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.
A large portion of that "training" is what's represented in this playlist. I did a significant amount of it simply by rapidly adjusting focus between the separate screens, remembering what must be done far enough ahead to have time to look at the other screen, make decisions and remember what needs to be done and switch back again. Tetris is obviously like this. The wii sports tennis (all versions) was kind of like this, but there wasn't much to remember, and there was a lot of time to change focus. I would plan out the shot I wanted to hit, look to the other screen as I hit it, and then I'd have enough time to see the ball coming on the other screen, plan a shot, and hit it. Of course, I'd have the advantage of knowing where I intended to hit the previous shot also. The only shots that I never became good enough to see and aim were the fast returns at the net, where one front player hit the ball and the other front player returned it immediately, into a position where the first front player should return the ball once more. In this case, if I could play the game by only looking at one screen, it would help. But, since everything else I could do by alternating my focus, I always played like that.
All of the times when there were two different games, I had to alternate my focus between the two. However, I do believe that if I were to practice enough, I could see and react to both games truly simultaneously. Stepmania 2 players was what I became the best at, but it's also one of those things where you might ask, "Well, is that really two things at once, or is it one thing?" I definitely learned it as two 4 buttons streams, but now it's almost like one 8 button game. Almost. I focus on the combined rhythm, and then read the two note patterns as separate note patterns for each hand, and then I make sure I hit the notes on each side at the appropriate time in the combined rhythm.
The last thing would be REFLEC BEAT. Since I played this recently, I can remember how it felt learning to become able to do this.
At first, I did it by looking at the notes approaching one side, reading where the next few notes would hit the line and remembering that, then looking at the other side and hitting the notes on that side by looking at them, while I did the other side from memory. As I got better, I started reading both sides at the same time. I was remembering, as any good rhythm player remembers, the next few notes to hit, just for both sides at the same time. I feel like I reached the level where I merged the two sides into one task, and it made it easier to play the game like this.
In the end I feel like the best way to learn to multitask is not by learning how to do multiple tasks at once, but by learning how to view multiple tasks as a single task. Well, maybe that means you're no longer multitasking, but who cares about technicalities like that?
Well, it's always interesting to know the limits of the human mind just to see how it overcomes them. It's also important to understand one's own limits, because that's precisely the only way anyone can overcome them (or in this case, circumvent them). But I agree with you that it's pointless to dwell on these particular limits, because no one operates like this. If we did, we'd probably be dumber than ants.
ReplyDeleteStrangely, though, I think it's common to forget that we do learn things by pattern and significance. I think every rhythm gamer has had that experience where spectators get confused at how anyone could play stuff like that. I remember I used to play parts of songs in Guitar Hero without looking at the screen at school events, and people would ask me how many times I had to play it to do that and I'd be like "Uh, once? o_O"
I mean, I'm not immune to that, either. I still freak a little when I see FL plays of 1000+ note songs on osu!, especially for songs that jump all over the map, and I catch myself making that same mistake: "How many times did that they have to play that to memorize every freaking note?" (And the answer is often less than 30 times). And that's a silly question anyway, because clearly, those people aren't actually memorizing 1000 note positions. It's probably more like 10-20 segments, and seeing/hearing a certain part cues them into each segment. For my senior piano recital a few years ago, I played Beethoven's Waldstein, Chopin's Scherzo in D-Flat Major, and Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue, all from memory. That's like 80 pages of music, at an average of maybe 150 notes per page. Include things like dynamics, tempo, voicing, and other musical effects, and that becomes like 14,000 "objects" I had to play correctly, from memory. But again, I hardly memorized 14,000 things; each song is more like 6-7 segments, and I really only needed to consciously remember a few things per song. So it's the same thing, I guess. I still think people who (HD +) FL FC Insanes are crazy, by the way.
The same musical analogy carries over to multitasking. Piano requires 2 hands playing in unison (organ brings in a pedal keyboard for 3 "tracks", and drums has all four limbs working together), sometimes with completely different rhythms (like Chopin's Fantasie Impromptu, which for the majority of the song has the RH playing in 8 to the LH's 6, or Debussy's Ballade in F Major, which at some points has the RH playing in 8 to the LH's 5, with syncopation to boot). Sometimes each hand plays two voices separately (meaning certain fingers have to be playing louder and differently than others on the same hand, even on chords). You could even break it down to the individual fingers, and say it's 10 "tasks" at once. But obviously, it's supposed to be one task. When you're learning piano, you often learn each hand separately and bring them together later. Even that, though, becomes obsolete eventually (I learn songs mostly together now, only breaking it up for particularly hard parts).
ReplyDeleteBut I'm an absolutely horrendous multitasker in the actual sense of the word, where I'm doing things I see as separate tasks. I can't even read/study and listen to music at the same time: if I pay attention to the book, I won't even remember the last song I listened to, and if I pay attention to the song, I won't remember the last 3 pages of the book. So while that article puts the limit at 2 complex jobs at once, I don't think I even meet that. I can only consciously direct my efforts at a single thing. If I start something else, the first task gets put on autopilot, for better or for worse.
Then there are things like idiot-savant syndrome, where people really do seem capable of breaking those “hard” limits. I'm curious as to whether people like Kim Peek (the guy Rain Man is based on) are just exceptionally good at grouping things and creating algorithms quickly or if they really are just storing random bits of data into some unknown nether region of their head and reading them off later like a book. I also remember reading about someone (perhaps Kim Peek, again) who read/memorized books by reading both pages simultaneously. I read that most people have a "priority filter:" the brain actually does remember every little piece of data it processes, but chooses to ignore insignificant details and instead focuses on building pathways for the important stuff. People with photographic memory are supposedly missing that filter, so the brain ends up treating all data with equal importance like computer-based data storage, and it becomes trivial to retrieve any given piece of data. Granted, eidetic memory is kind of a sketchy topic and a lot of people fake it for publicity, but there are probably people with it to some extent. But there are also probably significant drawbacks to it, which explains why the brain has this seemingly self-imposed limitation (the same way muscles are normally unable to work in 100% sync, preventing us from hurting ourselves with our own strength). So maybe those limitations in those studies have nothing to do with the brain’s capacity, and more to do with safety checks? I don’t know, I’m just speculating.
I don’t know where I’m going with this comment anymore. That seems to be something I do often lately.