Albert Einstein

Multiple research projects evidence the limits of multitasking. People would be wise to limit multitasking in an office, home, study hall, and especially while driving a car. The experts advise refraining from checking e-mail messages more than once an hour. Soothing background music may actually improve concentration, but be careful, songs with lyrics as well as attention grabbers such as TV or instant messaging lower performance.

Einstein lived a life of ultimate simplicity in order to keep his thoughts free from distraction, external or internal! All of this complicated research does nothing but confirm what should have been obvious. Either you know what is important, or you get the overload of information we endure today while pretending we can handle it. Perhaps having no clue of what matters, we are terrified of missing anything. “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not one bit simpler.” Einstein is quoted as having said this, although no one source can be found. He certainly said things to support this sentiment (after all, he found socks and shaving cream to be wonderful but not worth the complication to his life necessary to keep them in stock and to remember to use them). Of the 3 “Rules of Work” attributed to the Professor, the only one that truly related to his own original words is “Out of clutter, find simplicity.”

As for the finding that “Multitasking is going to slow you down, increasing the chances of mistakes” and “disruptions and interruptions are a bad deal from the standpoint of our ability to process information.” as stated by David E. Meyer, the director of the Brain, Cognition and Action Laboratory at the University of Michigan, it is the beginning of what I’ll call the “absent minded professor syndrome” which is all based on parodies of Albert Einstein. Have you ever noticed that every fictional genius has a “photographic memory” while every real genius depicted in the media is absent minded to some degree? This is because a writer can write thoughts on his/her own level, or below it. If you could go through the thought processes of someone more intelligent than yourself, you’d have to be that smart, so you couldn’t! To make up for this two things are done. 1) The fictional genius makes conclusions out of thin air through a process we must attribute to the inner workings of genius. They turn out to be correct because the writer made them up and wrote that they are correct. Perhaps the writer made up a scenario then worked backwards from an answer that is correct and fits the clues given, but could not possibly be found from only those clues. How the genius did it is left to the imagination. So how does this writer show off the genius in action? 2) Photographic memory.

I love this because even if geniuses possesed the trait involved, all writers and readers have been using the wrong term for this ability, due no doubt to their own lower-than-genius intellectual limits. Remembering words and events instantly is accomplished by an didactic memory, the photographic kind is only used to draw detailed pictures after a short viewing of an object. It is also more a trait of limited intelligence. It is the equivalent of a hard drive that overloads itself by storing everything, every time it is exposed, with no clearing the clutter and no organization. Very little useful info is stored, and one has to go through the entire drive to find anything. Worse, within this clutter there is all the consideration given to the stored material as done by a tape recorder. No, a genius ignores all the drivel, quickly figures out what truly counts and considers this type of information only, organizes it to make quick and amazing associations between all facts that truly count, then plays out all the possibilities in “thought out” inner run-throughs (thought experiments… what a great name for a play!). A true Sherlock Holmes would not remember every detail of a crime scene, he’d nudge into walls while going after the fraction of a percent of the “pixels” of real content that matter, even things that nobody else would manage to notice in the “glare” of the entire scene, or would even see as being important had Sherlock hit them over the head with it. A line attributed to Albert, for good reason despite the fact he likely never said it, is “the levels of intelligence are Smart, intelligent, brilliant, genius, simple!”

Putting the original article about the research down one thing is so obvious it is funny. Why is everyone using so much of these new techno-toys so much of the time, many of which serve to either give pleasure and peacefulness (our own background soundtrack with us at all times) or to make our work easier (almost every other distraction listed in the studies) and deriving nothing but more stress and unhappiness from it? It is more true now than when the following was painfully obvious to the great thinker stuck in the middle of a new techno-filled-and-dependent world nearly a century ago, ironically enough seeded by the fruit of his own thoughts done under purely simple circumstances. “Why does this magnificent applied science which saves work and makes life easier bring us so little happiness? The simple answer: because we have not yet learned to make sensible use of it.”