Just a random post today about some ideas I have been simmering over for a few days.  I’m working on another post about a recent Simpsons episode I watched, but that will come this weekend.  For now, I have a random screed to share with you that results from those few days of simmering.

The first is a fascinating story about why overheard phone calls are so annoying.  Slashdot summarized the story, and Reuters had a good story about the journal article.  Basically, the idea is that overheard phone calls are so distracting because we only hear one side of the conversation, and it requires more of our concentration to process the conversation, even if we do not want to.  One great quote form the Reuter’s story:

“We have less control to move away our attention from half a conversation (or halfalogue) than when listening to a dialogue,” said Lauren Emberson, a co-author of the study that will be published in the journal Psychological Science.

I love the word halfalogue.  I’m going to have to use that sometime in everyday conversation because it’s such a descriptive portmanteau.  I’m not sure how I can work it in, but I will find a way, trust me.

The second thing is that last night, at the gym, I started to seriously get into the book A Whole New Mind by Daniel Pink.  Previously, I talked about Drive by Pink, and I loved that book.  I even wrote a full paper linking the concepts he discusses to new methods of citizen engagement.  Now, A Whole New Mind is blowing my mind as well.  For example, he is talking about the left-brain/right-brain discussion in popular culture and science.  Previous centuries of thought said that the left-brain is most important, since it controls what we typically call “intelligence,” i.e. logic, language, et cetera.  Interestingly, it is at least partly related to why Western languages are read from left to right, because it exercises the left side of the brain (since the muscles to move from left to right are on the right side of our body, which is controlled by our left brain.)

However, now we know that both the right brain and the left brain are crucial to all tasks and that each is dominant in certain areas.  One example of this differentiated dominance is that the left-brain handles mostly sequential and serial thinking, and the right brain is mostly non-sequential.  Computers handle sequential and serial tasks, and they do so with greater speed than we can manage.  However, non-sequential thinking – dominating the right side of our brain – is still much more developed in the human brian than in computers.

I think he is setting up the argument that computers today handle a lot of sequential thinking for us, on our behalf.  I think that is called “the extended brain,” or something like that.  For example, I know few people who do manual math anymore.  Especially because of cell phones, people do not even seem to perform basic math themselves anymore.  I know that’s true for me as I do almost all math calculations using my iPhone, iPad or computer.

Today, we rely more and more on right-brain thinking to do work because left-brain logic is cheaper, faster, more efficient, and less prone to error when it’s done by a computer.  It takes right-brain thinking to turn left-braining logic into meaning.  It’s like the difference, I learned recently, between data, information, and meaning/knowledge: data are just individual details; information is the collection of data with trends and reflections; and meaning or knowledge is how we interpret information (derived from data) into “knowing.”

This relates to an old concept for processing group knowledge that I learned in high school from facilitator training, and Anytown Arizona uses the same model.  It’s acronym is ORID – Observe, Reflect, Inform and Decide.  I still use that to process things myself or when talking to others.

Anyway, I think this right-brain/left-brain societal change is dead-on, if he is driving towards that point.  Most of the work I do today is about organizing left-brain tasks (performed by a computer) into right-brain products, such as websites and videos.  So, I may do sequential programming, for example, but it’s to design a website that is inherently non-sequential.

All of this links to something that Kara’s Ryan and I talked about one night when we were up watching TV.  I was thinking about something we saw and I said that there are two types of information: content and context.  Now, I want to revise that and say that everything is content, context and metadata.  Everything we experience is all three of those things, all at once, and they do not exist without each other.

Not Her Finest Moment

In some ways, our brain seems like a GIANT Wikipedia, where every word is linked to something else.  You have a point of information, like “Britney Spears,” pictured at left.  Connected to that are a variety of other words and thoughts, such as: crazy, blond, singer, name, celebrity, bald, photos, tragedy, children, Kevin Federline, et cetera.  That is all either contextual information (bald, photos, children, tragedy, K-Fed) or metadata (bald, blond, singer, name, celebrity).  And each of those things are a point of information and would be context or metadata for some other piece of information.

That’s just the data, though, and that’s why it can be stored in forms like Wikipedia.  Information would be a narrative that gathers that information (Spears is/was a popular singer who has children, she went crazy for a little bit, she is blond but shaved her head at one point, and she married K-Fed).  Meaning is then taken from that information (fame is dangerous, life is tough, alcohol is addictive, whatever).  Computers can store all of that – data, information, meaning – but computers, so far, are limited to creating data and providing information.  Meaning is the task of humans in the beginning of the 21st century.

To relate it all back, it’s like that overheard phone conversation.  When overhearing a complete dialogue, we hear the sounds of syllables and pauses (data), gather the data by combining the sounds together into sentences (information), and interpret the information (meaning) in order to arrive at understanding.  In a halfalogue, however, we only hear half of the data, so we cannot interpret the data automatically and our brain struggles at that first step and seeks to pay closer attention in order to gather more data.  When reading, if you only had ever other word or paragraph, you would need a lot more conscious attention in order to understand what is written.  And, unlike computers, our brains are information-guzzlers.

Or, as a recent episode of Glee reminded me, our brains are the Tinkerbells of information – like she needed applause, brains need information in order to live.