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Comment by ssl-3 | Hacker News Reader

Can the combination of mind and body only process reactive tasks serially, or can it process them with some amount of parallelism?

And is 100ms (I struggled to get below 180ms, myself) only the time needed to process, or does that include IO latency?

If it includes IO latency, then is there a buffer?

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According to psychology research on human perception there is indeed something that you could call buffered IO in the human brain.

It's used in theories to explain why you can hear your name in a short sentence in a crowded room and then know what the sentence is. Including one or two words before your name. While if your name wasn't said, no attention is diverted to that sound and the "buffer" contents get dropped without retrieving the information.

Yes, and there's different buffers with different capacity for different types of perception according to these theories. Look up Baddeley & Hitch for details. I would guess there are similar buffers for other senses that didn't make it in the lectures in college.

This might be the worst possible way to measure the net throughput of conscious decision making I've ever seen. A wildly ecologically invalid, serialized discrimination task.

Now take someone navigating a social situation with three simultaneous participants, actively listening, coordinating body language, interjecting, responding to questions... and you have a human being operating at a "bitrate" of information that is so many orders of magnitude removed from this bullshit psychometry task as to prompt the question: "what the actual are they talking about".

Using a computer analogy to try to understand the brain functions is ok as long as we remember that the brain is not actually one of them. There have been different technological analogies throughout history including hydraulic systems, telegraphic and telephonic lines, all of them might seem comical today but they were the best explanation at the time, same will be in the future with ours, comparing something like the brain (or rather the whole living being) to a mathematical processing device is more than short sighted. We try to explain everything from the engineering point of view by isolating things but that’s not how life or the universe works.

> or can it process them with some amount of parallelism

I guess someone with two boxes handy could set them up next to each other and run two copies of this test to see if their reaction time holds up or if it lengthens?

EDIT: mine suffers greatly on dual wield: 225 -> 320 ms

I'll have a good think about whether we can process things in parallel or only in series the next time I decide to walk and chew gum while bouncing a ball, not tripping over things, and staying out of traffic.

none of those activities need involve conscious decisions, however

Having a think is not a conscious activity?

that, yes, sorry.

I meant walking, chewing gum, dribbling a basketball, and avoiding traffic.

Depends on expertise. Consider a toddler learning to walk, while eating a snack, carrying a toy and avoiding the cat.

Driving stick is a good example, as shifting gears requires conscious thought at first and becomes mostly automated with experience.

Mh, balance that ball on your finger while keeping it in spin or dribble it between your legs while spinning your body around and see how many conscious decisions you make while not stepping into canine feces.

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