Communications consultant Stowe Boyd says new studies may be showing us that multitasking is actually quite possible. “There is recent evidence (published by researchers Jayson Watson and David Strayer) that suggests that some people are natural ‘supertaskers’ capable of performing two difficult tasks at once, without loss of ability on the individual tasks,” he wrote. “This explodes the conventional wisdom that ‘no one can really multitask,’ and by extension the premise that we shouldn’t even try. The human mind is plastic. The area of the brain that is associated with controlling the left hand, for example, is much larger in professional violinists. Likewise, trained musicians listen to music differently, using more centers of the brain, than found in non-musicians. To some extent this is obvious: we expect that mastery in physical and mental domains will change those master’s perceptions and skills. But cultural criticism seems to want to sequester certain questionable activities—like video gaming, social networking, multitasking, and others—into a no-man’s-land where the plasticity of the human mind is negative. None of these critics wring their hands about the dangerous impacts of learning to read, or the intellectual damage of learning a foreign language. But once kids get on a skateboard, or start instant messaging, it’s the fall of Western civilization.”

Boyd said it seems as if the social aspects of Web use frighten many detractors, adding, “But we have learned a great deal about social cognition in recent years, thanks to advances in cognitive science, and we have learned that people are innately more social than was ever realized. The reason that kids are adapting so quickly to social tools online is because they align directly with human social connection, much of which takes place below our awareness. Social tools are being adopted because they match the shape of our minds, but yes, they also stretch our minds based on use and mastery, just like martial arts, playing the piano, and badminton.”

- Janna Anderson, Lee Rainie,  Questioning the idea of multitasking; some define it to be impossible | Pew Internet & American Life Project

I think of myself as a futurist (postfuturist, actually), but that’s ok.

Infinite Stupidity - Mark Pagel via Edge

Mark Pagel is Fellow of the Royal Society and Professor of Evolutionary Biology; Head of the Evolution Laboratory at the University of Reading; Author Oxford Encyclopaedia of Evolution; co-author of The Comparative Method in Evolutionary Biology. His forthcoming book is Wired for Culture: Origins of the Human Social Mind.

I want this book.

Mark Pagel via Edge

One of the first things to be aware of when talking about social learning is that it plays the same role within our societies, acting on ideas, as natural selection plays within populations of genes. Natural selection is a way of sorting among a range of genetic alternatives, and finding the best one. Social learning is a way of sifting among a range of alternative options or ideas, and choosing the best one of those. And so, we see a direct comparison between social learning driving idea evolution, by selecting the best ideas —we copy people that we think are successful, we copy good ideas, and we try to improve upon them — and natural selection, driving genetic evolution within societies, or within populations.

I think this analogy needs to be taken very seriously, because just as natural selection has acted on genetic populations, and sculpted them, we’ll see how social learning has acted on human populations and sculpted them.

What do I mean by “sculpted them”? Well, I mean that it’s changed the way we are. And here’s one reason why. If we think that humans have evolved as social learners, we might be surprised to find out that being social learners has made us less intelligent than we might like to think we are. And here’s the reason why.

If I’m living in a population of people, and I can observe those people, and see what they’re doing, seeing what innovations they’re coming up with, I can choose among the best of those ideas, without having to go through the process of innovation myself. So, for example, if I’m trying to make a better spear, I really have no idea how to make that better spear. But if I notice that somebody else in my society has made a very good spear, I can simply copy him without having to understand why.

What this means is that social learning may have set up a situation in humans where, over the last 200,000 years or so, we have been selected to be very, very good at copying other people, rather than innovating on our own. We like to think we’re a highly inventive, innovative species. But social learning means that most of us can make use of what other people do, and not have to invest the time and energy in innovation ourselves.

Now, why wouldn’t we want to do that? Why wouldn’t we want to innovate on our own? Well, innovation is difficult. It takes time. It takes energy. Most of the things we try to do, we get wrong. And so, if we can survey, if we can sift among a range of alternatives of people in our population, and choose the best one that’s going at any particular moment, we don’t have to pay the costs of innovation, the time and energy ourselves. And so, we may have had strong selection in our past to be followers, to be copiers, rather than innovators.

Followership is part of a vast meta-genetic pattern of human culture, where we need fewer innovators as our networks grow better at transmitting innovation. As social density increases, social learning increases, and the very best ideas can reach everywhere: or better, everyone.

(Source: underpaidgenius)

The Myth of Monotasking - Cathy Davidson via HASTAC

Why the debate about attention — multi- versus mono-tasking — is really about institutions:

Cathy Davidson, The Myth Of Monotasking

[…] If we want to change our institutions, we have to believe that it is the institutional structures that are the problem, not the new conditions of life that institutions should be supporting.   That is, if we believe that technology is making us dumb, distracted, shallow, and lonely—as some have said—then we should be insisting that school stay exactly as stultifying, bubble-tested, standardized, and hierarchical as it is now.   By contrast, if we realize that we are in the midst of a monumental historical change and one reason we feel distracted and disjointed is because there is a mismatch between the educational institutions that help to form us and the changed world in which we live, then there is motivation to change our institutions to help us in this new world.  

So attention is key.  I side with those neuroscientists who argue the brain doesn’t know how to “monotask.”   Multitasking is a way of life, and disruption is what saves us from our own attention blindness.   Right now, we are often blind to how much how world has changed and how essential it is to change our institutions to support that change.

And, I believe, the institutions involved are not just schools, but work. We need to change the world of work to reflect and support the way our minds actually work, instead of attempting to force ourselves into some ideological mindset. A mindset where our attention must be focused at every second, like a laser, working on the next task in our work queue. However, cognitive science shows that this is folklore — or religious doctrine — rather than an appraisal of how we actually operate cognitively. This is the war on flow I have been writing about for years.

This is not dissimilar to the obsession in Western culture with individuality and autonomy, which is such a strong bias that people are unwilling to accept how much of our cognition is social, and that many of the behaviors we consider individual are in fact group phenomena.

Does a strong sense of meaning in life make you more attractive? - Eric Barker

The authors report on data indicating that having a strong sense of meaning in life makes people more appealing social interactants. In Study 1, participants were videotaped while conversing with a friend, and the interactions were subsequently rated by independent evaluators. Participants who had reported a strong sense of meaning in life were rated as desirable friends. In Study 2, participants made 10-s videotaped introductions of themselves that were subsequently evaluated by independent raters. Those who reported a strong sense of meaning in life were rated as more likeable, better potential friends, and more desirable conversation partners. The effect of meaning in life was beyond that of several other variables, including self-esteem, happiness, extraversion, and agreeableness. Study 2 also found an interaction between physical attractiveness and meaning in life, with more meaning in life contributing to greater interpersonal appeal for those of low and average physical attractiveness.

Source: “Meaning as Magnetic Force, Evidence That Meaning in Life Promotes Interpersonal Appeal” from Social Psychological and Personality Science

(via Eric Barker)

And I bet greater influence on those that they come into contact with. I bet there is a strong correlation with Twitter followers and having a strong sense of life purpose.

[Flash 10 is required to watch video]

A 60 second pitch for a talk on Social Cognition.

In one study, they [researchers David Dubois, Derek Ruckner and Adam Galinsky] demonstrated that subjects perceived those with a larger coffee as having more status than someone who chose medium or small, even when the price was the same. (The effect also applied to pizzas and smoothies.) In a second experiment, subjects were randomly assigned to “power” or “powerless” conditions, in which they were told to recall an experience “in which you had power over another individual” or “another individual had power over you.” It turned out that those in the powerless conditions were twice as likely to choose the biggest size of smoothie (with more than double the calories) as those in the powerful or control conditions. (Those primed with power preferred the smallest size.) This same pattern held with bagels, even when prices were constant: those in the powerless condition chose bigger bagel pieces and consumed about 30 percent more calories than those in the power condition.

Jonah Lehrer, Why Do People Eat Too Much?

It appears we over eat to compensate for lack of social status. However Lehrer never extrapolates to the obesity epidemic: if we are at an all-time high for overweight, does that mean a growing proportion of the population is suffering from alienation, for a sense of being at the bottom of the social heap?

Perhaps this is a secret rallying cry for Occupy Everywhere. We need a new society in which more — much more — of the population has enough social status that we don’t supersize.

(via underpaidgenius)

As Social Network Grows, so Does the Brain

Monkey brains grow bigger with every cagemate they acquire, according to a new study showing that certain parts of the brain associated with processing social information expand in response to more complex social information.

“Interestingly, there are a couple of studies in humans by different research groups that show some correlation between brain size and the size of the social network, and we found some similarities in our studies,” study researcher Jerome Sallet, of Oxford University in the U.K., told LiveScience.

“[Our study] reinforces the idea that the human social network was built on something that was already there in the rhesus macaques.”

via Live Science, infoneer-pulse

Social connection is a fundamental part of the human operating

johntropea:

Looking more deeply at the invisible forces that link one human being to another helps us see something even more profound: our brains and bodies are designed to function in aggregates, not in isolation. That is the essence of an obligatory gregarious species. The attempt to function in denial of our need for others…violates our design specifications. The effects on health are warning signs, similar to the “Check Engine” light that comes on in today’s cars with their comptuerised sensors. But social connection is not just a lubricant that like motor oil, prevents overheating and wear. Social connection is a fundamental part of the human operating and organising system itself.

- Alan Moore via

Related

The limbic brain needs to be in active relationship with others to be happy

Touch, Trust, Oxytocin, Cortisol

Sharing social experience is key to better teams and awareness

Existential cowboys or interconnectedness

(Source: smlxtralarge.com)

Can Irrational Decisions Be Corrected? A Football Case Study

Lehrer takes a look at David Romer’s analysis of fourth down decisions by NFL coaches and discovered that they don’t go for the first down enough, and opt for kicking way too much: about twice as much as they should, statistically.

Jonah Lehrer via Wired

If kicking a field goal or punting on fourth down is such a bad idea, then why do coaches always do it? To explain the consistently bad decisions of NFL coaches, Romer offered two different answers. The first is risk aversion. If coaches followed Romer’s strategy, they would fail about half the time they were within ten yards of the endzone. This means that instead of kicking an easy field goal and settling for three points, they would come away empty handed. Although that’s a winning strategy in the long-run, it’s hard to stomach. (As Daniel Kahneman notes, “Worst case scenarios overwhelm our probabilistic assessment, as the mere prospect of the worst case has so much more emotional oomph behind it.”) After a long drive down the field, fans expect some points. A coach that routinely disappointed the crowd would quickly get fired.

The second reason coaches stink at making decisions on fourth down is that they stink at statistics. As Romer politely writes, “Many skills are more important to running a successful football team than a command of mathematical and statistical tools…It may be that individuals involved want to make the decisions to maximize their teams’ chance of winning, but that they rely on experience and intuition rather than formal analysis.”

So firms don’t always maximize profits, if only because coaches aren’t rational agents. But I’m most interested in what happens next. Can coaches learn from their mistakes? Can a rigorous analysis of flawed behavior help us correct that flaw? This is the optimistic hope behind much of behavioral economics, which assumes that identifying the irrational quirks of humans allows us to escape those quirks. Thanks to Romer’s analysis, it’s now easy to make the right decision on fourth down.

So how have coaches reacted to this data? In 2001, before Romer published his findings, the average team went for it on fourth down 15.1 times per season. During the 2010 season, the average NFL team went for it on fourth down…15.125 times. Perhaps 2011 will be the year coaches start to maximize profits. But I’m doubtful.

There are a few sad lessons here. For one thing, it appears that NFL teams don’t closely follow the behavioral economics literature, even when it directly involves the sport. But the lack of change in fourth down decision-making is also a depressing reminder that human biases are exceedingly hard to fix. When the game is on the line we default to our lazy hunches and instincts, even when the rational choice couldn’t be more clear.

What is the equivalent of the fourth down bias in your world, or business? Can we learn from the cognitive biases of football coaches, even if they can’t, or are we just as stuck as they are?

And the lesson to learn isn’t the stats, or just that you should look at the objective reality of things: we need to be able to break out of the social conventions that ensnare us, even if it leads to others questioning our judgment.

This reminds me of the John Holt definition of leadership:

Leaders are not what many people think — people with huge crowds following them. Leaders are people who go their own way without caring, or even looking to see whether anyone is following them. “Leadership qualities” are not the qualities that enable people to attract followers, but those that enable them to do without them. The include, at the very least, courage, endurance, patience, humor, flexibility, resourcefulness, determination, a keen sense of reality, and the ability to keep a cool and clear head even when things are going badly. This is the opposite of the “charisma” that we hear so much about.

[Holt cited by Caterina Fake]