The Overflowing Brain: Information overload and the limits of working memory
tertulia-moderna.blogspot.com
tertulia-moderna.blogspot.com
> He describes studies that have found a substantial delay in the reaction time of people talking on their cell phone while driving --- or even just holding conversations with someone in the car while driving. A similar delay has not been found in these studies when the driver is doing more passive activities such as listening to the radio or an audio book; it is the need to focus on a conversation that limits the working memory's ability to effectively support driving at the same time.
When your mind is holding items in working memory, that means that it has less space to focus and execute effectively on the main task at hand.
Just writing things down gives some resolution of that task/thought so that we can fully show up for our main thing.
Working on a new notepad for jotting things down to free up working memory. The goal is to make it easy to capture things and add some organization when you want.
Curious to get feedback. https://www.stashpad.com/blog/working-memory
>Just writing things down gives some resolution of that task/thought so that we can fully show up for our main thing.
Anecdotal but there was a time in my life not too long ago where I found myself stressed out because I had so many life admin tasks to do but would also have to remember not only the task, but what I had to do, when I could do it, how far along it was. I was unable to sleep properly and day to day tasks were being affected.
It sounds so bloody simple in hindsight, but simply writing them into a kanban style app removed a lot of this stress. Every time I remembered I had to do something new I would just add it to the board. I also have issues with starting these tasks so while it's never going to be finished, at least the tasks are there and not in my brain
I ended up jotting down the tasks/dependencies in dot syntax to quickly get items recorded and out of my mind during the day, then at the end of the day updated rendered the whole depency graph to give the overview.
Here's the scripts I used
- Relieves the stress of having to remember random stuff that comes up during the day
- Allows me prioritize my worries… the “Eventually” category usually consists of lower-priority things that would have low impact if I didn’t get them done soon (or at all in some cases)
- Gives me a sense of accomplishment when I check off an item
[1] https://www.macintoshhowto.com/gtd/gtd-with-apple-reminders.... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Getting_Things_Done
For personal tasks (not work), I use a todo list that emphasizes not having the task in view if I've decided it's not a candidate to do that day. (Such as by using the Start Date feature of some tools.)
I also try to cull the candidate tasks for the next day on the night before, bumping tasks so that I won't see them and have to consider them the next morning, wasting fresh brain.
I'm good at multi-tasking, but there's noticeable costs to that, so I try not to do it unnecessarily.
Unfortunately, we lack the tools to quell the information overload and focus on the most impactful items in the OODA loop. We also often lack data and even the right vocabulary/taxonomy to make statistical conclusions about how much is too much.
Otherwise it's too hard.
Now I’m thinking maybe the ideal is to have at least two types of notes:
* The messy more ephemeral stuff you’ll probably delete later.
* The more structured and summarized stuff you’ll review from time to time and adapt to your latest understanding of it.
She's right, you can't multitask. Nobody can, really, at least without doing everything poorly. That includes her.
Had a fun moment with this just yesterday. We were driving across a road behind a line of cars stopped at a red light. The angle was such that I couldn't see the oncoming lane.
I go "Hey I can't see around these cars but you can, is anyone approaching?" and my passenger replies "No, all clear". We move forward slowly and ZOOM a car whooshes past us.
So yeah, I don't think passengers are paying attention even when they say they are.
If I'm lucky I arrive at my destination without remembering anything about the ride.
If I'm unlucky my unconscious autopilot does something stupid like taking a wrong turn or blindly following a sight to the Autobahn (but the wrong one) and I suddenly realize "I have no idea where I am" and have to fix this.
In the latter case I'm completely unable to focus on the audio book or radio any more until I'm in known terrain again.
- If I use 'Empty trash' it removes Trash entirely such that 'Go to Trash (deleted)' or 'Delete' no longer does anything until restarting the app.
- If I use 'Delete' on the Trash entry inside of itself it will crash the app.
Found this using the Apple Silicon version
I could drag up the edit box to get it bigger, but maybe you should just let is almost to the top, not completely to the top, as dragging it down interferes with the iOS notifications drag down.
Cheers!
When I was younger I was single and almost never had passengers in my car. I rarely talked on my phone (before we were forced to be hands free) but occasionally I would and I'd say overall did not find having it in my hand a particular distraction (honestly what would that have to do with anything).
Anyway, I remember when "bans" came into effect and put my phone on bluetooth. I was talking to my mom on the speakerphone in the car, and suddenly realized I'd gone through a red light, and realized I'd better hang up and drive.
Tldr, for me anyway it's being on the phone that's distracting because it, as mentioned above, gets me thinking about other stuff, and I actually find talking to the air more confusing than either phone to ear or a person in the car. Though I routinely tell my wife to stop talking when I'm driving in traffic (I don't mean this as a joke) because I find it too distracting to be involved in conversation when I need to think about driving. Obviously I'm a shitty multitasker but I suspect this is true to some extent for most people.
If someone interrupts me and asks me to do something that I can’t attend to right then, there’s two options (assuming I want to do the thing):
- Hold it in my working memory until I’m able to fully context switch or put mental effort into transferring it into long-term memory
- Immediately note it down, then make no further effort to remember it
The same applies for random ideas that might pop into my head that are unrelated to the task at hand.
This is somehow related to the fact that e.g. a programmer can spend 30-60 minutes wandering through code and docs before the right amount of context is built in their head, so that a seemingly simple change can be done with confidence.
> Program tracing, or mentally simulating a program on concrete inputs, is an important part of general program comprehension. Programs involve many kinds of virtual state that must be held in memory, such as variable/value pairs and a call stack. In this work, we examine the influence of short-term working memory (WM) on a person's ability to remember program state during tracing. [...]
>Program tracing, or mentally simulating a program on concrete inputs, is an important part of general program comprehension. Programs involve many kinds of virtual state that must be held in memory, such as variable/value pairs and a call stack. In this work, we examine the influence of short-term working memory (WM) on a person's ability to remember program state during tracing. We first confirm that previous findings in cognitive psychology transfer to the programming domain: people can keep about 7 variable/value pairs in WM, and people will accidentally swap associations between variables due to WM load. We use a restricted focus viewing interface to further analyze the strategies people use to trace through programs, and the relationship of tracing strategy to WM. Given a straight-line program, we find half of our participants traced a program from the top-down line-by-line (linearly), and the other half start at the bottom and trace upward based on data dependencies (on-demand). Participants with an on-demand strategy made more WM errors while tracing straight-line code than with a linear strategy, but the two strategies contained an equal number of WM errors when tracing code with functions. We conclude with the implications of these findings for the design of programming tools: first, programs should be analyzed to identify and refactor human-memory-intensive sections of code. Second, programming environments should interactively visualize variable metadata to reduce WM load in accordance with a person's tracing strategy. Third, tools for program comprehension should enable externalizing program state while tracing.
I suspect your experimental results might be slightly weakened by the way mechanical Turkers will always do the easiest thing possible to get paid (I've had studies broken by this too). That probably explains this: In fact, we found the preponderance of linear traces somewhat bewildering — participants appeared to just click through each function, remembering what they could and then synthesizing the information into an answer at the end.
For each increase in cyclomatic complexity, you need to keep one additional bit of state in your head.
Usually you can ignore high level state bits when you are down low, so cyclomatic complexity isn't a one-to-one mapping to working memory, but one notes that the old shorthand of "working memory is 7 +/- 2" is close to the "cyclomatic complexity > 10 is too hard" rule.
if (someEdgeCase) {
return SpecialValue;
const normalCase = a + b ...
It allows you to drop a case from working memory as early as possible. I believe this would be a +1 in cyclomatic complexity, but it shouldn't be. Cyclomatic complexity is not the whole story (nor do I think it tries to be).
There have been, admittedly, no studies on specific digital tools and their impact on the working memory, though at the same time, even the benefit of actively training working memory is inconclusive at best[0].
In general, I am doubtful over any statement that general use of modern technology could lead to a short-term memory impairement.
Plato (400 BC)
There’s always tension in Plato as to what was his opinion and what was Socrates’. Furthermore many characters in his dialogues are explicitly meant to be wrong in their opinions. Just reading a Plato quote as evidence of Plato’s actual opinion is a route to confusion.
This idea as communicated in Phaedrus, by Socrates, was certainly Socrates’ opinion: Socrates never wrote anything down.
Digital tools mostly seem help me with long-term memory and doesn't do a thing for the working memory exercise.
I can look up a phone number or have a calendar on what I'm doing next Wednesday, but the working memory of "what am I doing right now" hasn't gone digital yet. Navigation has vaguely the same, because it's more long form memory rather than the hot list in my brain (maybe "what gear am I in?" on a manual car? doubtful).
Of all the day to day activities I do, cooking is one of those things where I've really felt like my working memory is working hard & despite quite a few tools like timers or automatic cookers, the way the kitchen is organized with closed drawers is a most-recent working memory exercise like those face-down card games.
If anything digital tools greatly improve my memory by allowing me to offload things.
I play video games, I play instruments, I write programs, and I have to imagine that all of it helps, but I haven't tried "brain training" or used tools marketed as improving working memory. I'm not even really sure what's on offer in that space, so if you've found some I'm curious to know about them.
I can’t think of any better test than trial by fire. Kind of like learning languages. Study all you want, theory won’t save you when it comes to practical application. :)
When it comes to programming, becoming familiar with your tools and learning to offload stuff to paper far exceeds anything else. If you know something well, you need less working memory to do it.
Jim Keller raised this point in one of his Lex Fridman interviews. They're some of the more worthwhile ones to listen to IMO.
The diagnosis of Marilu Henner’s recall ability as Hyperthymesia (per her Wikipedia article) seems to confirm this is a mutation compared to typical memory formation.
That aside, long term memory is indeed distinct from working memory. Long term memory is formed from your working memory, but the memories are stored separately.
I feel like he sustains the information processing throughput that happens when an olympic gymnast or diver is mid-air, but for minutes at a time with remarkable ability to pocket information for later recall.
Edit: Looks like he just dropped his first wordplay Wednesday in a while. Two and a half hours of freestyling based on chat recommendations.
I barely know the streets I take to my office, 6 months in (and I'm not just talking about their actual names). I use nav every time. My father thought I was losing my mind.
But at the same time I can remember basically every small block of code in a large saas I single handedly built a few years ago, even today.
Not exactly the case when you have ADHD.
No bullshit content, no doomscrolling, no ads, no notifications.
Trying to replace that with something useful here at the moment. Much more difficult than it looks.
Advertising wouldn't exist if we actually had control over what we pay attention to and memorize.
I get your point that a lot of knowledge acquisition that goes into short and long term memory has more to do with the environment (passive learning) and less to do with intentional learning.
Blocking the input entirely will always work (using headphones, not reading certain things).
When I code, I always work on one thing for 60 - 90 minutes, nothing else so all working memory is dedicated to task at hand.
When I read (fiction or technical) or watch a lecture on YouTube, this is usually a dedicated 15 - 60 minute session. Once again, all working memory is dedicated to task at hand.
Working memory might be a problem for people who multitask, but I don't like to do that.
Immediately I have questions like: 1. Do I get this in one call or several? If former, will this cause issues with the cache? If latter, will it decrease performance? 2. At what level do I want to do the filtering, at the query or higher level? 3. How will this affect existing calls, etc?
Breaking this down into questions is called "chunking" - grouping multi-parameter unknowns until they are simple. The problem is that if you can only keep 5 things in mind, you may outright miss questions to ask, or, at the very least, you will spend more time on a task than a person with a higher WM.
Oh, and talkers interrupting each other, everytime.
Then, I head do the teletext service (which is "alive", amazingly) and I have the same content in four or five lines.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teletext
What we need it's some service over web/gemini/gopher which news resumed down to the core. Yes, http://text.npr.org it's good for Americans, and http://lite.cnn.io used to work. But, instead of an endless wall, something composed of two or three paragraphs.
On average each sentence is over 30 words. Gasp Most and-splices, commas, semicolons don't add much value. At least the word lengths aren't too egregious.
Also, not all pieces are the same - 7 numbers are easier to memorize than 7 colors for most people for example.
Working memory is the fluid intelligence part intelligence covered on IQ test, which covers 2 parts: fluid intelligence(working memory) and crystallized intelligence (stuff you memorized). Unlike what the article states, no one has found a proven way to improve working memory in a general sense in adulthood. This would be the panacea if someone did.
edit: I did get through the end of the article after all and at the end of the day it really does say nothing at all. The author just tried to tie a bunch of old concepts together.
I was under the impression that dual n-back training was a way to achieve this, although https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N-back describes it as somewhere between unproven and small impact. It's a pity that it hasn't been studied more extensively; as you note, if we had a reliable way of increasing general working memory it would have a significant impact.
There is a good desktop trainer (/game) here: https://brainworkshop.sourceforge.net/
In short, my understanding is that we can't improve it, but that could be very much due to the lack of actual dedicated research. If we could, it would essentially be a super power.
There are people who can't memorize their authenticator codes in one piece, let alone focus when someone is describing a method signature at work. This would be a big quality-of-life change for those people. This also ties in with following conversations and tying words together well, which most people don't think about.
I want so, so bad for DNB (etc.) to make me smarter, but the meta-analysis seems to point to practicing DNB makes you better at... DNB.
Re the earlier parent's:
> Also, not all pieces are the same - 7 numbers are easier to memorize than 7 colors for most people for example.
That's because you can turn a sequence of numbers into a sequence of compound numbers. In NANPA, the phone company has taught many of us to turn a 10 digit number into an four parts: the three digit area code, the three digit exchange prefix, and two two-digit halves of the subscriber number.
Ex: Jenny's phone number, +12128675309, becomes area code 212 (New York), exchange eight-six-seven (UNion 7?), five-three, oh-nine. Sometimes, as in the case of Jenny, it makes more sense rhythmically to read out the individual components of the last four digits without grouping them.
And given my salary and savings I cannot afford going to the countries where this problem is studied and probably can be fixed. Darn.
Sorry, I had to. But here's an actual real suggestion that may or may not be any better. It's a working memory trainer that I feel has slightly helped improve my own working memory called Brain Workshop. Obviously proper diagnosis and medical treatment would be preferred.
https://brainworkshop.sourceforge.net/
Edit: one other thing that may legitimately be the issue, worth checking even if unlikely: get a Carbon Monoxide detector.