Synesthesia

At the suggestion of Marc Eisenstadt I’ve been trying Compendium.

The tool itself seems relatively straightforward (I have used both cognitive mapping and mind map software before so this may not be a fair assessment of how a beginner would get on) - the trick I suspect is in learning a methodical approach to applying it to a specific task.

I experimented trying to map out the exchange of views in the recent “Hierarchy” exchange (1 2 3 4 5 6 7) [order may not be quite right] between Dave Rogers , Jon Husband and Euan Semple but ran out of steam partway through analysing the second post. I don’t think that is a comment about Compendium, more a facet of the difficulty of mapping this sort of writing especially when you are very rusty at that sort of thing.

This will be the problem with creating the semantic web, it’s completely conceivable to have nice well-formed RDF triples as a way of navigating information that is already structured but the vast majority of human knowledge is tied up in messy human-written text.

My gut feeling is that most of us, most of the time, don’t analyse information to the depth that is needed to make good use of a tool such as Compendium. Certainly my tendency is for a strong degree of pragmatism in my learning - I’d suggest that generally knowledge-workers dig just enough to get a sufficient gist of things for the immediate purpose - as long as I have good enough knowledge for the task in hand then why seek more precision?

The willingness to stop digging could be increased by the illusion of explanatory depth. This tendency for people to over-estimate their knowledge of a subject where there are attractive intuitive explanations was identified in 2002 by Frank Keil and Leonid Rozenblit. I’m probably doing it now of course!

The next area to try Compendium will be working the other way - assembling a set of facts or assumptions about the world and seeing if it helps extrapolate meaningful abstractions. The obvious application of this will be in strategy development.

Wiki page for evaluation notes: [wiki]Compendium[/wiki]

Technorati Tags: Knowledge_Management, Minds, Psychology

Ming links to this article about research into “Hypertasking” which suggests that although frantic multi-tasking (with the help of phones, IM, email, feeds, etc., etc., etc.) has the appearance of productivity the reality is of significantly reduced performance on the individual cognitive tasks. This is not the first study to suggest that multi-tasking makes you perform less well - for example this, this and this.

In the comments to Ming’s post there are a range of views expressed but two themes emerge:

* using the tools available today to _filter_ incoming information and tasks, allowing you to concentrate on the important things
* there is indeed a very sharp limit to the power of conscious processing to handle multiple tasks (Miller’s [bliki]SevenPlusOrMinusTwo[/bliki]) but the unconscious mind is capable of many many simultaneous activities.

From my own subjective experience I would suggest that one reason why having too many things to do “simultaneously” hits productivity is because it ignores the way the mind transfers things into unconscious processing.

The trick seems to be to concentrate on one thing sufficiently long that you build up a whole set of pathways relating to it, then “put it down” and move on to something else - the unconscious will still be working away. Do this and you will be surprised how often the answer “just appears” a few hours or days later.

Time-slicing too finely in the conscious domain seems to have the effect that no topic creates enough energy to engage the unconscious learning circuits, so I’m left relying on the distractable power of the conscious alone.

It would be interesting to explore the neuroscience of this a bit further…

From a [bliki]TheoryOfConstraints[/bliki] perspective it would appear that conscious attention is the constraint, so useful questions to consider might be:

* How do I get the most out of my conscious processing power?
* What else do I have to change to allow my conscious attention to work at its best?
* How can I find other ways of processing information (e.g. exploiting my unconscious mind)?

Technorati Tags: Constraints, Minds, Psychology