The 2012 Turkey Trot

The Turkey Trot is one of two 5K runs that I've been running every year, so of course I have to get excited for it.  I was pumped up; I was like, C'mon, let me out there, I'm gonna go crazy on the course.  Well, that was until the 15 minutes before the race started, because then I started wondering why I was excited to push myself like I did in my cross country days and go through ridiculous amounts of pain and suffering to run only as fast as other people were running for fun...  I started to remember that fact that pounded itself into my legs and my mind every race when I used to run cross country: running isn't actually fun.

On Working Memory and Multitasking

Have you ever heard of limits like this?  Or things like this?  I've always wondered the value of searching for limits like that.  Take that first article, for example.  They say you can't remember 4 things at once, unless you use tricks.  Well if you're talking about something like a game, and saying that, without using some special input device, you can only do so much, then all right.  But when you're talking about the human mind and it's capacity to learn and remember, why would you consider a limit like that??  It's like saying, "If you memorize things inefficiently, then your limit is 4 things."  Well maybe, but why would you want to memorize things inefficiently?  You're saying I can only remember 4 groups of objects.  If I think of an individual object as it's own group, then I should only be able to remember 4 objects, but maybe if I remember objects in groups of 10, then I can remember 40, or groups of 100 for 400 total... something like that, right?  So where's the limit?

I feel the same about multitasking.  Maybe you can only focus on one thing at a time, or maybe only two things.  That may be so, but how do you view your "things"?  How many beats am I keeping when I play this?  (I can do the first half of the song with no misses pretty consistently now.)

It's 4 beats, right?  There's the quarter note, the eighth note, the 16th notes, and one more beat pattern.  But then I've had enough practice with things like that, so the quarter note and eighth note beats basically just feel like one rhythm to me.  So that's three beats, I guess?  But then, after practicing that song enough, I can see the whole left hand rhythm as a single beat.  So, two beats?  That's how I see it when I play it, but maybe if I was a bit better at it, I could hear the sync between the left and right hand parts and play both beats as one completely.  So, am I multitasking?  Am I not surpassing any limits because I'm seeing things that could be considered separate tasks as one?

See, I really believe that much of it depends on how you view things.  In many cases, there's a normal classification for tasks.  Like, you probably wouldn't say someone playing DDR is doing 4 tasks at once, even though there's 4 arrows.  It's just one game.  And someone playing Beatmania might be hitting 7 keys and the scratch, but you wouldn't call that multitasking between 8 things.  But then there is the option to play both sides on Beatmania.  Now that, that sounds like multitasking, right?  Well, I'm not so sure.  If you learned the game in that mode, you'd probably just consider it one game.  One task.  Now, if you learned the game in the normal mode, then you'd probably have your memory of playing the normal mode, and it'd feel a lot more like doing two things at once.  But, with enough practice, you could put them together.

Then there's another big question I have.  Who do they test in these kinds of studies, and how much practice do they get on the tests?  I don't think participants get to practice the tests beforehand, and I doubt that the people chosen are the best multitaskers out there.  Maybe that's good for knowing the average, but I wouldn't make any statement about a limit from a study like that.  I mean, imagine if someone randomly selected a thousand people to play DDR, and it just so happened that none of them were extremely experienced at the game.  It'll look like the hardest songs in the game are impossible to beat, for any number of reasons.  The people playing couldn't move their legs fast enough.  They couldn't process the information fast enough.  There were times when there were 8+ notes on the screen at once, and there's no way to remember that much information in working memory.  Well, maybe, but you improve on things like that with practice.  Which leads to another question: can you improve your working memory with training?  Can you improve your multitasking with practice?  I like to believe so.  I have nothing to mention on working memory specifically, but I have plenty of what you might call "multitasking training."  And, I feel like this form of multitasking is something that's gotten easier for me with practice.