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Saturday, 30 September 2006

Undivided Attention

Here again, there are two kinds of people. One, whom we could label the "Distributed Processors" are those who can simultaneously attend to multiple matters and synchronise them well so as to take each of them to their desired destination. Two, to which I've proved my allegiance and undivided support time and again, consist of those souls who can concentrate only on one activity at a time, or the "Uniprocessors". (The terms 'multi-tasking' and 'uni-tasking' might seem more appropriate, but then I would refrain from using them, to give enough base to my argument that these are activities that need different parts of the brain to light-up, in which case, the brain is a set of processors, not just one.)

Needless to say, it's the former variety that gets preference in the fast-paced present-day world. Give both of them the same amount of time, and it's almost obvious whose output appears faster. Or, so we think. The Uni-procesors can't even do the routinest of activities, take for instance peel an orange properly while watching TV. But, then, what misses our eye may be the attention to detail each variant has.

Another misconception might be that of attention span. You might be led to believe that the distributed processors have low attention spans, and so keep shifting between the tasks A, B or C. Then that would mean that uniprocessors posess higher abilities of concentration. In fact, it's because of their lack of concentration that they stick to one task.

And, what will happen when uniprocessors are asked to deliver more than they could take? In an effort to finish them on by one, they could buckle under the pressure and end-up doing all the tasks in a shoddy manner. And, what if the distributed processor is given only a single task? This is something I don't have an answer to, and beyond any statistical prediction. Certainly, there is a limit to the number of tasks a distributed processor can distribute.

When it comes to the debate over who will absorb the maximum of intricate details in a task, I would give a thumbs up to the uniprocessors. They'll go to every speck of dust on the smallest of crevices, and the least visited corners, and come up with appealing truths.

Update on Nov 4, 2008:

Please make sure you read the following before reaching any conclusions. My inference uniprocessors are more prone to distraction gets challenged in the NYT piece.

NYT
43folders
Flickr

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