The bottleneck in the brain

The New York Times brings us more evidence that multitasking doesn't work well:

"Multitasking is going to slow you down, increasing the chances of mistakes," said David E. Meyer, a cognitive scientist and director of the Brain, Cognition and Action Laboratory at the University of Michigan. "Disruptions and interruptions are a bad deal from the standpoint of our ability to process information."

The human brain, with its hundred billion neurons and hundreds of trillions of synaptic connections, is a cognitive powerhouse in many ways. "But a core limitation is an inability to concentrate on two things at once," said René Marois, a neuroscientist and director of the Human Information Processing Laboratory at Vanderbilt University.

Mr. Marois and three other Vanderbilt researchers reported in an article last December in the journal Neuron that they used magnetic resonance imaging to pinpoint the bottleneck in the brain and to measure how much efficiency is lost when trying to handle two tasks at once.

Study participants were given two tasks and were asked to respond to sounds and images. The first was to press the correct key on a computer keyboard after hearing one of eight sounds. The other task was to speak the correct vowel after seeing one of eight images.

The researchers said that they did not see a delay if the participants were given the tasks one at a time. But the researchers found that response to the second task was delayed by up to a second when the study participants were given the two tasks at about the same time.

In many daily tasks, of course, a lost second is unimportant. But one implication of the Vanderbilt research, Mr. Marois said, is that talking on a cellphone while driving a car is dangerous. A one-second delay in response time at 60 miles an hour could be fatal, he noted.

"We are under the impression that we have this brain that can do more than it often can," observed Mr. Marois, who said he turns off his cellphone when driving.

A slideshow accompanies the article, with images of New Yorkers talking and texting while biking, skateboarding, and walking.

Slow Down, Multitaskers; Don’t Read in Traffic (New York Times)

Related posts
Multitaskers, take note
Multitasking makes you stupid
On the advantages of writing by hand
On continuous partial attention
On continuous partial attention and reading habits
On wireless connections in classrooms

"If the gods want to drive you mad"

“If the gods want to drive you mad, first they tell you your future."

Dr. Milton Wexler, founder of the Hereditary Disease Foundation and sponsor of research on Huntington's disease, advising his daughters not to take the test that would determine if they have Huntington's. Their mother Leonore, Dr. Wexler's ex-wife, died from the disease. Research made possible by Dr. Wexler's foundation led to the test.

Milton Wexler, Groundbreaker on Huntington's, Dies at 98 (New York Times)

"But it's so deconstructive!"

Nina Conti might be described as a postmodern ventriloquist. She and her puppet Monk (a monkey) stole the show in For Your Consideration (there's also a long bit with the two on the DVD of the film). Below, a link to a clip of Conti's 2005 performance at Tickled Pink, an annual breast-cancer fundraiser at the Royal Albert Hall.

Note: There are a few rough spots in the language -- all from the monkey.

Nina Conti and Monkey (YouTube)

Six lines from Auden

I came to W.H. Auden's poetry relatively late: when I was an undergraduate, Yeats and Eliot ruled from the world of the dead, and I'm not sure that many English Department people knew what to do with Auden's plain, colloquial words.

Here's a wonderful Auden passage: the first six lines of the very late poem "A Thanksgiving" (the next-to-last poem in Edward Mendelson's edition of the Selected Poems):

    When pre-pubescent I felt
that moorlands and woodlands were sacred:
    people seemed rather profane.

    Thus, when I started to verse,
I presently sat at the feet of
    Hardy and Thomas and Frost.

What's to like? A number of things:

The poet is quietly dazzling, writing syllabic verse with 7-, 9-, and 7-syllable lines. Note too the partial rhyme of verse and Frost and the way line six echoes "Tinker to Evans to Chance."

The poet characterizes his youth in a funny, self-deprecating way. It's impossible to imagine, say, Dylan Thomas in "Fern Hill" speaking of himself as "pre-pubescent." "Rather profane" is a nice swipe at the attitudes of youth too -- people, mucking up the landscape! A pre-pubescent of course would be untroubled by his own profane presence in these sacred territories.

There's more subtle comedy too: even when the poet, as a very young man, is writing poems without other people in them, he has to learn how to do so from other people -- from Thomas Hardy, Edward Thomas, and Robert Frost. So the solitary wanderer is not so solitary after all, and if he's sitting at the metaphorical feet of other poets, he's not wandering either.

One more point: Auden is taking up the centuries-old poetic practice of honoring by surname, as in Ben Jonson's Cary-Morison ode: "Nothing perfect done, / But as a CARY, or a MORISON." But he's having fun with this practice, sneaking in the American Frost and later acknowledging Brecht and Kierkegaard. Contrast the insular Philip Larkin, who once responded to an interviewer's question about another writer-librarian by asking "Who's Jorge Luis Borges?"

2007 is Auden's centenary -- one more good reason to take a look at his poems.

Other Auden posts

W.H. Auden centenary
Auden on handwriting and typing
Ian McEwan on Auden's "Musée des Beaux Arts" and the 2005 London subway bombings

Unnecessary repetition

I liked this example of unnecessary (and unneeded!) repetition in my local newspaper:

Police officers would be able to park all their squad cars next to the station and be able to drive through a 24-foot-wide parking lot aisle, instead of the existing 12-foot-wide alley.

"It is going to double the width of the access," [the city planner] said.

12 + 12 . . . yes, it checks out.

Related post
Unnecessary repetition

Primates and morality

Interesting reading in today's New York Times, on primatologist Frans de Waal's contention that the origins of human morality are to be found in the social behavior of monkeys and apes:

Though human morality may end in notions of rights and justice and fine ethical distinctions, it begins, Dr. de Waal says, in concern for others and the understanding of social rules as to how they should be treated. At this lower level, primatologists have shown, there is what they consider to be a sizable overlap between the behavior of people and other social primates.

Social living requires empathy, which is especially evident in chimpanzees, as well as ways of bringing internal hostilities to an end. Every species of ape and monkey has its own protocol for reconciliation after fights, Dr. de Waal has found. If two males fail to make up, female chimpanzees will often bring the rivals together, as if sensing that discord makes their community worse off and more vulnerable to attack by neighbors. Or they will head off a fight by taking stones out of the males’ hands.

Dr. de Waal believes that these actions are undertaken for the greater good of the community, as distinct from person-to-person relationships, and are a significant precursor of morality in human societies.

Macaques and chimpanzees have a sense of social order and rules of expected behavior, mostly to do with the hierarchical natures of their societies, in which each member knows its own place. Young rhesus monkeys learn quickly how to behave, and occasionally get a finger or toe bitten off as punishment. Other primates also have a sense of reciprocity and fairness. They remember who did them favors and who did them wrong. Chimps are more likely to share food with those who have groomed them. Capuchin monkeys show their displeasure if given a smaller reward than a partner receives for performing the same task, like a piece of cucumber instead of a grape.

These four kinds of behavior -- empathy, the ability to learn and follow social rules, reciprocity and peacemaking -- are the basis of sociality.

Read more:

Scientist Finds the Beginnings of Morality in Primate Behavior (New York Times)

And now it's back to work at the Continental Paper Grading Company.

The toll of war

U.S. troop fatalities in Iraq (March 2003-February 28, 2007):

3,166

For Iraqi Security Force and civilian fatalities in Iraq, estimates range from

30,000 (March 2003-December 2005, Bush administration)

to

650,000 (March 2003-November 2006, Johns Hopkins School of Public Health)

An interactive timeline is available from National Public Radio:

The Toll of War

“Middle school is like Scotch”

On teaching at a middle school in Brooklyn:

JoAnn Rintel Abreu, 40, an English and social studies teacher at Seth Low, graduated with a masters' degree in English literature, the "bare minimum" teaching requirements and glorious visions of turning high school students on to Shakespeare and Chaucer. She was offered a middle school job first.

Now, after 16 years at Seth Low, Mrs. Abreu takes great satisfaction in trying to figure out how to reach adolescents. The rewards come with breakthrough moments, like when a sullen eighth grader who rarely does his homework handed in a bitterly descriptive, beautifully written memoir about his father's new girlfriend, "the witch."

"Middle school is like Scotch," she reflected in the teachers' lounge one afternoon. "At first you try to get it down. Then you get used to it. Then it's all you order."

For Teachers, Middle School Is Test of Wills (New York Times)

Me?

If I were paranoid, I would be certain that Roz Chast is drawing me. Again and again, this glasses-wearing, bearded guy appears in her work. Here he's a psychiatrist floating in an inner tube:

[Detail from "Emergency Session," New Yorker cover, August 7 and 14, 2006.]

And here he's passing as an academic:

[Detail from "How to Bail Out EuroDisney," New Yorker, December 28, 1992]

Wait a minute: she is drawing me.

By Roz Chast: Theories of Everything: Selected, Collected, and Health-Inspected Cartoons, 1978-2006 (Amazon)

An Irish post

A passage from "Ithaca," the catechism episode of James Joyce's Ulysses (1922):

What considerations rendered departure desirable?

The attractive character of certain localities in Ireland and abroad, as represented in general geographical maps of polychrome design or in special ordnance survey charts by employment of scale numerals and hachures.

In Ireland?

The cliffs of Moher, the windy wilds of Connemara, lough Neagh with submerged petrified city, the Giant's Causeway, Fort Camden and Fort Carlisle, the Golden Vale of Tipperary, the islands of Aran, the pastures of royal Meath, Brigid's elm in Kildare, the Queen's Island shipyard in Belfast, the Salmon Leap, the lakes of Killarney.

Happy Saint Patrick's Day.