BillG writes "So people can do more that one job at the same time. And if this report is to be believed, we
can do it much more efficiently. After all
human brain is THE most powerful computer.
" So that explains how I can do e-mail and post at the same time.
Some interesting things I have learned in Psychology 101:
If we were to have a memory like so many of you are describing, it would almost be impossible to function normally. You would remember many many useless things. For example: What time you got up yesterday to go to the bathroom, what color socks you wore 3 weeks ago, what you ate for dinner months ago, etc. Your brain would be filled with unimportant information like this, and it would be very cluttered. I believe there have been some cases where people did have this type of memory, and they were unable to function normally, because stupid little details like these would interfere with their normal train of thought. This is why you only remember the pretty important things. All of your sensory input is taken in, and then sent to your hippocampus, which it will stay for a short period of time. Your brain then decides wether or not to store it in memory. Anything which involves emotion has a much greater chance of being stored permanently, or at least as long as it's important. To recall these memories - especially old ones, you need some sort of cue, which brings it out, and puts it into conscious thinking. Audition (sense of smell) is one of the most powerful cues. (Like smelling cookies baking, and then remembering grandma's house) And you don't usually forget things you'd like to, as someone pointed out - horrible war images. But other things, like car accidents, you may never remember, because if you were in the car accident, and you had any sort of blow to the head, at that point in time, information isn't being sent to the hippocampus, or if it's gotten there, it can't be encoded into memory, because at that point in time, a hard hit to the head would disrupt chemical activity, or neural pathways which allow this to happen.
And the other thing I'd like to point out, the fact that we only use 2% (or whatever %) of our brain is really a myth. We do use all of our brains. There is implicit and explicit memory. Say you got amnesia, and didn't remember anything - yet you still remembered how to walk and talk, and perform other simple tasks. This is part of your memory - which I believe is stored in your cortex (I don't quite remember) Most animals have very thin cortices (plural of cortex?) The larger your cortex, the more capacity you have. (The size of your cortex is determined by what kind of enviornment you were raised in. An experiment done with rats showed that a rat left in a cage by itself while it was young did not develop as thick a cortex as rats put in a cage with other rats, and rat toys for it to play with)
Woah long post - sorry about that. I just found Psychology 101 to be an amazing class (after being forced to take it as a requirement for an AI course, Human-computer interaction), and I would suggest anyone interested in the brain to take a few Psychology classes.
From the sound of it, this has next to nothing to do with 'walking and chewing gum', which are parallel tasks, using different regions of the cortex at the same time--no task switching involved.
What this sounds like, OTOH, is the ability to use the *same* part of the brain for multiple tasks. This would be an extraordinary system, having to store a *lot* of information about the current state of the brain, and then be able to retrieve it for switching. (There seems to be some overlap with memory here, too...) In an extreme case, it may actually be holding copies, albiet probably simplified, of whatever networks were being switched. In computing terms, this thing could not only be a task switcher, but a swapper as well, actually changing tasks by swapping the activation patterns in and out of networks.
Speculating a bit, this system would also be a convenient way around nature's standard approach to multiple tasks, which is to evolve parallel systems. When behavior became sufficiently complex, it didn't make any sense to keep parallelizing for everything, so the switcher evolved as a 'quick-fix' that allowed the organisms to multitask new behavior before the better performing dedicated systems could be developed.
Still speculating, it no doubt takes short cuts, which could explain why people are so poor at switching. (For one thing, it may not attempt to 'force' the switch. The current task, or a monitor, would have to request that the older one be swapped in--this would not only be necessary for the current task to be completed, but would explain why people get side-tracked; they 'forget' to swap the primary task back in.)
As for a possible relationship to attention, I doubt it. Attention is a fairly old function, much older than cortex this region is part of, and isn't really switched, though the switcher may be *used* by the attention-function. (IIRC, the thalamus is believed to be the primary 'seat' of attention, which makes it *much* older and considerably more universal.)
Slashdot Mirror
Some interesting things I have learned in Psychology 101:
If we were to have a memory like so many of you are describing, it would almost be impossible to function normally. You would remember many many useless things. For example: What time you got up yesterday to go to the bathroom, what color socks you wore 3 weeks ago, what you ate for dinner months ago, etc. Your brain would be filled with unimportant information like this, and it would be very cluttered. I believe there have been some cases where people did have this type of memory, and they were unable to function normally, because stupid little details like these would interfere with their normal train of thought. This is why you only remember the pretty important things. All of your sensory input is taken in, and then sent to your hippocampus, which it will stay for a short period of time. Your brain then decides wether or not to store it in memory. Anything which involves emotion has a much greater chance of being stored permanently, or at least as long as it's important. To recall these memories - especially old ones, you need some sort of cue, which brings it out, and puts it into conscious thinking. Audition (sense of smell) is one of the most powerful cues. (Like smelling cookies baking, and then remembering grandma's house)
And you don't usually forget things you'd like to, as someone pointed out - horrible war images. But other things, like car accidents, you may never remember, because if you were in the car accident, and you had any sort of blow to the head, at that point in time, information isn't being sent to the hippocampus, or if it's gotten there, it can't be encoded into memory, because at that point in time, a hard hit to the head would disrupt chemical activity, or neural pathways which allow this to happen.
And the other thing I'd like to point out, the fact that we only use 2% (or whatever %) of our brain is really a myth. We do use all of our brains. There is implicit and explicit memory. Say you got amnesia, and didn't remember anything - yet you still remembered how to walk and talk, and perform other simple tasks. This is part of your memory - which I believe is stored in your cortex (I don't quite remember) Most animals have very thin cortices (plural of cortex?) The larger your cortex, the more capacity you have. (The size of your cortex is determined by what kind of enviornment you were raised in. An experiment done with rats showed that a rat left in a cage by itself while it was young did not develop as thick a cortex as rats put in a cage with other rats, and rat toys for it to play with)
Woah long post - sorry about that. I just found Psychology 101 to be an amazing class (after being forced to take it as a requirement for an AI course, Human-computer interaction), and I would suggest anyone interested in the brain to take a few Psychology classes.
From the sound of it, this has next to nothing to do with 'walking and chewing gum', which are parallel tasks, using different regions of the cortex at the same time--no task switching involved.
What this sounds like, OTOH, is the ability to use the *same* part of the brain for multiple tasks. This would be an extraordinary system, having to store a *lot* of information about the current state of the brain, and then be able to retrieve it for switching. (There seems to be some overlap with memory here, too...) In an extreme case, it may actually be holding copies, albiet probably simplified, of whatever networks were being switched. In computing terms, this thing could not only be a task switcher, but a swapper as well, actually changing tasks by swapping the activation patterns in and out of networks.
Speculating a bit, this system would also be a convenient way around nature's standard approach to multiple tasks, which is to evolve parallel systems. When behavior became sufficiently complex, it didn't make any sense to keep parallelizing for everything, so the switcher evolved as a 'quick-fix' that allowed the organisms to multitask new behavior before the better performing dedicated systems could be developed.
Still speculating, it no doubt takes short cuts, which could explain why people are so poor at switching. (For one thing, it may not attempt to 'force' the switch. The current task, or a monitor, would have to request that the older one be swapped in--this would not only be necessary for the current task to be completed, but would explain why people get side-tracked; they 'forget' to swap the primary task back in.)
As for a possible relationship to attention, I doubt it. Attention is a fairly old function, much older than cortex this region is part of, and isn't really switched, though the switcher may be *used* by the attention-function. (IIRC, the thalamus is believed to be the primary 'seat' of attention, which makes it *much* older and considerably more universal.)