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Re: Mind: Mulitasking


Duncan_Philps-Tate@europe.notes.pw.com wrote:
>
> >"can our mind multitask several tasks?"
>
> For an interesting discussion of a big time scientist investigating this,
take
> a look in Richard Feynman's "Surely you're joking Mr Feynman" (hey the whole
> damn book is worth reading - Feynman is very humourous and the section on how

> he got the truth out of NASA on the shuttle disaster investigation is
important
> to people concerned about integrity in management).
>
> RF describes getting interested in this and experimenting on himself by
finding
> out what else he can do while counting seconds and how accurately he can
> maintain the timing.  In brief he found he could get pretty accurate on
> timekeeping, and maintain it while doing other tasks, providing (and this is
> the interesting NLP bit) the rep systems didn't conflict. That is, if doing
the
> time keeping in internal auditory, he could do visual or physical tasks but
> couldn't maintain a conversation and timekeeping at same time.  Can't
remember
> whether he could read or not concurrently.  So, being Feynman, he then tried
> switching to watching the seconds go past on his internal screen - now he can

> do the auditory task but not the visual.  He wrtes it much better and I've m
> issed out on the scrapes he gets into while concentrating on two things at
once.
>
> So there you go.
>
> Duncan


Yes!  I found the anecdote most reminiscent of NLP.  Just to fill in a
little more, he did the experiment as a student, out of doubt and
curiosity concerning an article he had read by some author who
hypothesized (based on observing his wife in a fever) that our sense of
passage of time (and hence our ability to estimate it) distorts
according to our internal body temperature.  So RF "calibrated" his
time-estimating ability while at rest, and then exercised vigorously
(running up and down the house stairs) in order to heat up his body,
then calibrated again.  He found no difference.

When his roomates asked what he was doing, he explained, and so they
calibrated everyone's time-estimating ability, under various
conditions.  During the course of this they noticed that *most* of them
could not converse and count time both at the same time.

RF and the others were most puzzled, though, that one of the roomates
claimed he could converse just fine while counting (while at the same
time he had other, different limitations).  At first RF was
incredulous, but after the roomate demonstrated the ability to
everyone's satisfaction, only then did they dig into the question of
just *how* he managed to do this, leading eventually to representation
systems, and discovered that this one guy used a visual clock while the
others used internal voice.  And then RF found that he could use the
visual rep as well if he tried, and could then get the same results.
Modelling, extracting and installing strategies ... shades of NLP!

I believe they also experimented with a kinesthetic (tactile) counting
method as well.  From the anecdote it appeared that whichever rep
system was used to do the counting "used up" or fully occupied that
"channel".  You could do things in parallel in different rep systems,
but not more than one thing at a time in any one rep system.


-- Kurt Luoto