Can it? In reality software leaks memory, periodic maintenance tasks like reindexing and defragmentation are necessary to maintain performance, etc.

More recently, a lot of simplistic, reductionist psychology emerged that equates a walk on a busy street with a life in the city.

This is the bingo quote for me. And that research that showed 59% of one group taking cake, 63% of the other group taking an apple—is that 4% difference even statistically significant?

They have parks in cities so that people can have a little bit of the country there; I’ve always thought that they should have little bits of the city out in the country.

In the early 20thC, it was widely believed that busy electric signs were dangerous distractions to drivers; then research showed that, in fact, they helped to keep drivers alert and aware – of things on the road, not just the signage. There’s a long tradition of underestimating human cognitive capacity (particularly filtering capacity).

Furthermore, early childhood development research shows that kids raised in urban environments are, ceteris paribus, better at a number of cognitive tasks (especially wayfinding, but also spatial comprehension) than their suburban peers. Which shouldn’t be surprising, but apparently runs counter to this journalist’s preconceptions.

I’d put it as “Spending too much time on the street may make you chronically mentally fatigued.”

There’s probably a paper to be written testing the cognitive abilities of big-city bike messengers, who spend lots of time in high-risk situations on the street that must be quite cognitively demanding.

To the extent Bernie Madoff is cognitively fatigued right now, it’s probably not because he lives on the Upper East Side, but because he’s in trouble with the law.

I doubt that he left Paris because of Paris. I suspect he left because of the demands of his social life in Paris. Which is a very different thing that navigating a city of strangers to walk to Borders to buy a novel. Picasso’s problem was more like the stress of a person at a company holiday party, where appearances must be maintained, asses must be kissed, etc.

Or even from, say, 9 to 6 in the day. They might have a place called a ‘cubicle’.

On the other hand, a way to avoid cognitive fatigue is to use the brain for different things. A lunchtime walk around Times Square is very different than a morning of coding. And it’s not like walking around a city really demands 100% of your mental function.

There are good scientific reasons to keep the brain as computer model? Who knew…
I think you can make a strong case for the computer model having been a very productive one for advances in psychology, but the evidence for the brain actually having a strong computational model has always been pretty weak. Whether the evidence for other models is any stronger is of course up for debate…

“Recent research by scientists at the Santa Fe Institute used a set of complex mathematical algorithms to demonstrate that the very same urban features that trigger lapses in attention and memory—the crowded streets, the crushing density of people—also correlate with measures of innovation, as strangers interact with one another in unpredictable ways. It is the “concentration of social interactions” that is largely responsible for urban creativity, according to the scientists.”

… where Scott Page and the SFI gang do their thing against the backdrop of a bunch of interesting empirical work (Vernon Henderson, Edward Glaeser) testing Jane Jacobs’ entirely non-mathematical ruminations on diversity and innovation in and around cities.

I don’t mean this as a swipe on Page and SFI: it’s very cool work they’ve done, and Page certainly knows the richer history behind his urban stuff, and his diversity book. Berman’s experiment reported by Lehrer is clever too (although when I FB-linked this BG article, a friend quite reasonably pointed out that the phrase “the busy streets of downtown Ann Arbor” rings a bit comical to anyone who has moved from Ann Arbor to, oh, an actual city). Lehrer’s piece is what it is (a short report), but if he’d had the time and space this could have been spun out into a great longer essay on the contradictions of city life, where some of the richer historical and social-scientific backgrounds to these recent findings could be laid out.

Indeed… :)
So, thinking is NOT information processing, information apparently just “appears” in the brain without going through our senses (which are all limited), etc. Interesting. Sounds almost like a philosopher without a clue of the biological underpinnings of a human body. By the way, I never said dual task performance is a mystery. Just that it works differently to how you present it. :)

As for the paradigm shift, I agree that there are good reasons to ditch the brain as a computer model, but there must be evidence, not some abstract desire and theories. There are good, well controlled experiments where you cannot come up with alternative explanations for the results, and there are bad ones (over 90%). Currently, there are no good solid results that would support such a shift. I’m sure when/if that finally happens, many people would be saying “I said it all along, but nobody listened”. Nobody listens because there are no factual grounds for those ideas at this point in time. And every time someone blames sociology of science for the difference of opinion, it’s very annoying – do a good, solid experiment to prove your ideas. If you can’t, don’t engage in empty rhetoric about the implications of results that are not there to begin with.

Again, straw man alert. I am not denying:

a: People get tired.

b: Some tasks are harder than others.

c: After a hard task (cognitively speaking or, for that matter, non-cognitively speaking) you need a break.

As far as the discussion of the Spelke results goes: it’s true that writers in the cognitivist tradition have spent a huge amount of time denying that those experimental results really mean what they apparently do mean, or that they have any implications, or that the conclusions drawn are valid or blah blah blah. To be honest this has more to do with the sociology of science than anything else. It was vital for the ‘brain is a digital computer’ variety of cognitivism to deny that attention is essentially a skill which we learn as opposed to a resource which we use. Therefore, to repeat, a lot of ink was spilt denying the implications of these experiments: they were, to use Kuhn’s language, ‘paradigm shifting’ and at that time the paradigm was not for shifting.

CF: ‘Most scientists would say that it’s the executive control aka switching mechanism that’s at work here, not attention per se.’ MOST scientists? Really? Who? Scientists in the ecological psychological tradition? Behaviourists? Discursive psychologists? Psychologists in the post-cognitivist tradition (e.g. Brooks, Wheeler, van Gelder,Clancey)? I don’t think so.

Indeed I don’t even accept the rhetoric used here. What do the words ‘executive’ ‘control’ and ‘mechanism’ bring to the discussion other than creating the illusion that someone has ‘proved’ that the brain is a digital computer or even that this is a useful metaphor without arguing for it? The Spelke results are only ‘mysterious’ from a cognitivist perspective. Abandoning that, we conclude that the brain is a biological organ, that it needs fats, water and glucose (amongst other things) to function: if it runs low on these things, then performance suffers. Likewise, we cannot ‘concentrate’ for hours on end for the same reason that a normal person can’t just get up off their sofa and run a marathon. However with training, almost anyone could get up and run a marathon. That’s what people do: they learn. The more you do something the better you get at it (ceteris paribus). And that’s all there is to it. Dual task performance is only a mystery if you start off with the idea that thinking ‘is’ information processing, that information ‘passes into’ the brain via (limited) information channels, that there is an ‘executive control mechanism’ that ‘switches’ between tasks etc. But if you ditch all these ideas, the ‘mystery’ dissolves.