can be obvious, such as when the answer does not address the question, but it can also be more subtle. Sometimes, the same sentence can mean two things, one meaning is an answer to the question, the other is not. 

When misunderstandings pass us by the consequences can be dire. In an article from 1992, Emanuel Schegloff, an American sociologist, discusses a conversation in which a radio host and a caller have a misunderstanding. One thinks they’re talking about the Korean war, the other thinks they’re talking about Vietnam. This misunderstanding continues to pass them by, and they get into a heated argument about whether or not the war was supported by the UN. It’s not until the caller hangs up, looks up the information, and calls back in, that they come to realize the misunderstanding. The problem is not their language: the host heard the same words as the caller and vice versa. It is in the assumptions they use to make sense of that language. Language only works when both speakers share the same assumptions, when there is common ground. When that common ground breaks down, language fails too.

Now to the point of this blog. I recently had a similar experience to radio host and caller, but one without a happy conclusion. I got into a heated discussion about whether science should be accessible. The initial understanding was completely my fault: I misread and thought it was about whether the language should be accessible to everyone, whereas the point was accessible in terms of free access for everyone. We continued discussing, clearly not going anywhere, and I just could not understand why.

​When I finally realised my failure, it was too late. I tried to show we agreed, that I have to make my research accessible, but my co-participant made sense of my explanation based on what he perceived my unwillingness to listen. My words did not mean to him, what they meant to me, and so the discussion ended with him thinking me an arrogant academic. Of course, had I been taking the position he thought I was taking – that science should not be accessible to non-scientists – that would be totally justified. The assumptions he built about me shaped his understanding of my language. What happened between us is precisely what Schegloff describes: when a misunderstanding leads to an argument, we do always not get a change to rectify it and we will go our own ways, being angry, when we really should not be.

We likely all have been in this position multiple times in our lives without even realising it. We make sense of the world based on what we think we know. In other words, our assumptions shape how we see and understand the world. If there is a discrepancy between our assumptions and the world, our first instinct is not to update our assumptions. That is not a bad thing: we should not change our minds at a whim. There are times when we have to fix a discrepancy, or just have to accept that others see the world differently. However, had I been less busy trying to argue my own position, and instead been trying to understand my co-participant, we would likely not have had an argument. Here, as is so often the case, an argument started with a failure to listen. And no amount of language was enough to put that right.