Natural Understanding

Psychologists and cognitive scientists believe that our minds are like Swiss Army Knives - they consist of an array of specialized tools that can be harnessed for various tasks. The base of the tool is called a "substrate" (i.e. the hypothesized location [1] in the brain for the function), and these substrates are used for more than one task - just like you can pound a screw into a board with a hammer if that is all you have the brain uses tools for more than one task [2]. Now take this general understanding of the brain and apply it to how we must understand objects in the physical world in order to manipulate them - it is speculated that we have an "intuitive physics" substrate in our brains [3]. This intuitive physics is one reason physics in school is so difficult - our built in predictions and feelings of how things behave, which work in the real world on the human scale, are actually *wrong*. Our physics teachers do not bother to contrast our built in expectations and how things actually work, and we often cannot move past this. But more importantly than poor teaching is this: if substrates are reused, can we expect our intuitive physics of the physical world to bleed over into our intuitive understanding of the social world?

There is some evidence for this: an interesting study looks at how people expend thought - if they fill out surveys attached to heavier clipboards they will put more thought into their responses. Just like heavy objects require more muscle power, our brains seem to be tricked into thinking that more brain power is required. This is automatic and unconscious. This is suggestive that our intuitive understanding of physics is also used in social and conceptual spaces. And even if the "physics module" of our brain is not specifically resued in a certain situation we may be able to intentionally apply this module to a specific action.

So, what other built in physics understandings do we have? Friction. Inertia. Can we game this natural understanding to guide our actions?

What do we call these terms in social/conceptual spaces? "Transaction costs", and, well, "inertia". We are all familiar with friction - if many steps are required to do something we realize that the friction is simply too great, and we don't bother to start the project or we quickly give up. Even if we know the end is valuable, the effort requried is simply too great [4]. Related to this friction is risk - if 1/20 talks are worth sitting through, then it is most likely not in my interest to go to a talk [5]. Why don't people go to free financial advice talks? They are not free - I will most likely be wasting my time. The "friction" is simply too high - where friction is the wasted energy that depletes ones efforts towards some constructive end. If we really want to improve things for ourselves we act to put friction between us and things we do not want to do, and remove friction from things we want [6]. Don't want to be fat? Don't keep junk food in your house. Block out a time for exercise.

As for inertia, we all know that once we get going we tend to keep going. We can use this intertia principle to trick ourselves into action - working on something for 5 minutes will often turn into an hour, as once we overcome the inertia of inaction continuing motion is easy(er). Or we can do a minimal and small amount of something, and before we realize it we are doing more and have a new habit. The trick here is to use our built in "intuitive" understanding of the mechanical world and apply it to other aspects of our lives, and since the actions will be underpinned with an intuitive feeling of "yeah, this is how stuff works" it will naturally flow.

Want to make better decisions? Apparently just pick up a heavy clipboard and work with it [7]. Build up or remove friction in order to guide actions. Use your knowledge of inertia to get yourself moving. Think about your natural understanding of the physical world, conform your actions to this understanding and you will likely have better results.

Notes:
[1] Sometimes this location is a specific well known area of the brain, well studied by MRI and other imaging studies, and some are not well known or thought to be dispersed over the brain.
[2] Just like we cannot afford all the tools we might like, we cannot have every tool in our brain that we might like. This invariably will lead to using a hammer where a spatula would have been better.
[3] Indeed, it is hard to imagine how we could survive if we did not have an intuitive physics module. We can play catch with ease, just like we can "learn" to count with ease - most of the things that we learn are only learnable as they are largely built in and we simply refine our use of these innate skills.
[4] Consider citations versus hyperlinks. The difference in the effort required to look up an article cited is fairly significant - think about the old fangled days when grandma had to go to the library, look up the book in the index card, hoof over to the shelf, then flip through the bound journal until she got to the article, then read the abstract to see if it is worth reading more. Now we click. An order or two magnitude in transaction costs difference is huge - Hamming's Law: Enough quantitative difference becomes qualitative difference.
[5] Unless I have more information - such as knowing the talk is going to be good via word of mouth, or seeing a well crafted abstract.
[6] An excellent book on this is Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness.
[7] We all have heard of the "speaking conch" idea, were a speaker must hold a token and gets the floor. The urban legend is that ancient tribes did this, and this ensures that a free for all doesn't derail discussion. But perhaps the conch was used not to control the audience - but instead to control the speaker; by holding the conch they would more carefully speak due to the weight. Maybe meetings would work out better if people had to hold a 5-10 lb object, and we wouldn't have to sit through mindless and inane chatter...

Focus: One hour chunk?

You may have heard that the optimal time chunk for learning is roughly one hour, after which your attention "exponentially" drops, and you may have heard even more precise figures such as 55 minutes. The lowdown is that you waste your time if you try to do one task, that requires sharp attention, for > 1 hr.

But wait. Doesn't this sound like an urban legend? What are the odds that the human attention span exactly equals the time unit we chunk the day into? One hour? Really? Sounds fake.

The origin of the hour as the unit of the day is in the deep past, but one can speculate it it comes out of the duodecimal (base 12) number system that many ancient cultures used. Why base 12? Who knows, but hold your hand palm up and then fold and touch your fingers to your palm. You now have a counting machine - use your thumb to count on your joints and finger tips. Base 12 baby. Could be useful for commerce, counting your flock, etc. Base 12 also makes division easy - dividing by 2,3,4, and 6, all easy. Look at your counting machine again - easy to "chunk" things together in 2's, 3's, 4's, 8's, etc. But I digress.

So the hour is an unit of time defined by ancient number systems; it should have little correlation to human attention span. As it is a "reasonable" unit of time we teach classes for 1 hour. Some education researchers then find that 1 hr is an optimal attention span time. This "finding" conflicts with every single person who went to public school or attended a lecture - close attention for a full hour? Huh?

Apparently the FAA limits lectures to ~ 20 minutes in U.S. flight schools, as they have found that this is the time students can highly absorb information (HT: Philip Greenspun). This is inline with my personal experience - the first 1/3 of a lecture I can really absorb, then things get harder. This 20 minute claim also makes the 1 hr "attention window" make some more sense - if you take engineering you will learn that ~ 3 time constants are sufficient to have some fast ("exponential") decaying process go down to almost nothing (~ 5%). We can have lectures that last for 1 hr, and still get something out of it (not much, but something) - if this was not true we would have dumped the 1 hr lecture long ago. Essentially we are horribly wasting time and being inefficent, not to mention making people uncomfortable and the environment unpleasant, but not to the point that it becomes so blatantly bad that schools actually have to change.

Take away message:
- It seems that 20 minute chunks are ideal for high attention absorption tasks, and by the time you get to an hour you are at the point where it makes no sense to keep going (if high attention is required).
- Schools are both being ineffective in transferring information, and making children uncomfortable, by using 1 hr chunks - if they do not use additional tactics to take "natural" attention span into account. Essentially schools are training many students that learning is a negative experience. Make sure you don't accidentally do this to yourself by using standard "clock time" units instead of "head time" units in planning learning sessions in your schedule.
- The mismatch between "head time" and "clock time" is large enough to cause us problems, but not large enough to force changes in society. Keep this in mind in planning your schedule.

Questions to think about:
- What about "flow", when does this 20 minute rule no longer apply? (hint: think about the "direction" of flow...). In flow situations, what is a good time chunk? Is this completely idiosyncratic?
- How can you use this 20 minute rule to help you learn/engage in your work and life? Can you see any areas where you are trying to push longer, and thereby both waste time (due to inefficient absorption) and implicitly "train yourself" to dislike the task? There may be low hanging fruit here for increasing your efficiency and effectiveness, as well as increase your pleasure in a task (which goes a long way to being good at it).
- 20 minutes may be "optimal" in terms of being highly receptive, but this rule will be both an average and indicates the most receptive time frame. For yourself, and your given task, you may be able to go a bit longer, or must go a bit less. But 1 hr is likely the cutoff beyond which you are completely wasting time. Experiment - 4o minutes might be good for you/your task, etc. - with times between 20 minutes and 1 hr to see what works.
- Why 20 minutes? What are the mechanisms that make 20 minutes a natural unit of time for paying attention?