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Data input

11:09 / 25.04.02

A quick poll topic - I just want to know whether I'm abnormal, really...

How many data streams can you cope with? I find I can only deal with one input at any one time... I can't read and listen to music at the same time; I can't talk on the phone when the television is on in the background; I can't keep up with more than one conversation at a time; I can only read one book at once, otherwise I get terribly confused. I really can't cope with people trying to talk to me when I'm on the phone (ex-flatmate a particular sinner in this respect).

Am I just easily distracted, or do other people find this? I thought we were all meant to be able to multi-task - perhaps I am just not fit for the modern world...

11:14 / 25.04.02

No, I'm with you on that. I kow lots of people at work who write or edit while listening to music, and i just can't. And the same at home - if i'm reading, or on the phone, I have to turn off the radio or music.

11:15 / 25.04.02

Ha! And a perfect example here - someone came up and spoke to me and I posted the above by accident before I'd finished.

11:18 / 25.04.02

I'm exactly the same, especially with the phone thing, which makes sense because that's two different data sources trying to input to the one destination at the same time. For it to work, you'd have to listen to (and absorb) a microsecond of one conversee, then a microsecond of the other, and alternate like that until they'd finished. Then you'd have to put the two together as seperate data blobs and respond to each in turn.

(aside: imagine if you could respond to both in kind - ie say a word to person A, then a word to B and alternate till both responses were out...)

My theory is that all this multi-tasking crap = us being bombarded with (and expected to absorb) too many different data sources from too many different angles at the same time and THAT is why everyone's short term memory is so bad. The stuff's going in but we don't have the time to absorb, collate and file it properly. It's being stuffed into all and any available gaps, in an un-retrievable format.

11:22 / 25.04.02

Usually three streams minimum, at home - I listen to Radio 4 and I'm paying attention to at least two sites simultaneously. Sometimes you can add IM to that.

If I'm on the phone, though, or direct conversations of any sort, I find other media very distracting. Can't chat in clubs. Find it very hard to talk to two people at once.

I think this is more to do with the concentration you put into each one, and the necessity of paying attention. People who can carry on five different conversations at parties while being on the phone at the same time are not likely to be having the deepest of discussions.

11:57 / 25.04.02

This is supposed to be one of the standard male/female divisions. That is, women are said to cope better with doing two things at once. Personally, I find that it all depends on how much attention I want to pay to anything. I can work and listen to music, but then to be fair what I really do is ignore the music when I'm working - I am very good at filtering things out - and I stop working when I listen to the music.

Its pretty much the same with everything. I can't watch tv and have a conversation, but I can manage it if I am only paying scant attention to one or the other and using context and clues to fill in whatever I lose. Generally though, I don't get distracted by things unless I allow them to distract me. This makes me seem at bit clueless sometimes, since I ignore information unless I have specifically acknowledged it.

12:09 / 25.04.02

I really can't cope with people trying to talk to me when I'm on the phone (ex-flatmate a particular sinner in this respect).

Husband a particular sinner in this respect. Ex-Husb to be, if he keeps it up... he can multi-task really, so he doesn't understand. When I told him to stop, he switched to finger-spelling... where's the logic in that!? Finger-spelling is a lot harder than speech!

I can apparently multi-task, but all I'm really doing is switching between things and still doing everything one at a time.

12:20 / 25.04.02

Are there really people who do lots of things at once without switching?

12:52 / 25.04.02

"I think this is more to do with the concentration you put into each one ... " - fridgemagnet

Yeah. I agree. I frequently write, edit, read, or mark papers while listening to music. But then, when I'm working I *always* play things I know very well and really like, and that's usually classical music; so I guess the 'listening' occurs at the edge of my consciousness, with a few bars breaking through every so often. Actually I find the music somehow seems to help me, sometimes even to inspire. I find I can't listen to jazz or popular music and work in this way though; I quickly get irritated. I just have to listen and enjoy the music or I work. Likewise, I can't watch TV and work.

In some of my German classes at Uni, the lecturer taking the language part of the course used classical music in class (but nothing after Bach, because of something to do with alpha rhythms) to facilitate our learning. The methodology was the subject of some of her research.

I reckon Saveloy's got a good point about sensory overload - that the simultaneous bombardment from different sources interferes with our capacity to take in ideas, information, synthesize, retrieve it, etc. For me there's no doubt it contributes to tiredness, especially if using a computer is involved.

13:04 / 25.04.02

I can usually listen to music and do anything though it does depend on the music. Hardcore, punk or tekno can through me off a bit. I can talk and type at the same time. I find mellow music usually makes it easier for me to concentrate on something hard. I get easily distracted when I'm on the phone though. When I'm mixing music I usually can't do anything else. Doing shit on computers I find it very easy to do lots of things at once. Any jobs that I had that involve using my brain (3d, video editing) also involved working with more that 1 program or computer at once and that seems to come fairly naturally. With people I have a hard time multitasking at all.

13:29 / 25.04.02

Just thought of another point -

there's a difference between doing two things at once (listening to radio while typing) and being able to switch between two tasks rapidly (talking to X, typing a few lines of code, talking to X again)

These strike me as two different skills, and it's the latter that is most useful, at least to me. I'm constantly having to change between different tasks throughout the day, it's rare I'm doing the same thing for more than half an hour but I will need to go back to it, so I need to be able to maintain multiple senses of what I'm doing in the tasks I have to do. Not that I'm that good at it.

Maybe you could link this to the "poor memory" thing. If you have to deal with lots of information on different topics, you have to be very selective about what you keep in short-term memory.

17:56 / 25.04.02

Are there really people who do lots of things at once without switching?

To a certain degree, yes. I often have something playing in the background whilst writing. Since my selection of music is purposefully chosen to reflect the style or mood of whatever I happen to be working on, I'm obviously listening to the music (so haven't 'switched off' as such), but am also concentrating on the text I'm producing.

Of course, and this is probably just petty defining, but what we're talking about here isn't whether or not you switch off certain external stimuli to concentrate on other things, but how you go about prioritising said stimuli in order to assign less attention to less important data. The question essentially becomes, is anyone able to give equal amounts of concentration to multiple sets of data? The answer there, certainly as far as my tired old brain goes, is a resounding and hearty no.

21:24 / 25.04.02

After all those years of schooling, I became quite good at doing two things at once for 8 hours a day, namely reading while taking notes at the same time. If I thought about it, I'm sure it would have been harder, but I was able to read and listen to the prof at the same time. People found this quite funny for some reason....

We're The Great Old Ones Now

21:27 / 25.04.02

I use music and so on when I write to avoid being distracted. If I play music I know well, it's silence. If I hear a bloody seagull doing it's little horny fuckme dance for ten minutes, I can't work until I kill the bastard.

14:03 / 26.04.02

I can do radio4 + work or reading or other stuff.

I've been known to play and work on music with radio4 on - i just find voices keep me company. But can't do phone and tv, can rarely do music and book if the book's good enough, and music and work never seems to work.

But I always have a radio on when it's not that important what I'm doing.

Elijah, Freelance Rabbi

14:13 / 26.04.02

Everquest actually made me better at this, what with the tv, a comic and about 6 PM convos at once i think was the record...

11:47 / 27.04.02

listen to music + internet = yes.

listen to music + read comics = yes.

listen to music + do work = yes.

listen to music + do work + watch bad TV = yes.

listen to music + read books = NO!

11:48 / 27.04.02

listen to hip-hop + do anything else except draw = NO!

Our Lady of The Two Towers

19:34 / 27.04.02

I usually listen to music but it has to be instrumental (techno, electronica etc) if I'm writing, useless without it. I can have the telly on too, but that can slow things down so I tend to only do that if I'm waiting for the weather or the start of something I'm going to record and then turn the telly off.

Reading is much the same, though if it's work-related and so therefore dull my eyes will wander even easier. Talking I'm normally okay, unless something extraordinary happens in one of the other media, like the Pope dropping dead, will distract me a bit. I tend to watch telly and nothing else but that's just giving it my attention.