Brains are weird. If you pull out e.g. Raskin, you find that we generally have about 5 conscious attention slots. Try it: List how many things you are actively 'doing' or 'worrying about' but discount anything that pops into your head *while* you're listing -- the *pop* means you just shuffled your working set.

This is often quoted and can be a serious problem when performing latency-critical tasks like piloting an airplane or car.

Now, it turns out we're using a lot of the rest of our brain to maintain our map of the universe, from basic proprioception on up through emotion and knowledge. (This extrapolated in part from some findings in _The_Head_Trip_.) So if a "task" requires more creativity than latency, there's a chance some neurons are "simulating" it whether or not we're devoting the direct executive power of "attention" to it. We seem to have a mechanism, as humans, to keep creating hypotheticals, crunching the consequences, and, through messy biological mechanisms (combining both interrupts and polling), getting the results vetted "consciously."

In fact, the simulation aspect seems to be how we interpret memories, while "attention" is the I/O layer, where we become aware of sensory input and formulate our output/response. But if we fail to poll either our senses or our memories, we can just plain forget about things, or respond based on an outdated model: Consider the distracted (or just plain bad) driver who resurfaces from [dialing phone | eating lunch | applying makeup] and starts to merge based on a mental model (a hypothetical) that missed its chance to include the car in his/her blind spot.

Now contrast that to the programmer or any other creative nerd working on a task that's relatively latency-independent (aside from deadlines) and throughput-dependent ('quantity of creative breakthroughs' being the metric that results in completed work), in a fixed logical system that [normally] isn't going to change by surprise. That sort of system can successfully be modeled, and if the nerd's brain is a good enough simulator or emulator, it can be modeled reliably.

At that point it's not helpful to stare at the editor watching for a tiger to pounce or the cursor to sneak up in your blind spot; what counts is keeping the simulations running until the goopy neural network has modeled the hypothetical approaches that can be sanity-checked and perhaps taken; that's "imagination" at work.

It seems like both the short-term attention slots and longer-term memory and modeling rely on a sort of DRAM-like refresh -- but since we're meat, and meat is messy, we're also refreshing the neuronal connections (the basic wiring, but figure pointers in a software analogy) to our relatively persistent long-term memories.

The "five slots" rule of thumb behaves sort of like a linked list, or a chain of 'smart' DRAMs where each has to contain instructions to refresh the next; grow the chain too long and short-term memory decays, get sidetracked and you're filling the buffer with new I/O instead of remembering to check your mirrors or water the plants.

...

The trick is to know which tasks require "realtime" processing, know which ones you get equal or greater throughput on by doing something else (like using 'background noise' to inspire new hypotheticals), and have watchdogs in place so you remember to watch where you're going and don't forget entirely about tasks you're letting bake, respectively.

...

The real problem, on the other hand, is that most of our technological distractions are now communications-based, and a lot of tasks that used to be polled (or "bakeable") have become interrupt-based (IM, ringing cellphones, popups). We have a gut impulse to move to interrupts to squeeze more and more from our fixed lifespans, but there are two problems that result in gripes like the one discussed here:

1. People who can't adapt to the distraction-rich environment, whether for real ADD or lack of skill, can't accept these new extraneous interrupts as part of the 'background noise' and make "errors," attending to the ringing cellphone and crashing the bus.

2. Primate neurology produces different responses to different scenarios; since time immemorial we were selected to associate throughput and sustenance, even back before agriculture -- "got a lot of work done" triggers the same satiety and sense of well-being that foraging (or consuming) a lot of food did. Latency scenarios are governed more by other survival and panic responses; "did not crash the bus" conveys a different sense of relief governed by different chemicals.

We're not used to measuring success in terms of "did not crash the bus," and we have poor cultural mechanisms for rewarding it. (Since Dickens, being high strung has been the condition of the working class that has the misfortune of being replaceable, after all; we will, however, reward people greatly for massive throughput, as when celebrities release a blockbuster or upper management does something 'important.' We have an innate understanding of the risk/reward of those latter events -- like when some monkey dared leap a ravine and found a banana grove -- but we're less used to rewarding someone for simply responding quickly or maintaining the status quo without having things go to pieces, even if it requires as much human effort.)

When monkeys were coupled by higher-latency links of equal throughput -- note that information throughput for brain-work between individual humans has only increased a few times, with the invention of writing, the photograph, the motion picture, and the useful computer program, each requiring greater and greater effort to produce with acceptable quality -- effort was under proportionally less demand; the deadlines were longer. The ability of human labor was also pretty much a fixed quantity until the industrial revolution hit, at which point the consequences of technology-augmented individual action ballooned like crazy. (Few people ever crashed the horse, and if they did they probably didn't take anyone else out with them. We died of stuff like flu and plague and brainworms instead, but we weren't worried when we couldn't see it coming.)

The point? Being "successful" enough to maintain our standards of living (which the meat in our heads interprets as 'survival'), and thus our relative satisfaction with our lives now requires adaptation to higher and higher frequencies of interruption, while our brains' capacity for throughput has remained pretty constant. (What did individual authors use the once-ridiculous capacity of CDs for? Encoding the equivalent of an evening's live performance, or encoding the 'multimedia' equivalent of a book with illustrations.) There are thus some good arguments that we're spending more time geared up in our panic responses despite our improved standards of living and exciting new modes of leisure.