Overtaxed Working Memory Knocks the Brain Out of Sync: Study
quantamagazine.org
quantamagazine.org
I work in human memory neuroscience / linguistics.
1. The 7-plus-or-minus-two study is entirely bunk. Welsh words are longer and yield < 7. This WM capacity is about verbal rehearsal.
2. Here's background reading on the complexity and debates over oscillation functions: https://neurophysics.ucsd.edu/courses/physics_171/Buzsaki%20...
So, your mind can hold 4-5, not 7 things at the same time or it goes "out of sync"
edit: added quote.
I don't really have a good sense of what that speed implies mind you.
You should read Heidegger's The Thing.
[0] http://people.ischool.berkeley.edu/~ryanshaw/nmwg/the.thing-...
Found the scan annoying, transcribed to pandoc Markdown:
There seem to be two more widely accepted limits to working memory than George Miller's 1950s limit: (A) 3-5 chunks [1] or (B) it depends greatly on the context and type of chunk (e.g., visuospatial) .
[1] N. Cowan. Metatheory of storage capacity limits. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 24(1):154176, 2001.
It should be seen as rare and exceptional to need hours spent in meetings or group settings where dynamic real-time audio is required. That is a form of collaboration needed much less frequently than asynchronous collaboration built out of individuals taking a more contemplative and personally customizable, adjustable approach to organizing thoughtful work habits that don't disrupt others.
(Note: I'm not saying I support this particular study on working memory, just that open plan offices are a problem in this area of productivity, whether or not this particular study turned out to be mostly click bait or not.)
It gets especially bad when someone else wrote that code and you're just getting into it. Layers upon layers of abstractions scattered across classes, functions, files. Each add very little on their own, but you kinda have to keep it all in your head (or write it down as I do) if you're planning to grok it and fix that bug.
It's kinda like reading some piece of code not in its final form, but as a pile of diffs are applied to it. Fun. :-)
I find older style procedural code with longer functions generally much easier to get into than any OOP.
I don't often need to know what every single line does exactly all at once, nor can I actually keep that much information in my head anyway. I'd rather be able to say "that's the function that frobbles the subductor, it's 5 lines long and right now I don't care how it does it.",
Sure, the bug might be in that function - but if it's only 5 lines long and does one simple thing, I can write a bunch of tests for that one thing and work it out. When the code is broken up like this, I can keep an even larger system in working memory all at once.
I worked with a guy once who loved to split everything into tiny classes made of tiny functions, each in its own tiny source file. You'd hop through four or five different files to do the simplest thing, and it was mindbending to try and debug.
Also with regards to code duplication, it's important to distinguish duplication of statements from duplication of intent. If the code's actually doing the same thing then sure, collapse it down into a function. But if the intent of each piece is different and they just happen to involve the same operations, then removing the duplication is adding a dependency to both places, and may very well not be a net win.
Or rather, we could have a considerably simplified version, with a very small set of commands that are consistent with one another, and 'undoable', and a simpler conceptual model - and only allow admins/superusers to touch 'real' git.
I'm deadly serious, I don't care how brilliant a dev is, I find that git's conceptual model, the variety and inconsistency of the command patterns, and the variety of usage models add up to an unnecessary mental tax on dev.
I don't mean to turn this into a git discussion, but I suggest it is an example of one of many 'sneaky taxes' that effectively introduce otherwise reducible complexity on all of us.
"Miller thinks the brain is juggling the items being held in working memory one at a time, in alternation. “That means all the information has to fit into one brain wave,” he said. “When you exceed the capacity of that one brain wave, you’ve reached the limit on working memory.” "
File it under "path dependence," Pops. TIE (This is Evolution.) (a la "TIL")
Also, there are ways to form thought structures that you can't use a normal single-step debugger on, as the intermediate states have no useful interpretation. They are however much, much more capable, e.g. able to provide you with the ability to scan through isles at a large store, while walking reasonably fast through it, turning your head left and right. Your eyes scan rough at first, moving to get more detail for those areas in an isle that though process wants more detail on. Due to the inherent delay/reaction time, this needs an interleaving of about 3~6 steps delay between subsequent, sequential viewings of the same area, if all these viewings are decided with full knowledge of this area. The higher the interleaving, the higher the load on this working memory, but the less multi-viewings without intermediate deciding have to be done of the same area, as you can't handle more areas than this interleaving factor at the same time.
A nice aspect of this fuzzy nature of associations is that you can directly combine fuzzy associations from two such abstract concepts you can synthesize. Don't refine those concepts too much though. Compare e.g. the visual impressions from one historic city center with those of another. Don't try to list each and compare them one-by-one, try to get a fuzzy state of non-individually-enumerated-at-any-point visual impressions from one city center, place it to the side (you can imagine it on a side in a virtual space with rough directions relative to your brain, but don't try to relate it to the physical world, or you snap out of the coherence and possibly loose part of the memories), and then gather the same for the other city center on the other side. Maybe switch between them a few times, like 2 or 3 times each, and then just dissolve the seperation, e.g., drop the association of which side the concept was on, and just all the other mental-space location information. Just consider it no longer important, don't think about it in the moment. Prepare how to drop one of like 4 or 6 or so low-complexity semi-abstract thoughts (there should not be a linguistic expression accurately describing it that is shorter than 7 syllables, this counts for each though separately), before you do the fusion. If you then run through the things you get if you brainstorm small linguistic expressions (like maximum 5 syllables, preferably fewer) or visual things (that are drawable to recognition in under 30 straight lines of finite length, to the visual recognition skill common in Pictionary), you get what both of these city centers have in common, with much of the sampling done on the combined probability distribution this essentially is. The reduction in noise/errors is related to what a quantum computer does, but the limits are sadly much lower.
Be careful, you might like to use such to get rid of (some) emotions, and that can hit some feelings like hunger/thirst without trying to. It usually takes years to get a good handle on those after you loose them.
Manipulation of these lower-level/monolithic though processes can be done by creating a self-feedback one that is trained to tell you as a one-dimensional, non-quantisized "feeling" (you probe it similar to how you consciously probe a specific bodily sensation, but by asking for an abstract concept (naming it creates too much overhead, as you don't need to directly refer to it from linguistic communication) instead of a region of your body. Like how you can feel how dry your eyes are if they are dry, with less quantisation than what you'd use if you try to put it in words, and with less fudging than if you try to put it in numbers (even it those have decimals).
Although, for any even moderately complex problem, abstractions or chunks of some kind are necessary, so proficiency in recognising, using and creating them is more important than holding one or two more, being able to hold more like help - especially in managing them. Perhaps help a lot, and the development of some abstractions may actually be impossible without greater working memory.
Or when an experiment's results have been challenged or disregarded yet people continue to recall the first experiment's results. For example, the Stanford prison psychology study.
However, yes, poorly constructed headlines meant to attract a click rather than true information is still bad. Though that might be a fault of the collective being more interested in snipping headlines without reading the articles behind it.