Zombies in the City of London
by ilene - December 17th, 2009 10:10 pm
Zombies in the City of London
Courtesy of Tim at The Psy-Fi Blog
Often, as I wend my way around the City of London, I find my way blocked by some slow, shuffling, seemingly moronic creature staggering along, head loosely hanging to one side, as it meanders across the sidewalk in a way calculated to force me into the gutter where I’m assailed by tricycling sandwich trolleys, homicidal hackney carriages and a mulch of yesterday’s free newspapers. Yet when I finally get past these drooling monsters it invariably turns out that they’re not zombies at all, merely highly paid financial executives who can’t walk and use their cellphones simultaneously.
In fact they’re suffering from the human inability to multi-task, being unable to attend to two tasks simultaneously – in this case walking and typing. Such minor cases of attention deficit disorder are quite normal but can become a major cause of concern for drivers of automobiles, manufacturers of aeroplanes and all investors – because attention anomalies are at the heart of many flawed investment processes and are, inevitably, used to manipulate investors something rotten.
Don’t Multi-Task in the Driving Seat
The idea that women, or people generally, can multi-task is a myth. Our parallel processing capability is designed for unconscious processing of multiple tasks, not conscious ones. Trying to consciously attend to multiple things simultaneously comes at a price, as we shift our attention backwards and forwards. In essence we have limited cognitive resources and spending these in switching rather than attending reduces our overall performance on all tasks under consideration.
This is increasingly a concern in the cockpits of aeroplanes. Providing too much information to pilots is dangerous, because the more they have to attend to the less likely they are to focus on the really salient issues like the fact that the ground is getting very large very quickly. A similar problem befalls drivers and the increasing range of in-car entertainment and navigation equipment is exacerbating the problem – if a driver stops directly attending to the road for much more than two seconds the risk of an accident increases dramatically.
Incidentally, you might think that if people can’t walk and use their cellphones at the same time then driving and using them might be even
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Philip R. Davis is a founder Phil's Stock World, a stock and options trading site that teaches the art of options trading to newcomers and devises advanced strategies for expert traders...
Ilene is editor and affiliate program
coordinator for PSW. She manages the site