Multitasking as Microliberty
posted by Frank Pasquale
Is it possible to do many things well, at once? A lot depends on how you define simultaneity. “‘A core limitation [of the brain] is an inability to concentrate on two things at once,’ [according to] René Marois, a neuroscientist and director of the Human Information Processing Laboratory at Vanderbilt University” (quoted in an article critical of multitasking.) According to this piece, “Listening to soothing background music while studying may improve concentration. But other distractions — most songs with lyrics, instant messaging, television shows — hamper performance.”
I have to dissent here. I find that I need a well-near constant aural background to get much done during the day….and sadly, soothing music is often just not loud enough to drown out the random noise that constantly assaults one in urban areas. Perhaps this music-addiction is just idiosyncratic to me (and surgeons). But I think the anti-multitasking literature is insufficiently attentive to idiosyncrasy; to wit:
[R]esearchers reported . . . 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.
I like the application of this idea to driving with a hands-free cell-phone–I’m constantly amazed by the risks people take while hurtling at 60MPH in a 4000 pound hunk of steel. But I fail to see the extrapolability of many of the other experiments mentioned in the article. Sure, computer code writers may be distracted by email….but perhaps the epistolary stimuli are keeping them going till they get to their more productive moments. Similarly, on any particular day, I may spend way too much time perusing politicaltheory.info or reviewing all the blog headlines in my RSS feed, but the types of serendipitous finds I make on those procrastinating peregrinations can cut a Gordian knot I’ve been wrestling with for hours.
Nevertheless, I have to admit that I would love to have the self-discipline to, say, totally block out email for a few hours each morning. But I am afraid that the new multitasking research is going to ultimately feed into employee monitoring/prodding programs oblivious to the capricious character of productivity in many information age workers. I guess my fears here are driven by a scene in Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash, where a worker of the future is presented with a bureaucratic email and given the guideline “This email should take 8 minutes to review.” The worker calculates that perusing the turgid document for seven minutes may win her points for efficiency, but any less will lead to demerits for failing to read it carefully enough. Nine minutes could land her in a dread “Remedial Speed Reading” course!
Which leads to one last random reflection here….what do libertarians think of workplace surveillance like that? Is it part of the inviolable freedom of employers? Or is there some role for law to carve out, say, basic privacy rights for employees? I plan to review Russ Muirhead’s Just Work some time to look for ideas. For now, Brandeis’s old quote on vacations provides some food for thought: “I can do a year’s worth of work in 11 months, but not 12.”
Photo Credit: Flickr/Krossbow.
April 3, 2007 at 5:10 pm
Posted in: Behavioral Law and Economics, Law School (Teaching), Technology
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Responses (16)
David - April 3, 2007 at 7:07 pm
Interesting–John Dewey was also deeply suspicious of totalitarian corporations that utterly deprive their employees of their autonomy and dignity.
Speaking of which, 27% of the children of WalMart employees receive Medicaid. This serves as a hidden corporate subsidy of billions of dollars per year. And their crappy health insurance plan comes with a $3,000 deductible, which is probably more than almost any WalMart hourly employee makes in a month.
Patrick S. O'Donnell - April 3, 2007 at 8:33 pm
Frank,
I too ‘need a well-near constant aural background to get much done during the day,’ as we have very little setback and thus are not far from the street, so I keep the TV on in the background ‘loud enough to drown out the random noise that constantly assaults one in urban areas,’ although not a few car stereos go by with bass beats that rattle the windows and my mind. Although I cannot in any way ‘multi-task,’ as that means I do several jobs poorly rather than one job well. Still, as Herbert Fingarette explained in an appendix to his delightful little book on Self-Deception (2000 ed.), ‘when I am writing as I normally do, I *take account* of the complex and varying physical and orthographical requirements for putting my thoughts on paper, but *I do not focus my attention* on these things. Nevertheless it is fair to say I do all this purposely, intelligently and adaptively. But all the while my attention is focused on my thoughts at the moment and the task of choosing words to express them adequately. Once I have the words in mind, and have elected to write them down, the writing itself is “automatic.” The crux of the matter, if we generalize, is that we can take account of something without necessarily focusing our attention on it. That is, we can recognize it, and respond to it without directing our attention to what we are doing, and our response can be intelligently adaptive rather than merely a reflex or habit automatism. [....]
The nature of this mental capacity bears further elaboration in order to make explicit how complex and sophisticated is the exercise of it. While I am writing, there the noises of passing cars, the neighbour’s lawnmower, the kitchen refrigerator, all coming to my ears. They are irrelevant to my writing, indeed, would disrupt it were I to focus my attention on them. The fact is, I am simply unconscious of the noises. How can this be? The noises certainly register in my ears. It has to be that I take account of them, recognize their irrelevance to my project at the moment, and therefore do not turn my attention to the noises–nor do I even focus attention on the process of adopting and pursuing this aim.
Later, I do hear my wife’s car as it comes down our driveway, and I am conscious that she has arrived home. I want to greet her when she comes in, and in this case I also want to deliver several messages left for her. So now I direct my attention primarily to her and away from the writing. How does this change come about?
In order to accomplish it I must have been taking account of the car noises. I must have distinguished and recognized the distinctive noise of my wife’s car coming into the driveway. Taking account of the special significance of this noise, I have reason to shift my attention. I do all this without having turned my attention to what I am doing. All that leads up to this shift is done in the “back of my mind.” Yet when one appreciates the intelligent selectivity with which her car’s noise is picked out from all the others I have been hearing and have appropriately responded to, it becomes evident that I play an active role here. I actively direct and redirect my attention for what to me are good and sufficient reasons. [....]
The point is that I was doing something intelligently adaptive. I meant to do it; it was not inadvertent. I had a purpose, and a reason for having that purpose. It was an effective exercise of my wish not to be annoyed by the noises, not to let them come to my attention unless some noise was identified that was relevant to my current interests. It has all the characteristics of what we call intentional behaviour, except that it is not “conscious,” that is, it was something I was doing without directing my attention to it. [Fingarette concedes that 'all these thing are so familiar and obvious as to seem hardly to justify the lengths to which I have gone to call them to the reader's attention.' And 'Yet I have still barely scratched the surface.'] [....]
First, and psychologically most fundamental, is our mind’s capacity to take account effectively, within the moment, of an almost incredibly large range of data without having to focus attention on the process. True, the boundaries of the field of attention do not seem to be sharp. At one extreme we are acutely, vividly aware of some small segment of our total situation. At the other extreme, furthest distant from the focal centre of attention, we still effectively take account of things but we are totally “unaware” of our taking account of them. There seems to be more or less a continuum between these two extremes.
A second important feature of the mind at work is that while we can generally recall what took place at the centre of our attention, we generally find it increasingly difficult or even impossible to recall things that were at the periphery of our attention or outside our field of attention entirely.
Third, it is clear that to focus our attention is by its very nature to impose a special clarity and intensity on a very narrow segment of the total field of what we are taking account of. [....]
Finally, we actively and selectively direct our attention on the basis of reasons provided by our appraisal of our situation. We continue taking account of our situation –perceiving, appraising, responding–even though this very largely take place outside the field of our attention.’
So, it seems, in the above sense, we’re all multi-taskers of a sort!
Incidentally, for those who simply see the clever reference to multi-tasking in Shiva’s possession of a few extra limbs, permit me to note that this is one of the more popular representations of Shiva (part of the Hindu tri-murti [three forms] of God) as Nataraja, King of the Dance, and represents him as a deity with creative, destructive and emancipatory powers (in the sense of liberation from karma and hence samsara).
Patrick S. O'Donnell - April 3, 2007 at 8:33 pm
Frank,
I too ‘need a well-near constant aural background to get much done during the day,’ as we have very little setback and thus are not far from the street, so I keep the TV on in the background ‘loud enough to drown out the random noise that constantly assaults one in urban areas,’ although not a few car stereos go by with bass beats that rattle the windows and my mind. Although I cannot in any way ‘multi-task,’ as that means I do several jobs poorly rather than one job well. Still, as Herbert Fingarette explained in an appendix to his delightful little book on Self-Deception (2000 ed.), ‘when I am writing as I normally do, I *take account* of the complex and varying physical and orthographical requirements for putting my thoughts on paper, but *I do not focus my attention* on these things. Nevertheless it is fair to say I do all this purposely, intelligently and adaptively. But all the while my attention is focused on my thoughts at the moment and the task of choosing words to express them adequately. Once I have the words in mind, and have elected to write them down, the writing itself is “automatic.” The crux of the matter, if we generalize, is that we can take account of something without necessarily focusing our attention on it. That is, we can recognize it, and respond to it without directing our attention to what we are doing, and our response can be intelligently adaptive rather than merely a reflex or habit automatism. [....]
The nature of this mental capacity bears further elaboration in order to make explicit how complex and sophisticated is the exercise of it. While I am writing, there the noises of passing cars, the neighbour’s lawnmower, the kitchen refrigerator, all coming to my ears. They are irrelevant to my writing, indeed, would disrupt it were I to focus my attention on them. The fact is, I am simply unconscious of the noises. How can this be? The noises certainly register in my ears. It has to be that I take account of them, recognize their irrelevance to my project at the moment, and therefore do not turn my attention to the noises–nor do I even focus attention on the process of adopting and pursuing this aim.
Later, I do hear my wife’s car as it comes down our driveway, and I am conscious that she has arrived home. I want to greet her when she comes in, and in this case I also want to deliver several messages left for her. So now I direct my attention primarily to her and away from the writing. How does this change come about?
In order to accomplish it I must have been taking account of the car noises. I must have distinguished and recognized the distinctive noise of my wife’s car coming into the driveway. Taking account of the special significance of this noise, I have reason to shift my attention. I do all this without having turned my attention to what I am doing. All that leads up to this shift is done in the “back of my mind.” Yet when one appreciates the intelligent selectivity with which her car’s noise is picked out from all the others I have been hearing and have appropriately responded to, it becomes evident that I play an active role here. I actively direct and redirect my attention for what to me are good and sufficient reasons. [....]
The point is that I was doing something intelligently adaptive. I meant to do it; it was not inadvertent. I had a purpose, and a reason for having that purpose. It was an effective exercise of my wish not to be annoyed by the noises, not to let them come to my attention unless some noise was identified that was relevant to my current interests. It has all the characteristics of what we call intentional behaviour, except that it is not “conscious,” that is, it was something I was doing without directing my attention to it. [Fingarette concedes that 'all these thing are so familiar and obvious as to seem hardly to justify the lengths to which I have gone to call them to the reader's attention.' And 'Yet I have still barely scratched the surface.'] [....]
First, and psychologically most fundamental, is our mind’s capacity to take account effectively, within the moment, of an almost incredibly large range of data without having to focus attention on the process. True, the boundaries of the field of attention do not seem to be sharp. At one extreme we are acutely, vividly aware of some small segment of our total situation. At the other extreme, furthest distant from the focal centre of attention, we still effectively take account of things but we are totally “unaware” of our taking account of them. There seems to be more or less a continuum between these two extremes.
A second important feature of the mind at work is that while we can generally recall what took place at the centre of our attention, we generally find it increasingly difficult or even impossible to recall things that were at the periphery of our attention or outside our field of attention entirely.
Third, it is clear that to focus our attention is by its very nature to impose a special clarity and intensity on a very narrow segment of the total field of what we are taking account of. [....]
Finally, we actively and selectively direct our attention on the basis of reasons provided by our appraisal of our situation. We continue taking account of our situation –perceiving, appraising, responding–even though this very largely take place outside the field of our attention.’
So, it seems, in the above sense, we’re all multi-taskers of a sort!
Incidentally, for those who simply see the clever reference to multi-tasking in Shiva’s possession of a few extra limbs, permit me to note that this is one of the more popular representations of Shiva (part of the Hindu tri-murti [three forms] of God) as Nataraja, King of the Dance, and represents him as a deity with creative, destructive and emancipatory powers (in the sense of liberation from karma and hence samsara).
Jeff Lipshaw - April 4, 2007 at 11:08 am
I used to play golf as an escape from everything aural. But that doesn’t work anymore unless I have the discipline to leave the cell phone behind.
What works now is a one-hour Pilates class. Not only do you get to be humiliated (in a classic male-ego sort of way) by all of the middle-aged women who can do things you can’t, but you really are freed up from anything other than the dulcet tones of the instructor, in our case here at the Reily Center at Tulane, Louis, imploring you to do things like “activate your core, lengthening your spine, squeeze your buttocks, lift your tailbone, and slowly inch your vertebrae from the floor, one by one.”
Patrick S. O'Donnell - April 4, 2007 at 11:37 am
Jeff,
You’re one brave soul: I would never exercise in a room with more than myself in it, let alone members of the fairer sex. Perhaps Frank can post a picture of what you’re wearing while doing Pilates!
Patrick S. O'Donnell - April 4, 2007 at 11:37 am
Jeff,
You’re one brave soul: I would never exercise in a room with more than myself in it, let alone members of the fairer sex. Perhaps Frank can post a picture of what you’re wearing while doing Pilates!
Frank - April 4, 2007 at 11:43 am
Thanks for that great excerpt from the Fingarette book, Patrick. I was looking for some treatment fo the nature of “attending” and “taking account” of phenomena that was more refined than the usual….and you definitely provided me with that. I look forward to taking a look at that!
Jeff–yes, I used to do yoga, and hope to get back into it! Given my height, I can usually do about half of what’s asked in the midlevel course….sending me back to basics. I’m just stressed out by the prospect of a shoulder stand!
Patrick S. O'Donnell - April 4, 2007 at 12:18 pm
Lest readers get the wrong impression: what Frank is performing (or used to perform) are simply asanas (not, in other words, yoga as such), which are physical postures/exercises to discipline the body as a *prerequisite* to disciplining the mind, or as a prelude to the yogas of devotion (bhakti yoga), selfless social service (karma yoga), and knowledge (transcendental non-conceptual awareness: jnana yoga) as discussed in the Bhagavad Gita (the work from the Mahabharata which had an enormous impact on Gandhi’s moral and political philosophy). Indeed, asanas are only one ‘limb’ (hence: “Eight-Limbed Yoga,” or astanga-yoga) in Pantanjali’s canonical Yoga Sutra, the others being ethical restraint (yama), inner control or self-discipline (niyama), control of breath/vital energy (pranayama), sense-withdrawal (pratyahara), concentration (dharana), meditative awareness (dhyana), and meditative-concentration (samadhi) [diacritics missing]. I suspect Frank (and Jeff for that matter) is more adept at the other limbs than what I prefer to call ‘personal-ads yoga’ or ‘YMCA yoga,’ in the sense that such yoga is emblematic of the commodification of the spirituality of ‘the other’ in a manner initmated by Baudrillard according to this summary from Wikipedia: ‘In the work of the semiotician Baudrillard, commodity fetishism is deployed to explain subjective feelings towards consumer goods in the “realm of circulation”, that is, among consumers. Baudrillard was especially interested in the cultural mystique added to objects by advertising, which encourages consumers to purchase them as aids to the construction of their personal identity.’
Patrick S. O'Donnell - April 4, 2007 at 12:18 pm
Lest readers get the wrong impression: what Frank is performing (or used to perform) are simply asanas (not, in other words, yoga as such), which are physical postures/exercises to discipline the body as a *prerequisite* to disciplining the mind, or as a prelude to the yogas of devotion (bhakti yoga), selfless social service (karma yoga), and knowledge (transcendental non-conceptual awareness: jnana yoga) as discussed in the Bhagavad Gita (the work from the Mahabharata which had an enormous impact on Gandhi’s moral and political philosophy). Indeed, asanas are only one ‘limb’ (hence: “Eight-Limbed Yoga,” or astanga-yoga) in Pantanjali’s canonical Yoga Sutra, the others being ethical restraint (yama), inner control or self-discipline (niyama), control of breath/vital energy (pranayama), sense-withdrawal (pratyahara), concentration (dharana), meditative awareness (dhyana), and meditative-concentration (samadhi) [diacritics missing]. I suspect Frank (and Jeff for that matter) is more adept at the other limbs than what I prefer to call ‘personal-ads yoga’ or ‘YMCA yoga,’ in the sense that such yoga is emblematic of the commodification of the spirituality of ‘the other’ in a manner initmated by Baudrillard according to this summary from Wikipedia: ‘In the work of the semiotician Baudrillard, commodity fetishism is deployed to explain subjective feelings towards consumer goods in the “realm of circulation”, that is, among consumers. Baudrillard was especially interested in the cultural mystique added to objects by advertising, which encourages consumers to purchase them as aids to the construction of their personal identity.’
Jeff Lipshaw - April 4, 2007 at 2:50 pm
Patrick, which one of those counts as “squeeze your buttocks?”
Patrick S. O'Donnell - April 4, 2007 at 3:07 pm
Jeff,
With all due respect for my collegues in the study of religions and begging forgiveness from my Indian friends, I suppose we could include it under the last three: control of vital energy, awareness, and concentration.
Patrick S. O'Donnell - April 4, 2007 at 3:07 pm
Jeff,
With all due respect for my collegues in the study of religions and begging forgiveness from my Indian friends, I suppose we could include it under the last three: control of vital energy, awareness, and concentration.
Patrick S. O'Donnell - April 4, 2007 at 3:10 pm
erratum (or evidence of anal retentiveness): ‘colleagues’
Patrick S. O'Donnell - April 4, 2007 at 3:10 pm
erratum (or evidence of anal retentiveness): ‘colleagues’
Patrick S. O'Donnell - April 4, 2007 at 4:41 pm
OK Jeff, I gave it further thought: perhaps ’squeeze your buttocks’ should count, strictly speaking, as ‘ass-anas,’ as they might say in Irving, Texas.
Patrick S. O'Donnell - April 4, 2007 at 4:41 pm
OK Jeff, I gave it further thought: perhaps ’squeeze your buttocks’ should count, strictly speaking, as ‘ass-anas,’ as they might say in Irving, Texas.
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