Microsoft Announces New Human OS For Your Brain

February 24, 2009 · 4 comments

comp-brainHave you ever noticed that you can read while your mind is wandering off, thinking about something else? This can be frustrating when you need to focus on what you’re reading, but I say this is an impressive mental feat.

Just now I found myself reading a book while simultaneously thinking about my web design business. Granted, the quality of my reading comprehension isn’t great because I’m not completely focused on it, but it got me thinking – how many different layers of consciousness do we have? I did a little experiment to find out. I tried reading, planning a web design project, and “listening” to a song in my head. That’s tough. Go ahead, try it.

It’s easier if you use different sensory inputs for each – especially if one is visual or auditory. For example, try listening to a lecture, reading, and imagining a song in your head. It can be done, but again, the quality of each experience is less due to the divided attention because our attention is limited to one or two layers of consciousness.

Imagine if we regularly operated on ten “levels of consciousness” instead of two? It’s hard to imagine, but what if we had such a huge reservoir of attention that we really could focus on 5-10 conscious levels simultaneously? Maybe in 100 years when software-based human brains come standard… maybe when you upgrade your internal operating system to Human 4.0 one of the new features will be “up to 10 levels of consciousness! Now with 100x standard human attention!” Ha, now there’s a scary thought…

Tagged as: crazy idea

  • http://brains.parslow.net Pat Parslow

    It seems to me that the more ‘trained’ we are to perform a task the easier it is to do it subconsciously. Driving becomes subconscious, with our conscious mind brought back in to play when something is amiss (we hope!). Small talk appears to be able to take place without conscious input. Indeed, talking about even quite technical things, as long as they have been rehearsed, becomes second nature, and the pattern matching systems in your head seem to spot when something doesn’t fit the auto-pilots expectations and brings your attention to bear.
    It isn’t quite the same as being conscious of all the things at once, but it does seem to allow for quite impressive levels of ‘multi-tasking’. We may only be conscious of one thing at a time (but perhaps fool ourselves with fast time slicing) – but it seems we are able to be subconsciously aware of a lot of things, and able to spot possible threats (in terms of expectation breakers) to attract our attention.
    This is not really very surprising – we have a lot of neurons at work, and it makes sense for parallel processing to handle different inputs (semi) independently.
    To be honest, I don’t think I was particularly aware of writing this comment… I think and talk about this stuff a lot, and it has become second nature – but it is always fun when someone challenges it and causes ‘me’ to ‘think’ :-)

  • http://brains.parslow.net Pat Parslow

    It seems to me that the more ‘trained’ we are to perform a task the easier it is to do it subconsciously. Driving becomes subconscious, with our conscious mind brought back in to play when something is amiss (we hope!). Small talk appears to be able to take place without conscious input. Indeed, talking about even quite technical things, as long as they have been rehearsed, becomes second nature, and the pattern matching systems in your head seem to spot when something doesn’t fit the auto-pilots expectations and brings your attention to bear.
    It isn’t quite the same as being conscious of all the things at once, but it does seem to allow for quite impressive levels of ‘multi-tasking’. We may only be conscious of one thing at a time (but perhaps fool ourselves with fast time slicing) – but it seems we are able to be subconsciously aware of a lot of things, and able to spot possible threats (in terms of expectation breakers) to attract our attention.
    This is not really very surprising – we have a lot of neurons at work, and it makes sense for parallel processing to handle different inputs (semi) independently.
    To be honest, I don’t think I was particularly aware of writing this comment… I think and talk about this stuff a lot, and it has become second nature – but it is always fun when someone challenges it and causes ‘me’ to ‘think’ :-)

  • http://drewskwarcan.com Drew

    Pat, thanks for the excellent comment. You make several good points. I agree that multitasking is automatic when we’re performing well-trained tasks. Sometimes when driving I catch myself and realize just how little attention I’m paying. Then I get freaked out when I realize how casual I am about driving a ton of metal at 70 mph. But the brain is a wonderful thing isn’t it? And multitasking is the brains way of forcing us to expand to it’s full potential. It can’t be contained for long because it starts to wander and get creative. Thanks for taking a moment to think about… well, how we think!

  • http://drewskwarcan.com Drew

    Pat, thanks for the excellent comment. You make several good points. I agree that multitasking is automatic when we’re performing well-trained tasks. Sometimes when driving I catch myself and realize just how little attention I’m paying. Then I get freaked out when I realize how casual I am about driving a ton of metal at 70 mph. But the brain is a wonderful thing isn’t it? And multitasking is the brains way of forcing us to expand to it’s full potential. It can’t be contained for long because it starts to wander and get creative. Thanks for taking a moment to think about… well, how we think!

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