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Awhile back (Gearing Up post) I wrote that I was going to do a major rewrite of Blue Roses. Then last weekend I ran into Andrew Wardenaar at JAW. He loves Blue Roses, and can't imagine why I'd want to rewrite it. He's right, of course. There's nothing wrong with the play. I have a new idea about the characters. So what I should be doing is writing a NEW PLAY. A new play with the same characters, a companion piece. [smack to the forehead].
When I wrote the Gearing Up post, I said I was going to begin by using Save the Cat, and I am. Tomorrow. This is my public commitment to begin tomorrow. Even though I am still struggling with my brain, I can begin by re-reading Save the Cat, and making notes, making note cards. The beautiful thing is: I already have my characters! As a companion piece the play can be a prequel, a sequel, or even set at the same time, in a different place. Or even the same place. Oh, this is going to be fun.
What are you doing to exercise your creativity right now? Please share.

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By Dario Salvucci

If the mind is a society, as philosopher-scientist Marvin Minsky has argued, then multitasking has become its persona non grata.

In polite company, mere mention of “multitasking” can evoke a disparaging frown and a wagging finger. We shouldn’t multitask, they say – our brains can’t handle multiple tasks, and multitasking drains us of cognitive resources and makes us unable to focus on the critical tasks around us. Multitasking makes us, in a word, stupid.

Unfortunately, this view of multitasking is misguided and undermines a deeper understanding of multitasking’s role in our daily lives and the challenges that it presents.

The latest scientific work suggests that our brains are indeed built to efficiently process multiple tasks. According to our own theory of multitasking called threaded cognition, our brains rapidly interleave small cognitive steps for different tasks – so rapidly (up to 20 times per second) that, for many everyday situations, the resulting task behaviors look simultaneous. (Computers similarly interleave small steps of processing to achieve multitasking between applications, like displaying a new web page while a video plays in the background.) In fact, under certain conditions, people can even exhibit almost perfect time-sharing – doing two tasks concurrently with little to no performance degradation for either task.

The brain’s ability to multitask is readily apparent when watching a short-order cook, a symphony conductor, or a stay-at-home mom in action. But our brains also multitask in much subtler ways: listening to others while forming our own thoughts, walking around town while avoiding obstacles and window-shopping, thinking about the day while washing dishes, singing while showering, and so on.

Multitasking is not only pervasive in our daily activities, it actually enables activities that would otherwise be impossible with a monotasking brain. For example, a driver must steer the vehicle, keep track of nearby vehicles, make decisions about when to turn or change lanes, and plan the best route given current traffic patterns. Driving is only possible because our brains can efficiently interleave these tasks. (Imagine the futility of only being able to steer, or plan a route.)

So how has multitasking earned such a negative reputation? In large part, this reputation stems from unrealistic expectations. The brain’s multitasking abilities – like all our abilities – come with limitations: when performing one task, the addition of another task generally interferes with the first task. For many everyday tasks, the interference is negligible or unimportant: your singing may affect your showering, or thinking about your day may affect your dish-washing, but likely not so much that you notice or care.

Other tasks, though, require every ounce of attention and can push past the limits of our multitasking abilities. In driving, the essential subtasks are demanding enough; additional subtasks – texting, dialing, even talking on a phone – increase these demands, and when controlling a 3000-pound vehicle at 65 miles per hour, even these minimal additional demands may lead to unacceptable risks.

Still other tasks do not have safety implications per se, yet most would consider them important enough that multitasking in those contexts is undesirable. A student in class is already multitasking in listening to the teacher, processing ideas, and taking notes. If this student is checking Facebook at the same time, this extra subtask drains mental effort away from the more critical subtasks and dilutes the learning experience.

The problem with multitasking thus lies not in our brain’s inability to multitask efficiently, but in our own priorities and decision-making. When we choose to multitask, we are deciding – consciously or not –

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By Jeremy Taylor

On Friday, 20th August, I joined the panel for a Great Debate entitled “Are We Masters Of Our Own Destiny?” at the University of Newcastle, organized as part of the Green Phoenix Festival, 2010. My fellow panelists were science writer Rita Carter, most famous for her books on neuroscience: The Brain Book and Mapping The Mind, and local philosopher David Large. The debate was chaired by Caspar Hewett. As we suspected, this pitted two biology-oriented commentators against a more conventional philosopher who answered the question in the affirmative because he believed we can control our own destiny in the sense that Joyce could write his masterpiece Ulysses and Wittgenstein formulate his idiosyncratic theories. The nature of Joyce-ness, Ulysses-ness, Wittgenstein-ness, and the product of the mind and skill of great artists – Rembrandt-ness if you like – transcended “mere” functional explanations of what the mind is. He took umbrage with psychology which, he claimed, pretends its functional explanation of how the mind works is the explanation. It isn’t.

Rita Carter saw things very much from the bottom up rather than the top down. The mind is made up (literally!) by myriads of tiny, unconscious neuro-chemical events in our brains. She therefore believed free will is an illusion deeply wired into the brain as a set of mechanisms which automatically create the sense of self and agency to make it feel as though we decide what our acts will be – that we are responsible for them – rather than merely responding to stimuli.

I agreed strongly with Rita by suggesting that – like the illusion of free will – a large school of modern neuroscientists believe that our moral behaviour is produced not by moral reasoning but by input of extremely simple neurochemical data from our sense organs and receptors which is turned into moral intuitions in our brains by processes of which we are oblivious – the intuition simply pops into our heads. We then apply moral reasoning to our intuitions in a post-hoc sense in order to justify these instinctive beliefs. I agreed with one prominent such neuroscientist who claims that the conscious mind is like the mahout on an elephant. The elephant is the other 99% of what is going on in our minds – things that are unconscious and automatic. If free will and morality are the unconscious products of the way our brains work, thought a number of members of the audience, what, then, is the advantage to us of the illusion that we are in control? Carter argued that without the illusion that we are responsible for our own actions, and that we are therefore accountable for them, no society could possibly function; while I argued that the illusion of moral responsibility is a social phenomenon which evolved as a sort of social glue holding human groups together by commonly agreed norms and principles “outsiders” do not share. In that sense it is similar to the evolution of theory of mind – by which we explain other peoples’ actions by inferring to ourselves the hidden states of mind – their wants, beliefs and knowledge – that must be guiding them. If a teacher could have no inkling that he owned a state of knowledge his pupil lacked, and could not learn unless that knowledge was efficiently transferred from one brain to another, no culture could thrive and be

Robert Freedman, MD, is Professor and Chair of Psychiatry at the University of Colorado and the Editor-in-Chief of the American Journal of Psychiatry.  His new book, The Madness Within Us: Schizophrenia as a Neuronal Process, is a discussion of these two aspects of the illness.  Freedman outlines the emerging understanding of schizophrenia as a neurobiological illness.  In the excerpt below we learn about the basic brain dysfunction in schizophrenia.

The earliest observers of how people with schizophrenia seemed to react to their environment noted a peculiarity in the ability of persons with schizophrenia to appear unaware of the environment and yet overly responsive to it.  Eugen Bleuler first developed the concept of an attentional dysfunction in schizophrenia in his essay on attention in schizophrenia…

Rachel not only hears voices but she hears noises as well, noises that her family members also hear but have learned to ignore.  She hears screaming all the time, and she sometimes wanders the neighborhood to find out who is screaming.  When my colleague Merilyn Waldo suggested to her that it might be traffic, she told us that her mother had said the same thing.  There is a busy corner near the front of her house, and there are always cars stopping and then accelerating away.  My wife and I experienced the very same perceptual abnormality ourselves on the night we brought our first son home from the hospital.  We put the baby to bed and tried to sleep ourselves, but I heard screaming.  I checked on the baby, and he was asleep.  Then my wife heard it too.  We checked again.  Then we listened at the door.  The screaming must be coming from another apartment, and we wondered if we should call the police to alert them to child abuse, but we knew that no other couples with babies lived in the building.  Finally, when the traffic on the highway in front of the building stopped at 2 a.m., we understood how two very anxious, hypervigilant new parents can misinterpret the world around them.

For Rachel, the problem is not a single stressful night.  It is a lifelong problem, which she has struggled with since she was a teenager, long before the onset of her illness at 28.  She could never concentrate at school.  The least noise captured her attention.  As she put it, “My mind has to be here, it has to be there, I can’t concentrate on anything.”  Unlike a typical child with attention-deficit disorder (ADD), whose attention is rarely captured, her attention was captured by everything, from the traffic squeaking to the refrigerator cycling on and off, to the neighbor’s ongoing argument next door.  As a result, she could concentrate on very little.

Paul, on the other hand, seems to be aloof in his environment.  When he was first ill and worried about snakes, I wondered if their voices arose out of noises around him in the dormitory.  He acknowledged that the noise of the dormitory was exquisitely painful, but he could not connect it to the snakes.  Now he seems withdrawn.  When I walk out to get him in the waiting room, he seems oblivious to the people around him.  He has constructed a psychological shell around himself, a solution many patients use to shield themselves from their otherwise overwhelming environment.

The most dramatic experience of the phenomenon of seeming to ignore the environment is catatonia, a rarely seen syndrome in schizophrenia today.  The patient gradually stops responding to environmental stimuli and then eventually stops moving altogether.  In the most advanced cases, the person suddenly freezes.  If he is moved passively, then he may retain the position into which he is moved, a symptom termed “waxy flexibility.”  These patients can often be drawn back to awa

• Aloo Gobi Recipe – This is the one I used for last night's dinner. Tasty tasty tasty.
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• Scientists Figure out the Cause of Brain Farts – "A “brain fart” is a term for an inexplicably stupid error in a straightforward task made by someone with abundant skill and experience. Everyone is prone to them. Neuroscientists call these episodes “maladaptive brain activity changes.”
• The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.: How the States Got Their Shapes by Mark Stein – "How the States Got Their Shapes is one of the rare books that does exactly what it promises: Stein explains all of the geographic borders of all fifty US states, each in its own chapter."
• Chasing Ray – Slow Death by Rubber Duck: The Secret Danger of Everyday Things. – "This is one scary book. Using a variety of test methods, the authors determined individual “body burdens,” or the toxic chemical load we carry."

Aniruddh D. Patel’s research focuses on how the brain processes music and language, especially what the similarities and differences between the two reveal about each other and about the brain itself. Patel has served on the Executive Committee of the Society for Music Perception and Cognition and is currently the Esther J. Burnham Senior Fellow at The Neurosciences Institute. Patel’s book, Music, Language, and the Brain, challenges the widespread belief that music and language are processed independently. This fabulous book won a Deem-Taylor Award From ASCAP and its ideas are explored in a PBS special The Music Instinct which airs tonight. Below learn about Patel’s experience with Snowball, the dancing Cockatoo.

Sometimes science takes you in strange directions. I study how human brains processes music, but last year I found myself in a living room in suburban Indiana, dancing with a sulphur-crested cockatoo named Snowball.

I had been captivated by his YouTube debut, where he seemed to really be dancing to the beat of human music.Click here to view the embedded video.

The ability to synchronize movements to a musical beat was long thought to be uniquely human, but Snowball’s dancing suggested otherwise. Fortunately I was able to collaborate with his owners and conduct a controlled study, showing that he really did sense a beat and move in time with it, even when no humans were dancing with him. Crucially, when we slowed down or sped up his favorite song (”Everybody”, by the Back Street Boys), he spontaneously adjusted his dance tempo accordingly, just as a human would.

This discovery (recently published in Current Biology) has implications for debates over the evolution of human music, and has opened my mind to the complexity of music perception by nonhuman animals.

Our work with Snowball appears in the PBS documentary “The Music Instinct“, which airs on June 24th.

"If you wanted to create an education environment that was directly opposed to what the brain was good at doing, you probably would design something like a classroom. If you wanted to create a business environment that was directly opposed to what the brain was good at doing, you probably would design something like a cubicle. And if you wanted to change things, you might have to tear down both and start over."

Kathleen Taylor is a research scientist and writer affiliated to Oxford University’s Department of Physiology, Anatomy, and Genetics, where she specialises in the human brain. In the video below (filmed by the wonderful Meet the Author) she talks about her book Brainwashing: The Science of Thought Control. She is also the author of Cruelty: Human Evil and the Human Brain, which publishes in the UK early next year.

Click here to view the embedded video.