Sensory satiation

I was thinking about background music and other kinds of background entertainment recently. In a sense, it's very counter-intuitive that we enjoy these things. Take a comparable computer system, some kind of post-writing machine or something. Now you tell that machine, hey, also process this music, or this podcast, or this moving nature scene. The machine would work less well because now it's doing more things with the same resources.

But, of course, we're not computers. I think the main difference in this case is to do with the nature of our processing. A computer is at its most efficient when it is processing one task at a time, but we can be more efficient by adding more parallel streams of information. Still, there's a big difference between saying that it's useful to consume more relevant data in parallel and saying that it's useful to add extra irrelevant data. What's that about?

I don't think it's just that our processing is parallel. Even in a multiprocessing-capable computer, the control system is still centralised. The firmware runs the bootcode, runs the OS, runs the services and user shell, runs the applications. Everything is top-down. But for us? It's kind of a mess. You can be trying to concentrate on the single task in front of you, but it seems that whatever part of your brain isn't engaged in that task can't be content simply sitting idle. Hey! Since I'm here and not doing anything, would you like to know what I'm thinking about?

So perhaps the inefficiency of background entertainment isn't so counter-intuitive after all. In a sense, you are being deliberately wasting brainpower, but it's brainpower that would have been distracting anyway. By simultaneously working and listening to music you can saturate your brain to the point where there's no extra processing left over for distractions. You could think of it less like a supercomputer wasting a general-purpose processing unit, and more like a company finding busywork for a special-purpose employee who has nothing to do at the moment.

That notion of special-purpose is key to this idea, though. Although I've found music is good for focusing, it's better the less interesting it is. Words are distracting unless I know the song well enough to ignore them, and podcasts or anything with informational content is right out. I've tried background TV before, which has always been a total disaster. On the other hand, when I was doing my recent round of bird drawings, I listened to podcasts the whole time and found the experience very flowy. It was like the words and the drawing occupied two entirely separate processing paths.

I think there's an interesting direction there in figuring out combinations of activities that satiate your brain without overloading it. My evidence so far seems to suggest visual and language work well together. Music and writing or music and code seem to be an imperfect pair, because I find it distracting sometimes. I suspect music and drawing might not be saturating enough. I haven't experimented much with writing and visuals, but maybe some expeditions to The Outside World would be interesting to try.

There are definitely some limitations to this approach. One thing I've noticed is that when I'm really focused, any external stimulation becomes distracting, even music. I would take this to mean that I'm operating at the limit of my capacity already, which kinda contradicts the special-purpose idea. Perhaps a better model is general-purpose processing with a special-purpose preference. It might be easier to distract those errant processes than convince them to do something against their preference, but when there's long division to do everyone has to come to the party.

The most peculiar thing is that what seems to be most productive for me is to listen to music and then have the music stop without me realising. Maybe it's just a matter of keeping the extra processing occupied until the task builds up enough to fill it.