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Re: [Phys-L] multitasking

Of course the difficulty is that we all mutitask some, and concentrate some.
In the extremes you end up with severe ADD or contrariwise person who
ignores danger while concentrating on a single task. The data shows that
you can train youself to multitask and this happens by doing it more. So as
people talk on the cell phone more and more the tendency to multitask
increases and the ability to concentrate decreases. The brain is amazingly
plastic.

And when you become expert at something a number of tasks become automatic.
So steering is automatic, bur accident avoidance may not be. That is one
reason for accidents. You are told what to do, but you never practice it.
Safe driving courses are not very effective because they educate you about
what you should do, rather than train you in the actual process. They
apparently do have some effectiveness, but not as much as you would want.
There are courses where you actually train using simulated accidents and
skids. Ultimately teens should have tome on a skidpad. And flight
simulation can be useful because you can build in automatic reactions to
various situations.

Checklists are very valuable, and they have been used to decrease the
infection rate in hospitals to near zero. But they have to be enforced. In
other words the enforcer has to tell the famous surgeon, NO GO BACK AND DO
IT, and there has to be severe penalties for disobedience. But this is
attacking a different problem where people tend to forget important steps.

The penalty for multitasking is obvious. The more frequently you switch
attention, the slower you are because it takes time to reorganize your
thoughts to the new situation. This analogous to computers that time slice.
They have to save the current working info and restore the other tasks
current info. This must be done very time slice. But people do parallel
process many things, but not cognitive tasks. So ADD children must have
extra time to account for the lost switching time. On the other hand if
there is a need for paying attention to everything, the ADD person would be
the ideal spy. But they would not be ideal where concentration is needed.
There has been some evidence that ADD can be somewhat retrained, but so far
there is no evidence that all ADD can be totally eliminated. It may work
slightly for some people, but probably not for severe cases as there are
detectable brain differences for ADD.

One way of making travel safer would be to find ways to reduce the
distractions for operators (drivers/pilots), and provide better levels of
training which build in appropriate automatic responses. Again the question
is what research goes into the design of the operator systems, and into how
to properly train the operators? There is data about driver training as
there are now alternative to the standard safe driving courses, and it shows
that you can improve performance markedly. But it may be deemed to
expensive.

John M. Clement
Houston, TX


Despite John D,s spirited defense of multi-tasking and its
teachability,
and despite
John C's likening it to the behavior associated with ADDS,
I believe
that the experimental
data long available on the effects of an unexpected interruption on a
task requiring
concentration (call it a cognitive effort if you will) are rather
convincing:
performance declines. This year, and every few years you
will hear of
a pilot
crashing a plane when a door or hatch opens unexpectedly in flight.
The damn things fly perfectly well with all kinds of stuff
flapping
in the breeze,
but the distraction overwhelms.

The situation for some pilots is rather like that: they may
be shaken around
(which invokes those genetic propensities inherited from
tree-dwellers?
perhaps to attend to finding something to hang onto?) and may be
assailed with noisy
engine sounds: they need to look out and look down and
look round and
fold charts and punch mini keyboards - and yes, Dorothy -
they may fly
hands off, feet on, at times). It's for this kind of reason
that people
caution
students that their apparent IQ is halved when airborne.

There are methods to mitigate the drop in performance -
useful recipes
for people who can
get into deathly trouble with minor inattention - people like
surgeons.
It's the use of checklists:
this reduces the cognitive conscious effort to a rote behavior which
pulls up performance
considerably and avoids leaving swabs and clamps in patients.

Checklists have always been advocated for pilots - so that a student
from long ago would
remember a vital action checklist like this one:
Brakes off, undercarriage down, mixture rich, air cold, prop
pitch fine,
fuel on Mains and sufficient, flaps as required, harness and hatches
secure..
[You might well ask, what's an undercarriage, what is a propeller
fine/coarse control??)

The current incarnation of checklist advocacy stresses using the
appropriate written
not memorized version.

Is using a cell phone like talking to a passenger? I think
not: you look
down to select
a target for your call, and worse, continue to look down if you are
texting. But that
last is just personal opinion.