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RE: Unconscious Abilities of the Mind
The mind is an unbelievable machine. It will take a really long time for anything in AI to catch up to the complexity of what our brain does on a daily basis.
One of my professors in college studies cognition in grad school and his group came to understand that our brains can only do serious work for 26 minutes at a time then we need a break or our comprehension suffers. It was a great class because we took a 5 minute break each class to allow our mind to refresh and get back into the groove.
26m break? So you can't read on and on more than 26m or else you comprehend it less and less?
Yes essentially. He made the hypothesis that we can’t keep our attention span for a great length of time otherwise we lose it and our productivity goes down. They wrote a paper on it I will see if I can find it but their findings were essentially that our attention is limited to 26 minutes when doing something intensive such as learning in a classroom, working numbers (he’s also a statistician so this was pretty key to a good portion of his life) and other serious mind focusing activities. Obviously there are anomalies and deviations from this but I believe he was relating it to students, office workers and others who would need concentration for mundane but important things.
They also tried to find the optimum length of time for a break and it was 7 minutes I believe; not too long but not too short. Enough time to allow the conscious mind a break.
It does make sense to a certain extent, not sure about the time and recovery. So a 5 second break is enough? 1 minute? Does it have to be the same amount of time?