my mind is not absent: it's busy!

[gusl]

Today, I've been quite absent-minded. This is correlated with me being happy and full of ideas. Maybe this makes my left brain hyperactive. A few hours ago, I lost a glove inside my living room within a span of 2 minutes. I *knew* I had put it down somewhere moments before, but couldn't figure out where, which really pissed me off. My brain is running several threads, my hands are switching tasks often, and my attention, being overloaded with other thoughts, can't keep up with what I'm doing. So I lose track of what I did. My brain does tons of things at once, and my consciousness can only attend to (i.e. control, record, etc) a tiny part of it.

The other day, just after I woke up and went to the computer, shaktool materialized in front of me. It turns out he'd been right in front of me for longer than a minute, and I didn't see him.

I think "absent-minded" just means busy-minded. Which is why people like me rely on a stable environment: that way, tasks can be performed on auto-pilot mode, freeing up my consciousness to focus on ideas.

I just got back from D's. That place was so friggin' noisy, that I got a sort of tunnel vision of perception. I didn't recognize people until I was right next to them. I couldn't understand conversations unless I directly next to the speaker. Multi-person conversations were more effort than they're worth.

So I felt uncomfortable. Apparently, the only person who understands that is cozmic1 (ironically, the day that he came, I was ok with the noise). Even jcreed, who is normally sensitive to such environments, is ok with the noise at D's.

On my way in, saw two people at a table, speaking Spanish. The girl had a cute asymmetrical smile. I was very amused when she said "mano de vaca", apparently describing a frugal person. Googling for it, I see there aren't many hits, so it must not be an expression in Spanish. This must mean that either she is a Portuguese-speaker, or she was talking about actual cow-hands.

Comments

[peamasii.livejournal.com]

Do you think it's possible to quantify how much processing a brain does? Something equivalent to flops in computing power, or at least a speed measurement and a load average would be nice. I think it would be a great biophysical tool to be able to monitor brain activity on the go, and then focus on tasks which exercise the brain the most (as a practical application). I know they can do this with CAT scans, but something portable would be an awesome tool.

[ekorber.livejournal.com]

Which is why people like me rely on a stable environment: that way, tasks can be performed on auto-pilot mode, freeing up my consciousness to focus on ideas.

This sounds to me like it would imply a strong desire to be physically very organized and always wanting to have "a place for everything and everything in its place". AFAICT after 6 months of living with you, this is rather empathetically not the case. How do you reconcile that?

[gustavolacerda.livejournal.com]

Good question! Maintaining organization constantly would require my attention too, and would get in the way of doing other things efficiently. It's not clear what strategy is more efficient on average: lazy/greedy vs organized. It would probably be optimal to acquire the habit of cleaning my desk once a day, right after washing my dishes... but until it becomes a habit, it would be a burden on my mind.

But as a whole, I don't think my current level of physical organization is so bad, since my piles of paper:
* almost never affect my ability to retrieve things. The long-term trend is for this effect to become stronger, as paper becomes increasingly digitized.
* don't get in the way of me automating tasks. The tasks that I tend to automate don't involve paper.

[gustavolacerda.livejournal.com]

I think there are also brain-scanning technologies that can measure attention. You may be interested in OpenEEG.

[gustavolacerda.livejournal.com]

"a place for everything and everything in its place"
I am like that for food-ware (cups, dishes and cutlery, etc). Cooking is highly automated for me.

I'm also like that with my wallet, credit cards and keys: I can go nuts if I'm missing my ID or keys. But I guess that's not mainly because I use them in an automated task: without them, I can't do things at all.

[ekorber.livejournal.com]

I am like that for food-ware (cups, dishes and cutlery, etc). Cooking is highly automated for me.

That seems highly unlikely to me. You put spatulas in weird and different places all the time, and your food is always tossed into/onto the fridge randomly - doesn't that make it take longer to find the item you want to use?

[ekorber.livejournal.com]

I think I just realized a difference in our definitions of organization that is contributing to this. To me, part of "organized" means containing items in a small controlled space in an efficient way, and I think this is not part of the definition for you. For example, I would not consider a table covered with items exactly one layer deep to be 'organized', but you probably would, since it would be easy to find things in this arrangement by a quick visual scan. Essentially I think your definition is more functional than mine.

[gustavolacerda.livejournal.com]

Umm, I try to stick things at the right side of the fridge. But you're right that I could improve my fridge retrieval time significantly, by being more consistent with where I put things. I guess I was thinking more of pans: in retrieving the food, there's enough variation that it can't really be automated.

Re: spatulas, I'm not really sure. I have no idea what kind of weird places you're talking about.

[gustavolacerda.livejournal.com]

I agree with this comment, pragmatically.

Literally, however, "small controlled space in an efficient way" is a part of my definition of "organized". But it's not the aspect of organization that I care about, on most days.... very occasionally, when I'm not busy, I make an effort to clear the clutter, and feel a bit better about it afterwards, because (1) I feel more in control of my stuff (2) it's visually more pleasing. The hard part is the maintenance.

[peamasii.livejournal.com]

Yes, but that introduces the whole nervous system in the loop, measuring skin resistance, etc. If there was a direct way to measure brain activity, it would have to be CAT-scan-like so that other physical factors are filtered out.

[gustavolacerda.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure how skin resistance affects EEG, i.e. whether you can filter out this noise. There is another cheaper technology that measures blood inside the brain, based on infra-red IIRC. I guess I'm thinking of DOI.