11 ms·

Our Brains Are Not Multi-Threaded

273 points by janvdberg 7y ago

nitwit005 7y ago
Lacking in evidence and uses vague terms like "psychic toll".
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- beat 7y ago
  I think simple observation provides plenty of evidence. It's not a real scientific-method approach, but if you want to dismiss the relationship he's talking about, you need either to find a flaw in his reasoning or offer a better alternative explanation for the observation that when people try to "multitask", they usually do a shit job of it.
  - nitwit005 7y ago
    You can feel free to have whatever standard you want as to what makes up a worthwhile article. Someone's personal feelings on how the human mind functions, described with vague terms, is essentially worthless to me. Given that the same complaint seems echoed in other comments, I'm not alone there.
    - beat 7y ago
      My atttitude toward a Cal Newport article is that he's published multiple highly regarded books that I've read and found very insightful and applicable in practice. So when he writes something that's brief and does some handwaving, but fits within his overall worldview (like this article), I'm inclined to take it more seriously. If you've never heard of Cal Newport before now, I can see reason for some doubt, but I also think you're maybe missing out on a lot within the field.
      - Apocryphon 7y ago
        His blog articles were both more concise and more valuable than his bloated books.
thisisbrians 7y ago
In the tech community, we talk a lot about not interrupting programmers (or other knowledge workers) because of the cost of so-called "context-switching." I think this post raises the very interesting point that, much of the time, the sources of these interruptions are not external, but internal. Stop interrupting yourself! You're a knowledge worker! His advice to cultivate systems that afford one focus and prevent context-switching is salient.
- perl4ever 7y ago
  It's a cliche that IT as an industry is hostile to women, and it's also a cliche that women are good at multitasking. How do we know that people's opinions on the difficulty of multitasking are representative and not biased? I'm not even speculating on whether gender differences might be innate or trained.
frereubu 7y ago
The language here is weird. He's talking about doing more than one thing at a time. If you're talking about multi-threading in the context of the brain, the obvious comparison is with neural architecture. The brain does a massive amount of parallel processing and it very much is multi-threaded. But "multi-threading" sounds a bit cooler than "doing more than one thing at a time" I guess.
- rhombocombus 7y ago
  There is a big difference between multitasking and parallel processing. As a former neuroscientist I get rankled when I read gross conflations like this, it doesn't help anyone understand how the brain actually works, nor does it effectively underscore the attentional drawbacks of trying to multitask.
  - bwb 7y ago
    True, but from a big-picture view he might be doing a better job explaining the concepts to laypeople. And in that it might help them improve how they work / live :)
    - pathseeker 7y ago
      Sure, the layperson knows what multi-threading is.
      - bonoboTP 7y ago
        The lay hacker.
  - rm_-rf_slash 7y ago
    I think a better analogy is the way GPU calculations are done, as the calculations are done in parallel but the process is ultimately sequential: move data from CPU RAM to GPU RAM, calculate in parallel on GPU, move results data back to CPU RAM, operate on the results data on the CPU serially.
  - 7y ago
gorzynsk 7y ago
Consciousness about what our brain does is single threaded. Everything else is massive parallel processing.
- dclowd9901 7y ago
  Right. Thank god I don't have to think about breathing or making my heart beat.
  - serpix 7y ago
    What you don't think happens on its own and what you think also happens on its own. The illusion is that thinking is you, identification with thinking. Once that is seen as an illusion you can observe yourself talking, thinking and verify all this happens on its own.
- burke 7y ago
  That’s closer, but I also think it’s wrong to look at the brain as a GPU of general mind stuff hooked up to a CPU of attention. I think it’s likelier that each portion of the brain fires away at up to whatever its natural “throughput” is (some activities more or less parallel), and conscious awareness just happens to feel like a single global mutex. I guess this is a game you can play where you keep refining the analogy until it’s too complex to help, but I don’t think the linked author’s analogy is good or useful. Better to just say we can’t be consciously aware of two things concurrently. It’s not a hard concept.
- Valmar 7y ago
  I would suggest that it's not "single threaded", either. Comparing consciousness to how a CPU processes instructions is very poor analogy, because to this day, because the nature of consciousness is still a complete mystery to science. I mean, we can think about stuff, but we don't think about them one after the other. We're thinking all of the time, but we tend to focus on what's immediately interesting to us. Consciousness is a pretty complex thing to unravel...
generaljelly 7y ago
If you want to read something interesting on how thinking works I suggest 'Thinking, Fast and Slow' by Daniel Kahneman.
- perchard 7y ago
  I enjoyed TFS but tend to agree with this review: > Thinking Fast and Slow is my runner-up for “book most overrated by investors” (with Klarman’s Margin of Safety the champion.) People who pitch this book as “required reading” simply haven’t read broadly enough about cognitive biases: while the content is certainly useful and I don’t take anything away from Kahneman as a researcher, his writing/communication/worldview leave much to be desired, and the same lessons can be learned far more effectively and enjoyably via a variety of other books (many of which are suggested below). http://www.askeladdencapital.com/daniel-kahnemans-thinking-fast-and-slow-book-review/ http://www.askeladdencapital.com/daniel-kahnemans-thinking-f...
- theonemind 7y ago
  Interestingly, https://retractionwatch.com/2017/02/20/placed-much-faith-underpowered-studies-nobel-prize-winner-admits-mistakes/ https://retractionwatch.com/2017/02/20/placed-much-faith-und... The author thinks that he relied too much on weak studies for the thesis of the book.
nice_byte 7y ago
"it’s often much easier for the programmer to write independent threads, each dedicated to its own part of the larger system." oh, if only it were true...
- csomar 7y ago
  Yeah, that part really breaks down the credibility of the article.
- random_savv 7y ago
  This was the point I stopped reading and came to HN to make this exact comment. Beat me to it!
- doubleunplussed 7y ago
  Im one of these people who reaches for threads to solve many a task, and that statement resonates for me. I've never understood why threads are considered so difficult, other than people not getting the message to sparingly share data other than via message-passing. Any time you need to do something asynchronously, things get trickier, but whether you keep it single threaded or not barely makes any difference. Race conditions exist in single threaded code too as soon as it is interacting with a network or the OS or anything that takes time and you don't want to block. It's not threads that are hard, it's the explosion of the state space of your program when you commit to accepting further user/network input whilst some task is ongoing, whether you implement that with threads or not.
banachtarski 7y ago
AKA our brains are hyperthreaded. The observation doesn't seem that salient. That said, I believe the article to be incorrect. Our brain does do various sorts of parallel processing (visual cortex, keeping your heart beating, maintaining sense of balance, etc). It's just that the cores happen to be more specialized.
- SamReidHughes 7y ago
  You can add many learned things, like driving, riding a horse, playing the piano, and attacking math problems under time pressure to the sort that apparently involve parallel processing.
jlv2 7y ago
> In a world before multi-core processors, these threads weren’t actually running simultaneously, as the underlying processor could only execute one instruction at a time. This is not true. Before multi-core processors there were many computers with multiple CPUs. Is the author under 30 or something?
- wilg 7y ago
  You don't think its true that before there were multi-core processors, processors could only execute one instruction at a time? It doesn't say computers could only execute one instruction at a time. It says processors. If you're going to do needlessly pedantic bikeshedding, at least get it right.
  - qes 7y ago
    > You don't think its true that before there were multi-core processors, processors could only execute one instruction at a time? It is not true. Instruction-level parallelism existed before multi-core. > If you're going to do needlessly pedantic bikeshedding, at least get it right. Pot, meet kettle.
    - wilg 7y ago
      I don't care at all about this discussion! I was just trying to ding the commenter for going off on a tangent. Also, the person I'm replying to wasn't talking about instruction-level parallelism, they were misreading the article.
      - pathseeker 7y ago
        >I don't care at all about this discussion! Then don't say shit like "at least get it right".
  - hinkley 7y ago
    > In a world before multi-core processors, these threads weren’t actually running simultaneously He's trying to describe the difference between multi-threading and multiprocessing to introduce the idea of task switching. But the bad history lesson is distracting. There were long periods of history when most hardware vendors had at least one model with multiple processors, and there were some companies that specialized in them (Cray, Silicon Graphics, IBM, Fujitsu, Toshiba?), including ones built with x86 processors (Sequent, IBM).
aloknnikhil 7y ago
Multi-threading is not a good analogy. If you think of the conscious brain as a hyper-visor which is switching execution context between multiple virtual machines, the analogy sticks slightly better. Running too many VMs (on what seems like a single core processor) will slow things down and is akin to context-switching between "neural activities". It's a whole host of things that the processor needs to setup before executing instructions in a sandbox. Switching between threads is cheap and the conscious brain does it all the time, even when you're focused on a single task. But it's all so relative and comparing it to a "computer" and claiming it's not efficient is not fair. In fact, I'd argue that the human brain is a lot more efficient at handling tasks because not only is it executing instructions, it's constantly learning and programming the next set of instructions.
LoSboccacc 7y ago
not in the time slice way we programmer usually think when taking about multi threading, but how many times you let a problem be only too have an epiphany some time later? background thinking is very real and albeit not a fair allocation system it is, in a sense, threading.
cy6erlion 7y ago
The brain is the hardware, consciousness is experienced in the mind, the mind is the faculty for processing thoughts it is also the same faculty we use to perceive the self/ego and our reality with help from sensed data. The highest level of our consciousness the mind appears single threaded because the perceived self/ego is attached to the minds thread, multi threads will be like multi self. But we can be conscious of the fact that we are thinking, that is itself a sort of thread running, and we can perceive that one also, and the other...
- Gene_Parmesan 7y ago
  Sometimes when I'm meditating I experience a mini ego-loss. I come out of it feeling like I'm merely a collection of running processes over which I have little to no control. I feel like I get a brief glimpse of 'multithreads,' and it's somewhat emotionally unpleasant.
  - cy6erlion 7y ago
    Yes exactly. My first comment was based on what I experience when meditating. > I feel like I get a brief glimpse of 'multithreads,' and it's somewhat emotionally unpleasant. I think it helps not to identify the self as the thoughts/processes of the mind, the self is the observer/awareness
mkorfmann 7y ago
You can't think about two natural language sentence at the same time. It's possible to have a feeling at the same time though, or at least it seems like this. So, is the feeling processed at the same time as thinking a natural language sentence or do these things happen in sequence and it only seems parallel?
stratosgear 7y ago
I'm not sure this is a great example of memorization or multithreading but playing chess blindfolded against three opponents, is out there: https://youtu.be/xmXwdoRG43U https://youtu.be/xmXwdoRG43U
- sherkaner 7y ago
  That's actually pretty easy for any experienced chess player. The world record is simultaneously playing 45+ opponents blindfolded, which is actually incredibly hard.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
zeroimpl 7y ago
I’ve generally found that a context switch from one programming task to another can be pretty easy (even if totally unrelated), but switching to something non-programming related is often much more painful.
softwaredoug 7y ago
There’s a special irony to being distracted enough by a Cal Newport article to feel the urge to comment on it!
Eli_P 7y ago
Listen to Terence McKenna's recordings where he describes tripping experience, or somebody doing DMT, or Michael Stevens doing ayahuasca. Maybe all these observations are anecdotal and not scientific, but it feels like ideas and thoughts live their own lives inside neocortex. Our brain's potential is harnessed with reptile and mammal tasks which are more asynchronous than parallel. Even if we could overclock ourselves into massive parallel thinking it would have ended up with oxygen or glucose deficit. And mind overheating, whether cpu is made from silicon or grey matter, there's a limit for FLOPS per joule.
fucking_tragedy 7y ago
A computer is a bad metaphor for the brain, there's no reason to strain the metaphor even further by dragging threading into it.
thrax 7y ago
Effective task switching is a learned skill.. I often find that switching between 2 or 3 tasks a few times over the course of a day, helps me be more productive because blocking is less of an issue and sometimes blocking due to problems needing to be solved, can be iterated on subconsciously while you're forebrain is doing something else.. I think there are parallels with neural networks.. task switching helps make your network generalize better.
afinlayson 7y ago
Yet! Give it time, we'll add a peripheral port soon enough
karmakaze 7y ago
As I read it, it seems to be saying that our brains are multi-threaded, but not multi-core or multi-processor. The lower priority 'threads' which are not the intended focus still do take cycles in brief moments when the main task is idle only to be preemptively interrupted at the cost of many context switches and adding very little value. The same happens with hardware CPUs which is why coroutines are much more effective when the number of tasks >> number of processing units.
- karmakaze 7y ago
  Also we do have multiprocessing abilities, just not multiple 'foreground' conscious ones.
  - AstralStorm 7y ago
    We sort of do, but at best it's not more efficient, at worst it's much slower.
    - karmakaze 7y ago
      I've never experienced being aware of two unrelated things at the same time so I definitely have a single-core consciousness.
kordlessagain 7y ago
> This is all to say that the closer I look at the evidence regarding how our brains function, the more I’m convinced that we’re designed to be single-threaded, working on things one at a time, waiting to reach a natural stopping point before moving on to what’s next. So it's another hypothesis, parading around as a common claim.
dr_dshiv 7y ago
Multiplexing in the brain is apparently achieved by maintaining a high and low (theta) peak frequency -- when at a ratio of the golden mean, each separate period of high activity doesn't interfere with the other. Makes sense, when you think about brainwave bands being harmonics (frequency doublings), as that is what permits frequency coupling-- whereas irrational ratios prevent coupling. Pletzer, B., Kerschbaum, H., & Klimesch, W. (2010). When frequencies never synchronize: the golden mean and the resting EEG. Brain research, 1335, 91-102.
- dr_dshiv 7y ago
  Btw, I know that anything involving golden mean smells like crank science. Note that Wolfgang Klimesch is field topping in EEG research citations...
djsumdog 7y ago
> Imagine, for example, you’re creating a basic game. You might have one thread dedicated to updating the graphics on the screen Has the author has never actually written a game? The majority of games are single threaded. You calculate the positions, moves, strategy of the AI, etc. etc. and then eventually render the frame. For years, certain releases of Doom and Quake were the benchmarks for games because they were some of the first to use multiple threads and could scale to multiple CPUs/processors. Sure, modern games tent to be able to use more cores and have some independent threads, but the majority of the work typically still happens in the main event loop.
m12k 7y ago
A better title would be "Our Brains Are Not Multi-core' - so multitasking, just like multi-threading on a single core CPU, will incur a penalty of context switching, cache misses, and so on.
- PyroLagus 7y ago
  Looking at split-brain patients, it does seem like each hemisphere is a "core" which communicate via the corpus callosum. So you could say that our brains are multi-core.
test132 7y ago
More complex than any man made machine
Insanity 7y ago
Whenever these comparisons of brains and computers come up, I am reminded of Freud's comparison between the brain and the steam engine. People think about the world (and brain in this case) in terms of what they are familiar with. Today computers are ubiquitous and we try to see computers in nature. In 100 years it will be something different and we'll try to imagine the brain like that.
quickthrower2 7y ago
My brain is. I am simultaneously looking at the screen while writing this comment by tapping my fingers too.
posedge 7y ago
I feel like everyone in this thread arguing about multi-threading/hypterthreading/multi-core/multi-processor as an analogy is missing the poing. The post is about how you can focus your attention on a single task only (true multitasking doesn't exist) and that you should keep focus longer instead of switching context too often.
- jugg1es 7y ago
  That's because the author is saying that the brain cannot perform parallel processing, which is clearly not true. You are making a distinction that the author does not.
pinky1417 7y ago
Cal's essay is backed by empirics. I'd add that, for those like me who used to believe that women are better multitaskers, both men and women are equally bad at multitasking. Early studies would sometimes show a female advantage or a male advantage (not sure why the female advantage idea came to be popular), but they were based on humans performing tasks that didn't resemble the real world... or at least tasks from the world of business/office work. A newer study, based on a real world task of meeting preparation, showed that both men and women were quite bad at multitasking: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs00426-018-1045-0 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs00426-018-1045-...
jugg1es 7y ago
This article is nonsense and I don't think any background research was done before writing it. It takes almost no effort to come up with an example of parallel processing in the brain. Pat your head and rub your tummy at the same time. How many times have you been driving and talking and listening to the radio at the same time? He must mean that conscious attention is not multi-threaded, and that is obviously true because the nature of paying attention is that you are focusing on a single thing.

273 points by janvdberg 7y ago

nitwit005 7y ago

Lacking in evidence and uses vague terms like "psychic toll".

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
beat 7y ago
I think simple observation provides plenty of evidence. It's not a real scientific-method approach, but if you want to dismiss the relationship he's talking about, you need either to find a flaw in his reasoning or offer a better alternative explanation for the observation that when people try to "multitask", they usually do a shit job of it.
- nitwit005 7y ago
  You can feel free to have whatever standard you want as to what makes up a worthwhile article. Someone's personal feelings on how the human mind functions, described with vague terms, is essentially worthless to me. Given that the same complaint seems echoed in other comments, I'm not alone there.
  - beat 7y ago
    My atttitude toward a Cal Newport article is that he's published multiple highly regarded books that I've read and found very insightful and applicable in practice. So when he writes something that's brief and does some handwaving, but fits within his overall worldview (like this article), I'm inclined to take it more seriously. If you've never heard of Cal Newport before now, I can see reason for some doubt, but I also think you're maybe missing out on a lot within the field.
    - Apocryphon 7y ago
      His blog articles were both more concise and more valuable than his bloated books.

thisisbrians 7y ago

In the tech community, we talk a lot about not interrupting programmers (or other knowledge workers) because of the cost of so-called "context-switching." I think this post raises the very interesting point that, much of the time, the sources of these interruptions are not external, but internal. Stop interrupting yourself! You're a knowledge worker! His advice to cultivate systems that afford one focus and prevent context-switching is salient.

perl4ever 7y ago
It's a cliche that IT as an industry is hostile to women, and it's also a cliche that women are good at multitasking. How do we know that people's opinions on the difficulty of multitasking are representative and not biased? I'm not even speculating on whether gender differences might be innate or trained.

frereubu 7y ago

The language here is weird. He's talking about doing more than one thing at a time. If you're talking about multi-threading in the context of the brain, the obvious comparison is with neural architecture. The brain does a massive amount of parallel processing and it very much is multi-threaded. But "multi-threading" sounds a bit cooler than "doing more than one thing at a time" I guess.

rhombocombus 7y ago
There is a big difference between multitasking and parallel processing. As a former neuroscientist I get rankled when I read gross conflations like this, it doesn't help anyone understand how the brain actually works, nor does it effectively underscore the attentional drawbacks of trying to multitask.
- bwb 7y ago
  True, but from a big-picture view he might be doing a better job explaining the concepts to laypeople. And in that it might help them improve how they work / live :)
  - pathseeker 7y ago
    Sure, the layperson knows what multi-threading is.
    - bonoboTP 7y ago
      The lay hacker.
- rm_-rf_slash 7y ago
  I think a better analogy is the way GPU calculations are done, as the calculations are done in parallel but the process is ultimately sequential: move data from CPU RAM to GPU RAM, calculate in parallel on GPU, move results data back to CPU RAM, operate on the results data on the CPU serially.
- 7y ago

gorzynsk 7y ago

Consciousness about what our brain does is single threaded. Everything else is massive parallel processing.

dclowd9901 7y ago
Right. Thank god I don't have to think about breathing or making my heart beat.
- serpix 7y ago
  What you don't think happens on its own and what you think also happens on its own. The illusion is that thinking is you, identification with thinking. Once that is seen as an illusion you can observe yourself talking, thinking and verify all this happens on its own.
burke 7y ago
That’s closer, but I also think it’s wrong to look at the brain as a GPU of general mind stuff hooked up to a CPU of attention. I think it’s likelier that each portion of the brain fires away at up to whatever its natural “throughput” is (some activities more or less parallel), and conscious awareness just happens to feel like a single global mutex. I guess this is a game you can play where you keep refining the analogy until it’s too complex to help, but I don’t think the linked author’s analogy is good or useful. Better to just say we can’t be consciously aware of two things concurrently. It’s not a hard concept.
Valmar 7y ago
I would suggest that it's not "single threaded", either. Comparing consciousness to how a CPU processes instructions is very poor analogy, because to this day, because the nature of consciousness is still a complete mystery to science. I mean, we can think about stuff, but we don't think about them one after the other. We're thinking all of the time, but we tend to focus on what's immediately interesting to us. Consciousness is a pretty complex thing to unravel...

generaljelly 7y ago

If you want to read something interesting on how thinking works I suggest 'Thinking, Fast and Slow' by Daniel Kahneman.

perchard 7y ago
I enjoyed TFS but tend to agree with this review: > Thinking Fast and Slow is my runner-up for “book most overrated by investors” (with Klarman’s Margin of Safety the champion.) People who pitch this book as “required reading” simply haven’t read broadly enough about cognitive biases: while the content is certainly useful and I don’t take anything away from Kahneman as a researcher, his writing/communication/worldview leave much to be desired, and the same lessons can be learned far more effectively and enjoyably via a variety of other books (many of which are suggested below). http://www.askeladdencapital.com/daniel-kahnemans-thinking-fast-and-slow-book-review/ http://www.askeladdencapital.com/daniel-kahnemans-thinking-f...
theonemind 7y ago
Interestingly, https://retractionwatch.com/2017/02/20/placed-much-faith-underpowered-studies-nobel-prize-winner-admits-mistakes/ https://retractionwatch.com/2017/02/20/placed-much-faith-und... The author thinks that he relied too much on weak studies for the thesis of the book.

nice_byte 7y ago

"it’s often much easier for the programmer to write independent threads, each dedicated to its own part of the larger system." oh, if only it were true...

csomar 7y ago
Yeah, that part really breaks down the credibility of the article.
random_savv 7y ago
This was the point I stopped reading and came to HN to make this exact comment. Beat me to it!
doubleunplussed 7y ago
Im one of these people who reaches for threads to solve many a task, and that statement resonates for me. I've never understood why threads are considered so difficult, other than people not getting the message to sparingly share data other than via message-passing. Any time you need to do something asynchronously, things get trickier, but whether you keep it single threaded or not barely makes any difference. Race conditions exist in single threaded code too as soon as it is interacting with a network or the OS or anything that takes time and you don't want to block. It's not threads that are hard, it's the explosion of the state space of your program when you commit to accepting further user/network input whilst some task is ongoing, whether you implement that with threads or not.

banachtarski 7y ago

AKA our brains are hyperthreaded. The observation doesn't seem that salient. That said, I believe the article to be incorrect. Our brain does do various sorts of parallel processing (visual cortex, keeping your heart beating, maintaining sense of balance, etc). It's just that the cores happen to be more specialized.

SamReidHughes 7y ago
You can add many learned things, like driving, riding a horse, playing the piano, and attacking math problems under time pressure to the sort that apparently involve parallel processing.

jlv2 7y ago

> In a world before multi-core processors, these threads weren’t actually running simultaneously, as the underlying processor could only execute one instruction at a time. This is not true. Before multi-core processors there were many computers with multiple CPUs. Is the author under 30 or something?

wilg 7y ago
You don't think its true that before there were multi-core processors, processors could only execute one instruction at a time? It doesn't say computers could only execute one instruction at a time. It says processors. If you're going to do needlessly pedantic bikeshedding, at least get it right.
- qes 7y ago
  > You don't think its true that before there were multi-core processors, processors could only execute one instruction at a time? It is not true. Instruction-level parallelism existed before multi-core. > If you're going to do needlessly pedantic bikeshedding, at least get it right. Pot, meet kettle.
  - wilg 7y ago
    I don't care at all about this discussion! I was just trying to ding the commenter for going off on a tangent. Also, the person I'm replying to wasn't talking about instruction-level parallelism, they were misreading the article.
    - pathseeker 7y ago
      >I don't care at all about this discussion! Then don't say shit like "at least get it right".
- hinkley 7y ago
  > In a world before multi-core processors, these threads weren’t actually running simultaneously He's trying to describe the difference between multi-threading and multiprocessing to introduce the idea of task switching. But the bad history lesson is distracting. There were long periods of history when most hardware vendors had at least one model with multiple processors, and there were some companies that specialized in them (Cray, Silicon Graphics, IBM, Fujitsu, Toshiba?), including ones built with x86 processors (Sequent, IBM).

aloknnikhil 7y ago

Multi-threading is not a good analogy. If you think of the conscious brain as a hyper-visor which is switching execution context between multiple virtual machines, the analogy sticks slightly better. Running too many VMs (on what seems like a single core processor) will slow things down and is akin to context-switching between "neural activities". It's a whole host of things that the processor needs to setup before executing instructions in a sandbox. Switching between threads is cheap and the conscious brain does it all the time, even when you're focused on a single task. But it's all so relative and comparing it to a "computer" and claiming it's not efficient is not fair. In fact, I'd argue that the human brain is a lot more efficient at handling tasks because not only is it executing instructions, it's constantly learning and programming the next set of instructions.

LoSboccacc 7y ago

not in the time slice way we programmer usually think when taking about multi threading, but how many times you let a problem be only too have an epiphany some time later? background thinking is very real and albeit not a fair allocation system it is, in a sense, threading.

cy6erlion 7y ago

The brain is the hardware, consciousness is experienced in the mind, the mind is the faculty for processing thoughts it is also the same faculty we use to perceive the self/ego and our reality with help from sensed data. The highest level of our consciousness the mind appears single threaded because the perceived self/ego is attached to the minds thread, multi threads will be like multi self. But we can be conscious of the fact that we are thinking, that is itself a sort of thread running, and we can perceive that one also, and the other...

Gene_Parmesan 7y ago
Sometimes when I'm meditating I experience a mini ego-loss. I come out of it feeling like I'm merely a collection of running processes over which I have little to no control. I feel like I get a brief glimpse of 'multithreads,' and it's somewhat emotionally unpleasant.
- cy6erlion 7y ago
  Yes exactly. My first comment was based on what I experience when meditating. > I feel like I get a brief glimpse of 'multithreads,' and it's somewhat emotionally unpleasant. I think it helps not to identify the self as the thoughts/processes of the mind, the self is the observer/awareness

mkorfmann 7y ago

You can't think about two natural language sentence at the same time. It's possible to have a feeling at the same time though, or at least it seems like this. So, is the feeling processed at the same time as thinking a natural language sentence or do these things happen in sequence and it only seems parallel?

stratosgear 7y ago

I'm not sure this is a great example of memorization or multithreading but playing chess blindfolded against three opponents, is out there: https://youtu.be/xmXwdoRG43U https://youtu.be/xmXwdoRG43U

sherkaner 7y ago
That's actually pretty easy for any experienced chess player. The world record is simultaneously playing 45+ opponents blindfolded, which is actually incredibly hard.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

zeroimpl 7y ago

I’ve generally found that a context switch from one programming task to another can be pretty easy (even if totally unrelated), but switching to something non-programming related is often much more painful.

softwaredoug 7y ago

There’s a special irony to being distracted enough by a Cal Newport article to feel the urge to comment on it!

Eli_P 7y ago

Listen to Terence McKenna's recordings where he describes tripping experience, or somebody doing DMT, or Michael Stevens doing ayahuasca. Maybe all these observations are anecdotal and not scientific, but it feels like ideas and thoughts live their own lives inside neocortex. Our brain's potential is harnessed with reptile and mammal tasks which are more asynchronous than parallel. Even if we could overclock ourselves into massive parallel thinking it would have ended up with oxygen or glucose deficit. And mind overheating, whether cpu is made from silicon or grey matter, there's a limit for FLOPS per joule.

fucking_tragedy 7y ago

A computer is a bad metaphor for the brain, there's no reason to strain the metaphor even further by dragging threading into it.

thrax 7y ago

Effective task switching is a learned skill.. I often find that switching between 2 or 3 tasks a few times over the course of a day, helps me be more productive because blocking is less of an issue and sometimes blocking due to problems needing to be solved, can be iterated on subconsciously while you're forebrain is doing something else.. I think there are parallels with neural networks.. task switching helps make your network generalize better.

afinlayson 7y ago

Yet! Give it time, we'll add a peripheral port soon enough

karmakaze 7y ago

As I read it, it seems to be saying that our brains are multi-threaded, but not multi-core or multi-processor. The lower priority 'threads' which are not the intended focus still do take cycles in brief moments when the main task is idle only to be preemptively interrupted at the cost of many context switches and adding very little value. The same happens with hardware CPUs which is why coroutines are much more effective when the number of tasks >> number of processing units.

karmakaze 7y ago
Also we do have multiprocessing abilities, just not multiple 'foreground' conscious ones.
- AstralStorm 7y ago
  We sort of do, but at best it's not more efficient, at worst it's much slower.
  - karmakaze 7y ago
    I've never experienced being aware of two unrelated things at the same time so I definitely have a single-core consciousness.

kordlessagain 7y ago

> This is all to say that the closer I look at the evidence regarding how our brains function, the more I’m convinced that we’re designed to be single-threaded, working on things one at a time, waiting to reach a natural stopping point before moving on to what’s next. So it's another hypothesis, parading around as a common claim.

dr_dshiv 7y ago

Multiplexing in the brain is apparently achieved by maintaining a high and low (theta) peak frequency -- when at a ratio of the golden mean, each separate period of high activity doesn't interfere with the other. Makes sense, when you think about brainwave bands being harmonics (frequency doublings), as that is what permits frequency coupling-- whereas irrational ratios prevent coupling. Pletzer, B., Kerschbaum, H., & Klimesch, W. (2010). When frequencies never synchronize: the golden mean and the resting EEG. Brain research, 1335, 91-102.

dr_dshiv 7y ago
Btw, I know that anything involving golden mean smells like crank science. Note that Wolfgang Klimesch is field topping in EEG research citations...

djsumdog 7y ago

> Imagine, for example, you’re creating a basic game. You might have one thread dedicated to updating the graphics on the screen Has the author has never actually written a game? The majority of games are single threaded. You calculate the positions, moves, strategy of the AI, etc. etc. and then eventually render the frame. For years, certain releases of Doom and Quake were the benchmarks for games because they were some of the first to use multiple threads and could scale to multiple CPUs/processors. Sure, modern games tent to be able to use more cores and have some independent threads, but the majority of the work typically still happens in the main event loop.

m12k 7y ago

A better title would be "Our Brains Are Not Multi-core' - so multitasking, just like multi-threading on a single core CPU, will incur a penalty of context switching, cache misses, and so on.

PyroLagus 7y ago
Looking at split-brain patients, it does seem like each hemisphere is a "core" which communicate via the corpus callosum. So you could say that our brains are multi-core.

test132 7y ago

More complex than any man made machine

Insanity 7y ago

Whenever these comparisons of brains and computers come up, I am reminded of Freud's comparison between the brain and the steam engine. People think about the world (and brain in this case) in terms of what they are familiar with. Today computers are ubiquitous and we try to see computers in nature. In 100 years it will be something different and we'll try to imagine the brain like that.

quickthrower2 7y ago

My brain is. I am simultaneously looking at the screen while writing this comment by tapping my fingers too.

posedge 7y ago

I feel like everyone in this thread arguing about multi-threading/hypterthreading/multi-core/multi-processor as an analogy is missing the poing. The post is about how you can focus your attention on a single task only (true multitasking doesn't exist) and that you should keep focus longer instead of switching context too often.

jugg1es 7y ago
That's because the author is saying that the brain cannot perform parallel processing, which is clearly not true. You are making a distinction that the author does not.

pinky1417 7y ago

Cal's essay is backed by empirics. I'd add that, for those like me who used to believe that women are better multitaskers, both men and women are equally bad at multitasking. Early studies would sometimes show a female advantage or a male advantage (not sure why the female advantage idea came to be popular), but they were based on humans performing tasks that didn't resemble the real world... or at least tasks from the world of business/office work. A newer study, based on a real world task of meeting preparation, showed that both men and women were quite bad at multitasking: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs00426-018-1045-0 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs00426-018-1045-...

jugg1es 7y ago

This article is nonsense and I don't think any background research was done before writing it. It takes almost no effort to come up with an example of parallel processing in the brain. Pat your head and rub your tummy at the same time. How many times have you been driving and talking and listening to the radio at the same time? He must mean that conscious attention is not multi-threaded, and that is obviously true because the nature of paying attention is that you are focusing on a single thing.