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Brain Rules: The brain cannot multitask
Multitasking, when it comes to paying attention, is a myth. The brain naturally focuses on concepts sequentially, one at a time. At first that might sound confusing; at one level the brain does multitask. You can walk and talk at the same time. Your brain controls your heartbeat while you read a book. Pianists can play a piece with left hand and right hand simultaneously. Surely this is multitasking. But I am talking about the brain’s ability to pay attention. It is the resource you forcibly deploy while trying to listen to a boring lecture at school. It is the activity that collapses as your brain wanders during a tedious presentation at work. This attentional ability is not capable of multitasking.
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This blog also exists in english
Dave Snowden of Cognitive Edge, and ex of the IBM Centre for Organisational Complexity, will tell you that the brain works with fragments of information, and that our cognition’s main purpose is to stitch those fragments together in / for a context in order to :make sense”. Not multi-tasking, but a process that fits into / with multi-tasking, I think.
From this post:
Dave makes quick reference to David Weinberger’s book “Everything is Miscellaneous“. He reframes it with Everything is Fragmented. There is a consistency of message in both of these. The difference is that Dave Snowden is really focused on how we do the sense-making. He says the human brain doesn’t make decision on the basis of a rational ordered process. People scan at most 2 to 8 percent of what they view and then the first patterns they see they lock into. The brain holds many hundred thousand patterns. Example a radiologists matches against patterns. We evolved to make decisions to form patterns and make rapid decisions. Identified how we deal with danger from lions.. you don’t look at the case studies for how to cope on lions. Dave is really negative on case studies as a method for dumbing down your response and effectively containerizing stupidity. He says we want to recognize patterns and jump to these from fragments. You are wired and want to recognize danger (the lion again) very fast and then run and escape. We evolved to make decisions very quickly on the basis of partial data fragments.
His point of view is information models don’t apply to humans. We are pattern recognition devices. We recognize and act based on partial data sets. We know that this is often true. We basically find that people like environments that are fragmented. Context and data is increasingly fragmented. We like google for just that reason. In fact we like blogs for much the same reason. It is both ordered and chaotic. The blogosphere is an ecology that that thrives on fragments. Personally, it’s one reason I believe blogs aid recognition or the stimulation and creation of emergent patterns. My own observations suggest that the blogosphere learns faster.