Point of order: I found your post in my RSS feed as I was bouncing back and forth between my paper, due in a few hours, and my in-box.

His assessment seems correct to me. But I also feel there can be the opposite mechanism at work. I personally feel like I have too much energy or attentional resources to devote to one task. If I try to devote my mind to one thing, I get distracted, and I'll bounce permanently on to some other task, never to come back to the important stuff. By flipping back and forth between several tasks, my mental energy is saturated, and I can actually sit in one place and work.

I've torn over the pathologization of anything, however. A tongue-in-cheek paper was published in a journal a number of years ago about adding a new category of disorder into the DSM: Pervasive Labelling Disorder. Maybe Hallowell suffers from Pervasive Labelling Trait.

"By flipping back and forth between several tasks, my mental energy is saturated, and I can actually sit in one place and work."

Yes, that's precisely how I feel sometimes too.

Though to play devil's advocate to myself, sometimes I wonder if it's just an elaborate justification for twitchiness. It's like in one of those wonderful mid-80s Frank Miller issues of Batman when Batman visits Arkham Asylum and talks to a psychiatrist who's treating the Joker; she talks about his mental state and wonders whether it's actually a sane response to an insane world.

All studies on workplace interruptions I've heard of have shown that it's completely ruinous for productivity. No exception given for non-'attention deficit trait'-having people. The book 'peopleware' goes on about this at length.

It's interesting that a lot of this discussion revolves around productivity vs. twitchiness. I'm terrible at 'producing content' when I'm in the multitasking zone. I'll get a sentence or two written, tweak a few lines, and that's about it.

When I'm thinking, though... trying to pull together information and correlate ideas, teasing the beginnings of a hypothesis or a strategy together, multitasking is the only place for me. I'll google related ideas, skim, bounce back to bulleted lists and skim, IM a friend for thoughts, and pop into the visual thesaurus.

Maybe I'm just justifying twitchiness as well, but for me it feels like a way of intentionally cross-polinating ideas in the early stages of a project.

I've seen those studies too, and they're quite solid -- though I'd be interested to see whether there's any difference in the relationship of work style and productivity amongst different domains of work. For me, when I need to work in a critical and analytical mode, I need constant concentration without interruption; that's the only way I can be productive.

But when I need to generate ideas, I shift into a brainstorming mode -- which is all about the open play of influences upon your idea-generation: Some of the best brainstorming meetings I've been in are filled interruptions, discursions, diversions, etc. Hence the various management tools that have emerged over the years -- decks of "ideas" cards, software to suggest nonconventional modes of thought or areas of inquiry -- that are all aimed at throwing weird influences into your brain to break you out of your s mental ruts. There are certain types of creativity in which it seems that you're more productive when you actively court chaotic, interrupt-driven modes.

Sorry, Jeff slipped in there while I was posting -- I was responding to Bram.

Jeff, yeah, the justifying-twitchiness worries me about myself also.

"No one really multitasks."

Scientifically speaking, this is 100% incorrect. If anything, he's backwards. Most computers (having only a single processor) don't really multitask. Instead your OS just decides how to split up the time between different tasks that need to be done one at a time in the CPU. The brain however, is a massively parallel computer. Each neuron can be thought of a single, tiny not particularly fast or smart processor. However, by tying them all together, one stupid, slow processor feeds into 50 others, which are also wired into different inputs, and then they compare signals to decided if and when to fire. There is no particular reason why one section of the brain should wait for the signal from another section of the brain to get things done. If a particular section can solve a problem without interacting with other sections of the brain, then there's nothing to stop it from doing so. Now obviously, since different parts of the brain are specialized for solving particular kinds of tasks, there's a limit to how things can be broken up, where things can be processed, and what sorts of problems can be solved simultaneously. That said, it's clear from studies that parts of the brain, like say the visual pattern recognition functions, are always functioning and evaluating patterns of input, but only occasionally generate results of sufficient interest to pass on to other parts of the brain. This is how the many subliminal recognition effects occur. It's not that you don't recognize something, it's just that you don't bother to tell the rest of the brain about what was recognized. Seen from this angle, there's no reason that the brain cannot work on two (or more) problems simultaneously.

Excellent point! I hadn't thought of it from that perspective. I'm realizing now how often I fall into the metaphor trap of computers = brains.

You almost nailed it in one of your reply comments above, Clive... The operative difference is between creativity and work. I think the reason so many people get confused about this is because most creative types regard creativity as the work they do. But actually, I'm starting to realize that's just not quite right. Creativity can be your job, but it isn't the work, exactly. Thinking of a novel is not the same as writing one. Designing a sculpture isn't the same as building one. Writing music isn't the same as playing endless sets on tour...

The twitchy brain is, I think, really where the ideas come from. But manifesting them comes from the stable brain. Let's use sculpture as an example: I might spend all day dreaming, reading, looking at pictures, bouncing ideas off people or whattever, frequently moving back and forth between tasks etc while I'm designing something. But when it comes down to welding that puppy together, I need to be pretty focused on doing it right or some day it'll fall on someone and flatten them. Or I'll get cut or burned more than usual. or... And although I enjoy building stuff, it's certainly more labor intensive than thinking it up... And a lot of it is boring, too. No one wants to spend hours grinding down a surface or doing any of the other repetitive tasks that go into constructing a heavy piece of art. There's a satisfaction in good craftsmanship and seeing the piece come together, but most of that happens when you step back to look after a long, focused bit of work...

The thing that makes it hard to tell the two states apart is that both are completely consuming, and both generate a certain amount of pleasure. Both are necessary to get a work of art done (whether you're sweating in the orchestra pit, straining through a dance performance, tuning out your family to finish a book, or whatever).

There are people who only dream the day away and people who only work. Seems to me that people who do creative work always have to move between both camps, though, and can never really get their work done unless they spend time in both. And yeah, not just artists, but anyone doing something new or different.

2¢

That's a *really* nicely-put description of this interplay between modes. The way you talk about sculpture is perfectly applicable my experience of writing or recording music; it's the classic inspiration/perspiration divide.

"There are people who only dream the day away": Arg -- that reminds me far too much of what my week has been like so far ...

John T. Unger - thank you.
Excellent & inspiring point made.
I've been kicking myself for too long over what seems to be an inability at times to get past the "design" stage on some of my projects. I chalk it up to not having the right tools, lack of access to a good workshop - you name it - but really, I think a lot of it comes down to an aversion to the dull "grinding time" involved in most projects..

"The way you talk about sculpture is perfectly applicable my experience of writing or recording music..."

Thanks, Clive! I think the reason for that is probably because I was a writer and poet for 15 years before I finally moved into visual art as an easier way to make a living. Heh. The thing is, yeah, I always experienced the same issues regardless of what medium I was practicing. Sculpture just made the whole dichotomy more concrete (if you'll pardon the almost pun).

The work of being a poet was just as tedious and difficult at times but it didn't lend itself to such objective examination.

Anyway, I love your posts on ADD & ADHD related stuff. As I've mentioned before in the comments, I think it's just an evolutionary adaptation, but the whole key is learning how to work that split. I think it's easier to do once you become conscious of why both arre necessary!

Oh, and to Garth: Yeah, just take all the energy you use to kick yourself and apply it to whatever you need to work on. Heh. Easier said than done, but I guarantee you'll feel better.

"No one really multitasks."

Carl overstates his argument when he says this is 100% wrong. Sure we can walk and chew gum at the same time, and we can process things subconciously as we work. But we can only handle one stream of consciousness at a time. For clear evidence, look at the literature on binocular rivalry. If one eye sees horizontal stripes and the other eye sees vertical stripes, your perception will swap back and forth between the two; they will not overlap. A similar phenomenon underlies the magic of the Necker cube.

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