River: Crosstalk

This is the third of a series of three River posts about communication and conversation: the first was "Talking long distance", and the second was "Talking with you" I'm afraid my mindspace has been rather taken up recently with things like New Song Energy and getting ready for ConChord, so these are coming out a lot more slowly than I originally intended. Onward!

The last couple of days, a lot of my time has disappeared into watching old CSI episodes with Colleen (she's borrowing the DVDs from our younger daughter). Colleen can get things done while watching TV. I can't.

If there is anything at all with words anywhere in my auditory or visual environment, I will pay attention to it. If there are more than just one thing involving words, my attention will get split at random. I can't multitask.

In particular, I can't divide my attention between reading, listening, writing, talking, and thinking. And I have to think for a moment before I either write or speak.

The only thing that reliably blocks words coming into my ears is reading; if I'm reading something -- a book or a computer screen -- I will not hear you talking! I can't ignore anything else.

This is a phenomenon that cflute calls "crosstalk". As you can see from the start of the Wikipedia article, it's an accurate description of it:

In electronics, the term crosstalk (XT) refers to any phenomenon by which a signal transmitted on one circuit or channel of a transmission system creates an undesired effect in another circuit or channel.

I only have one channel for processing words. It's used for reading, understanding speech, writing, talking, and thinking. I think mainly in words -- it's called subvocalization.

I believe I've mentioned a couple of times that I have to compose what I'm saying before I say or write it. I subvocalize when I'm doing this, and I also subvocalize when I'm reading, which makes it hard to skim. Basically, if I'm hearing or reading words, I won't be able to hear the internal voice that I use to compose words. Literally, I can't think. I discovered, quite recently, that even talking to myself blocks thinking; I always used to talk to myself when I was out walking. It was always pretty aimless.

I've been writing more songs recently, and I'm pretty sure that this is, at least in part, due to the fact that I've learned to shut up and listen to my muse instead of my own voice. I've also learned to turn the radio off in the car: I can think in the car because driving in familiar territory is almost entirely a matter of visual and kinesthetic input, and those don't interfere with the verbal channel. (If I don't have all the landmarks memorized, I'll need to read a map or talk to a navigator. That is verbal.)

 

In electronics, crosstalk can be prevented by shielding. I don't have any shields. Whatever's coming in on the highest bandwdith channel -- visual or audio, in that order -- is going to dominate my attention. I can turn my eyes away from a book or computer, but I can't turn off my ears.

I've already written about my difficulty carrying on a conversation if there are distractions. If I concentrate, I can usually manage to carry on a conversation with one or two people in a noisy party, but my attention is sure to be caught now and then by a snippet of another conversation; I'll miss things, and sometimes stop in the middle of a sentence or even a song. And it's hard. At some point it's easier for me to leave in search of someplace quiet. Even with only a half-dozen people in our living room on a Wednesday night, an animated conversation can easily drive me into the office, especially if it's on a topic I'm not interested in. They'll still have fun without me, and you know where to find me if you want quiet talk about geekery or music.

Similarly, conversation blocks writing. I really enjoy having a laptop in the living room where I can talk with Colleen, but I can't use it for writing anything more than very short LJ comments or email replies: conversation blocks the channel I use for writing. I can use IM, but I'm going to respond a lot more slowly than I would in a quiet environment.

 

Crosstalk comes into play whenever there are multiple inputs. I noticed this with cflute on our recent trip to Seattle: we were engaged in a particularly tricky and strenuous bit of carpet-moving, and when more than one person was talking Callie would raise her hand and wait for silence when she wanted to say something. It didn't always work, because we mostly had our eyes on the carpet, but it seems like a good strategy when you do have eye contact. A loud "Excuse me" might work when you don't. The equivalent in a filk circle is hitting a loud chord on the guitar, or standing up to sing a cappella.

 

To summarize: read / listen / write / talk / think. Pick exactly one.

Where's the Bear?

I use too many different computers. At any given time I might be on one of three machines at home, or one of two at work. Managing things like browsers, email clients, and IM clients, all of which get upset if I'm using the same account from two different places, is a bit of a chore. IM is the worst; the others are at least manageable.

All of those machines know whether I'm typing at them or not. In many cases, based on the time of day, they might have a pretty good idea of where I am when I'm not typing. It would be really good if there were some kind of service, independent of IM, that could manage my presence, kill off extraneous IM and email clients if necessary, and let people know the best way to contact me.

It could probably be done with Jabber, a private XMPP server, and a batch of specialized clients. Anyone out there know of something like that? Preferably for Debian or Ubuntu.

A better place, one lemming at a time

"If there are one or more people on your friends list who make your world a better place just because they exist, and who you would not have met (in real life or not) without the Internet, then post this same sentence in your journal."

(from ravan and others)

Taking the rest of the day off

What was supposed to have been a simple matter of meeting the flower_cat at the passport office to apply for a passport for o the Y.D. ended up, between Colleen's health and the fact that the !@#$% feds no longer accept the version of a birth certificate that we had on hand and that they were accepting a mere couple of months ago, taking all morning and until well after 2pm.

At that point I could see that, if I wanted lunch and a walk, I was looking at an hour's worth of commuting for at most 2 hours' worth of work. I'll pass, thanks.

Walking and singing

Got in a good walk this afternoon after lunch, meaning (in this case) between about 3pm and 4pm. Good, solid exercise walk, three times around the Rose Garden. Or was it four? I lost count.

The route takes me past a high school; it was amusing to be strolling past kids a quarter my age. Of course, they were mostly in groups and more interested in their conversations than in covering ground. But still...

About 30-40 minutes of practicing; mostly stuff from the concert set. I still get distracted; it's usually safe to assume that there will be at least one trainwreck during the concert, but it's pretty solid otherwise. Discovered that I've been playing an F in the first line of third quatrain of QV, not the C that I originally notated. That, in turn, means that the second and third quatrains harmonize, and explains why I occasionally mix them up. Anyway, that means I can use the second (lower) melody with the men's ending, and it'll work.

Wheelin', meanwhile, may have acquired a C-C7-E7-F riff between what I still think of as the verse and the refrain sections. The C7-E7 slide is one I learned from my brother years and years ago, in "Railroad Bill" and "Freight Train". Always wanted an excuse to use it.

It feels like an odd sort of Sunday, not a Tuesday. Grumble. That means that tomorrow will probably feel like an odd sort of Monday, at least until I get home.

Perfectly cubical

Just noticed that tomorrow is 2³/3³...

And that Thursday will be perfect...