How Long Is Forever?
When Alice (in Wonderland) asks the White Rabbit the above question, he answers, “Sometimes, just one second.” While the US National Institute of Standards and Technology’s atomic clock ticks away inexorably, relentlessly, our internal perception of time is much less regular. The AC measures the frequency of an atomic transition in the cesium atom to define one second. Specifically, one second = 9,192,631,770 vibrations. The current version of the AC will not lose or gain a second over a span of three hundred million years (what happens after that I wonder).
We may very well have cesium atoms in our brains, but as far as I know, they’re not telling us anything about time. For us, forever can be a second or a second can be forever. We say things like “How can my granddaughter be in college now? That’s impossible! I swear she was just in grade school last year.” Or “how can it be that things like electric lighting, cars, plastic, the telephone, and television are less than 150 years old?” Or “How can it be that just from the time I was born, these things came into being: video tape recorders, hard disk drives, computers, satellites, ATMs, pocket calculators, email, CD-ROMs, cell phones, robots, the Hubble telescope, texting, DVDs, USB thumb drives, Netflix and Google, Bluetooth, Facebook, Twitter, self-driving cars, pneumatic wine decorkers, and Bitcoin ATMs?”
Re the latter question, Barclays Bank put out a study recently that tells us that human productivity has increased almost thirtyfold since 1760, mostly due to technology advances. We have gone from a baseline output of 100 units per hour in 1760 to nearly three thousand today. That seems incredible, especially because I’m always asking myself why I never seem to get anything done.
In technical terms, productivity measures the efficiency of production. For labor productivity, that means how many units we produce, whatever those units may be (new cars, for example), per hour of work put into producing them. From a psychological perspective, Psychology Today tells us, an individual’s productivity depends on factors like Motivation, Talent, Training, Work Environment, Support from Others, Time Management, and even Luck.
No wonder I never seem to get anything done. I sadly lack in the MTTWESOTMEL department [pronounced met-we-SOT-mell]. Multitasking for me usually involves ADD-induced pausing amid one task to consider something else I might be doing and as a result forgetting what task I had been in the middle of doing. Despite what someone might tell you, humans cannot multi-task. At best, they can switch from one task to another and back again quickly. As we do, one study reveals, this puts heavy burdens on attention, memory, and focus. Talking on a cellphone while driving, for example, “leaves people as cognitively impaired as if they’d had two or three drinks.” Perhaps I can take some comfort, then, in thinking of my multitaskdebility as the cognitive equivalent of being the designated driver.
Perhaps not. Imagine my chagrin when I learned there are people described as supertaskers. The supertaskers can manage actual multitasking. In one study, this was driving, memorizing the order of words, and doing simple math problems. The key factors in being able to accomplish such feats are controlling emotions under stress, selectively deciding what information to pay attention to, and, conversely, ignoring all irrelevant information and distractions.
Must be nice. Theoretically, we all could be supertaskers if we, ahem, put our minds to it. On good days, I even think I could reach this exalted state of productivity. But then I look down and see my “I don’t have ADD, I…hey, look a chicken!” t-shirt I’m wearing and experience a sudden, intense desire to pop out for a KFC famous bowl. I am so busted.
What was the question again?
