Dave’s Whiteboard

I have mixed feelings about CoComment: I like having some record of where I’ve commented, but I haven’t spent enough time figuring out any but the most basic features.

Looking at my comments today, I saw about twelve pages of comment history. I decided to act like a brain and prune this back a bit.

For one thing, a bunch of the comments were on my own blogs — this one and another I think of as the most narrowly-focused blog around (I created it for my parents, so the average number of hits a day is “one”).

And, from time to time, I’m willing to let a conversation go. If I commented somewhere four months ago, and only one other person did as well, and there hasn’t been anything added since then, I feel safe in no long tracking.

When I had a corporate job and a corporate cubicle, I strongly resisted retaining too much paper. I had a small bookshelf and one filing cabinet. When the files got up to 90% capacity, I’d weed them back to about 66%. I think it was Robert Townsend of Up the Organization who said it’s not the stuff you throw away that gets you in trouble; it’s the stuff you keep.

Naturally, I like to think my pruning is scientific and purposeful, though I suspect a fair amount of it is simply ripping out what looks rippable at the time.

So I managed to toss around 20% of what was being tracked — which is way above that magic number of seven plus-or-minus two. I chose the “natural pruner” picture that I did because this little guy couldn’t do too much damage in too short a time (unlike the ‘antler rats’ I used to have to defend my shrubbery against).

I did find myself coming up with informal guidelines for what to retain, and why, so the exercise paid off and not only in reducing the number of comments I was (theoretically) tracking.

“Serious pruning” photo by London Permaculture;
“Informal pruning” photo by Ben Cooper.

Ken Carroll (among other things, co-founder of the Chinese Pod language-learning site) wrote about language and social distance — for example, how traditional language study can leave the student with formal and even inappropriate phrasing.

I followed a comment by Orlando Kelm, a language professor, to his own post about learning a foreign language. There he quotes an estimate of “around 500 hours for native speakers of English to obtain an intermediate level of proficiency… in Spanish, French, etc.”

With the 10,000-hours-for-expertise notion still simmering slowly on my mental stove, I did some quick-and-dirty math:

I took four years of French in high school, though none of the three schools I attended had a language lab. Call that 45 minutes x 180 days x 4 years, or 540 hours. Knock off 40 hours for inattention (ha!); add 150 or so for study or practice outside of class.

That’s about 650 hours before age 18. (I took some French in college, but again, no language lab, and the courses were more civilization and culture.)

So what? My unscientific conclusions:

• Timing matters. You can begin learning a language at any age (Angelo Roncalli, later Pope John XXIII, began studying Turkish in his late 50s while papal nuncio to Turkey). All things being equal, though, earlier is better.
• Motivation matters. I wanted to learn French, and my first teacher, Brother André, was an encouraging, skillful teacher and a native speaker.
• Pathways matter. Although I used French very little after college, I didn’t abandon it completely. When the opportunity arose to use it (two trips to France since 2000), I felt as though I had to clear away mental debris. Some of what I’d learned never really left, though it sure was hiding well.

As Bill Deterline said, things take longer than they do. I wonder if there isn’t some combination of time and effort related to learning and habit. Dr. Ken Cooper, who developed the idea of aerobics, wrote about exercising 3 or 4 times a week for 6 weeks in order to develop “the training effect.”

Imagine that as the apprentice level of skill: you’ve made the commitment and have acquired the absolute basics. You’ve invested 30 minutes or so a day for 6 weeks, or 50 hours (give or take).

The intermediate status that Kelm talks about might be an example of a journeyman level — 500 hours. You’re not an amateur any more. In fact, at the same time you sense your abilities and know all too well your limitations.

Levitin’s 10,000 hours takes you to the master level.

I don’t want to stretch the notions farther then they merit; I see them just as metaphorical waystations on a spectrum of ability.

Photo (”Paris Opera on strike!”) by Philippe Leroyer.

Series: The brain rules!

Working my way through John Medina’s Brain Rules, I’ve been skipping around rather than following numerical order. The rules are a set of concepts, not a recipe.

Garr Reynolds made today’s choice easy— rule 10, “Vision trumps all other senses.” Reynolds posted about brain rules and presentations. Here’s a presentation he put together for three of Medina’s rules:

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It’s good to keep in mind (no pun intended) that we don’t see with our eyes, we see with our brains. We don’t have a little movie screen inside our heads. Some of the things that Medina points out:

• Specialized cells in the retina respond to particular aspects of the incoming photons. Some discern only outlines or edges, some only motion, and so on.
• Similar specialization occurs in the visual cortex. According to Medina, one region responds to a line tilted at 40° but not a line tilted at 45°.
• Far from being a camera, the brain deconstructs incoming information, processes it through filters, and then reconstructs “what it thinks it sees. Or what it thinks you should see.”

I’m starting three projects for the same client, and I’m still in a pleasant, setting-things-up frame of mind. It might be the rainy weather we’ve had — my neighbor is gathering two of every kind of animal she can find — but I find myself thinking about difficulties and setbacks.

That’s not from a sense of doom and gloom (I don’t think). It’s more the case that I want to remember what I’ve learned when progress has been tough.

In the last few months, my biggest work-related problems had a lot to do with different perceptions of what the project was about, what the standards were, and how the client would use the end product. I tended to focus too much on my own slice of the project pie; I’m sorry now that I didn’t more actively follow up when my main client contacts were always too busy to review drafts or apparently uninterested in details.

So, with my new work starting off well, I want to keep those problems on my mental dashboard. It’ll be easier to deal with delayed or miscommunication later on if I work at building timeliness and clarity here at the start.

Nothing startling there. But to set the overall level of challenge in perspective, I have a relative whose spouse has been assigned to a year-long training project — with the Afghan national police in Kabul.

So I’m wondering — how was your day? Care to talk about some training/learning challenge you’ve recently had . Especially if it was one you had to struggle with, what have you learned?

Rear-view photo by magpie967 / stephen turner.

Jonah Lehrer writes about the hidden cost of smart drugs. He examines Johann Hari’s account of taking Provigil and the drugs effect on how well he functioned.

The short summary: Hari felt he absorbed new information more easily, worked more steadily, got more done:

Normally, one day out of seven I have a day when I’m working at my best – I’ve slept really well, and everything comes easily and fast. Provigil makes every day into that kind of day. It’s like I have been upgraded to a new operating system: Johann 3.0.

Hari was able to stop easily as well, he reports. Eventually he felt conflicted, deciding “taking narcolepsy drugs when you don’t have narcolepsy is just stupid.”

Lehrer’s post looks at some of the potential drawbacks to such brain boosters. He quotes one researching as saying that distractibility may not be a bad thing — it may increase the information available to the conscious mind.

I’d like to be more productive, more focused, and a better dancer, too, but the pessimist inside me is reluctant to engage in “unclinical trials.”

And to some extent, I feel it’s the quality rather than the quantity of what’s going on inside my head. (Not that the quality is that high, necessarily, but it’s the quality I have to work with.) People complain about the fire hose approach to training and learning; why increase the water pressure?

On mornings when I’m feeling more sluggish than usual, for now I’ll stick with two cups of what I think of as Lutheran coffee.

Fire hose booster photo by Matt Adams.