What makes a Genius?

After last post's New York experience, I will add a new one about one of the other hubs of multitasking frenzy, London. What do you do when an Apple laptop breaks down on a trip abroad? You go to one of their Genius Bars! Or, the story of how we spend half a day in an Apple Store.

Let me try to explain this without too much technical detail. The problem with the laptop was that it didn't boot, and this problem was caused by repeated attempts to power it up on an empty battery. The attempts made by our Tech gave some interesting insights in how these people are trained. What he basically did was attempt a series of solution procedures that he selected on the basis of association with the problem. Our two "symptoms": computer did start up, but got stuck in the process, and something wrong with power. In this case, the power was a red herring: the real problem was the computer not booting. But before acting on either symptom the first procedure the Tech did was to hook up the computer to a standard hardware test. This showed up no problems with power nor hard disk, but did show up a problem with some sensor: the second red herring. This is something that sometimes happens in the medical profession as well: you go to the doctor with a problem, they do a test, and you end up with two problems.

As a result, the Tech went backstage to try and push all the sensors back in place. An hour later he was back from doing this, with no result. No surprise in retrospect, because the sensor couldn't possibly have been the problem. He then started going through a whole bunch of procedures related to power, up to verifying that our battery was past its expected lifetime (which we already knew), and verifying that the power adapter was indeed working fine.

In the end he did not solve the problem, but I walked away with a pretty good idea what was wrong and fixed it when we returned home.

The point here is not to criticize the Tech. He was obviously not a genius in the normal use of the word, but he was trying his best, but probably on the basis of the wrong strategy prompted by the wrong training. His approach, to reiterate, was to throw solution procedures onto the problem based on associations with the symptoms. What he should have done is try to reason out what possible causes there are of a computer not booting. Defective hard disk? No. Will the computer boot from another source? Yes. Then there must be something wrong with the OS: it needs to be fixed or reinstalled.

So why is this story important for multitasking? In order to be a good multitasking, your skills have to be flexible. When I am cooking from a cookbook, I have to pay close attention to the order of the steps and the ingredients I need to gather. I cannot really multitask very well while cooking from a recipe. But when I am not cooking from a recipe, I can happily watch the news, chat with people and do other things. So why is that? When I am not working from a recipe, the representation of what I need to do is flexible, and I can immediately respond to what I see happening in the kitchen with the right action. But when I cook from a recipe, I have to repeatedly consult the recipe and check what step I am in and what to do next. In the recipe case, I have to maintain a mental representation of the state of the food, and can therefore not afford distraction, but if I cook without recipe the world is my mental state.

Training in terms of learning procedures is very common. I carried out some studies with airline pilots who need to program their onboard computer, and are also trained in doing this by memorizing procedures. The airplane computer is a masterpiece of user unfriendliness, so some pilots despair in using the thing, and training on it is sometimes compared to "drinking from a firehose". The main reason why pilots have so much trouble is that they do not understand what they are doing. They are just carrying out procedures (did someone say "Chinese Room"?).

Our lives are full of procedures: look at any electronics manual, medical practice, pilot training, probably Apple Genius training, etc. But opaque procedures turn us into automatons, and blunt our capacity for creative problem solving. And that while it is not so hard to change things. In our pilot example, just adding an explanation of what each step did increased performance on the task tremendously, and also allowed subjects in the experiment to come up with new procedures for problems they were not trained on.

So what makes a true Genius? If I only knew... But improving training and instruction may be a way to make us all a bit smarter. And better multitaskers too.

Reading a book is also multitasking

Reading a book is often considered as the epitome of monotasking. Indeed, it is the activity that is considered by some as the endangered species in the multitasking world. Well, bad news for you nostalgics: reading a book is also multitasking.

Why? This only became apparent to me in the hub of human multitasking, the New York City Subway. People do a lot of reading on the subway, but in New York the majority uses iPads and other eReaders. When Steffi and I were riding the subway, I noticed a men who exhibited some odd behavior while perusing his iPad. His thumb seemed to have a strange twitch, almost a tremor, and hovered over a corner of his iPad going back and forth. Upon closer inspection it became clear to me that the man was not suffering from a strange neurological disorder, but was caught up in a twist of multitasking conflict. He was reading a book on his iPad, and his thumb was above the corner that turns the page.

Now, think about how you read books (at least it is how I read books). If your gaze approaches the end of the page, say the last few lines before the end, you already lift up the corner of the page in order to be able to turn it right at the moment you read the last word. If you wait with picking up the page until you have read the last word you will lose time and might even disturb the flow of whatever you are reading. So, what you are in fact doing is engage in multitasking. Picking up the page before reading the end of the page is not part of the standard reading process. It is not as if you always pick up the page, say, exactly three lines before the end. Instead there is a parallel monitoring process that itches to pick up the page as you get closer to the end. You don't do it with a newspaper, and when you read a text online you do something different (scrolling).

But now enter the iBook reader on the iPad. It looks very much like a real book, including a stack of pages below the current page you are reading. If you touch the corner of a page, it will go to the next. It is almost like a book, but not exactly. If you act exactly as you would act with a real book, you turn the page prematurely (happens to me all the time).

Now, our poor multitasker was probably halfway learning to use the iBook reader, and the tremor in his hand was produced by the normal book-reading process willing him to touch the corner, and the new iBook reader override trying to convince him not to. Because he was so engaged in the reading but maybe also monitoring the subway ride, he probably didn't even notice it himself.

This small example demonstrates that many of our behaviors are composed of several smaller task that we execute in parallel. When we read a text we have a text-processing process, but also a process that makes sure our eyes are fed words at the right pace. And even though text-processing is usually the same, the word-feeding process may differ depending on the circumstances.

The benefits of multitasking

The discussion around multitasking usually revolves around the question whether multitasking is bad, with the most extreme position that people just cannot multitask. There are, however, several studies that show that multitasking can sometimes improve your performance. In other words, your performance on task A is better when you combine it with a task B than when you do task A alone!

Doodling for concentration

One example is a study that shows that doodling during meetings improves your recall of what has been said during the meeting. Apparently, it is easier to keep concentrated on boring stuff if you do something, well, boring on the side. For this reason I tell my students that making notes during class is a good idea, even if they never look at those notes again (and I pray that my lectures are not as boring as the doodle meetings). However, in such practical studies it is hard to investigate in detail what is going on.

Attentional Blink

To drill down to the details we did a more controlled laboratory experiment that shows the benefits of multitasking in some situations. The experimental paradigm is called Attentional Blink. In these experiments, subjects see a rapid stream of character, most of which are digits, but up to two characters are letters. Subjects are asked to identify and report the letters, and ignore the digits. You can try out the task yourself here.

In a normal attentional blink trial there are two letters in the stream. Due to the speed of presentation, accuracy is never at 100%, but often around 90%. However, the interesting result in an Attentional Blink experiment is that if the two letters are between 200 and 500 ms apart, the second letter often missed much more often. So while correctness on the first letter may be 90%, it is typically only 50% for the second. Interestingly enough, if either the letters are much closer (say, 100 ms), or much further apart, the second letter is reported correctly as often as the first letter (again, around 90%).

The Attentional Blink effect is interesting itself, and many researchers have been thinking about explanations and models. Additional experimentation showed that in some cases people may improve their performance on the task if you tell them not to try to hard, if they hear music in the background, if there is a starfield in the background, etc. So why is that?

To get a better grasp on this issue, some colleagues and I did a new experiment in which we gave people a second task next to just watching for letters. So we added another task to a task that was in itself already quite hard! The additional task was to track a gray dot that circled around the characters that were presented in the center of the screen. In some trials this gray dot momentarily turned red, and subjects were asked to report this in addition to the letters they saw.

And indeed, the results show that people show less "blink" if they are given the extra task.

Why is multitasking sometimes better?
The advantage of a laboratory task is that we can study what happens in detail. In order to increase our understanding, we built a computer model that mimics human behavior on the task. This model could explain why the Blink happens in the first place: once you have seen the first letter, you try to consolidate this in your memory, and you temporarily block additional letters from cluttering your memory process. In other words: you are too focused on the first letter and therefore miss the second.
If we now add a secondary task, we are slightly disrupting this focus. As a consequence, you will not try to remember the first letter too hard, and therefore also process and remember the second.

Back to the real world

Are you still with me reader? The bottom line is that sometimes we do better on tasks if we are a little distracted by a secondary task. Sometimes our automated processes do a better job than when we focus too much. This can be an issue in sport, for example. If an athlete doesn't trust his or her training, then too much thinking can ruin the effort. Another example: I have a hard time swallowing pills. My trick is to distract myself a bit while trying to swallow, for example by reading the package. I before I know it the pills are gone!