Automatic Distractions: How Habit Enables Multitasking
Distractability, complexity, and condensation
Automization of a habit enables a person to focus their attention on things unrelated to that habit while performing it. When you automatize the habit of writing, you gain the ability to think about things unrelated to the act of writing while you’re writing. We can walk and talk and think about what we’re going to do later all at the same time because we can walk and talk out of unconscious habit. Part of what makes something a personal habit for you is that you don’t have to think about it while you do it. This indicates that distractibility during habit performance is positively correlated with habit automaticity. When you are first habituating a habit you have to focus all your attention on the practice of that habit, but deliberately cultivated habits become unconscious routines through repeated focused practice. But why? Why does it work like that?
You see structurally similar dynamics play out with conceptual thought. Once you gain an understanding of a concept, you are able to condense that concept with other concepts to imagine and then understand new higher-level concepts without thinking about the original concept. This ability economizes thought and it’s represented mathematically through multiplication.
It is much more efficient to perform multiplicative operations relative to additive ones when calculating answers to complex problems. It takes much longer to add five ten times than to multiply five times ten. Habit cultivation is like learning how to multiply except that, instead of affording the ability to perform more complex calculations, it affords the ability to perform more complex activities.
It’s useful to think about habituation in terms of dimensionality. A thing’s dimensionality is measured by the diversity of its interactive opportunities. Higher dimensional objects do not necessarily interact with more things than lower dimensional objects, but they necessarily have the ability to interact with different types of things than lower dimensional objects. Complexity is a measure of dimensionality. The more dimensions something has, the more complex it is. A 2D representation of a circle is much less complex than a 3D sphere because it has fewer interactive opportunity types. Since the sphere has depth, it has the opportunity to interact with deep things whereas the 2D circle lacks the opportunity to interact with deep things. The 3D sphere has the opportunity to interact with an entire category of objects that the 2D circle can’t even hope to touch.
Another useful analogy involves sensory perception. Touching and smelling something that you have only ever seen increases the complexity of your understanding of that thing. When you are first experiencing something through a new mode of sensory perception, your attention is consumed by information from that one mode. If you have only ever tasted and never smelled freshly baked cookies, then your attention will be consumed by their smell when you first notice it. At this point, you have two separate experiences of freshly baked cookies. One experience is composed of information from the smell mode, the other from the taste mode. Eventually, however, you condense these separate uni-modal uni-sensory experiences of freshly baked cookies into one multi-modal multi-sensory experience. The multi-modal experience is more complex than the two uni-modal experiences it condenses because it is more dimensional.
Crucially, a multi-modal experience is not the simple combination of multiple uni-modal experiences, but the complex condensation of them. You cannot add uni-modal experiences to get multi-modal experiences because multi-modal experiences have dimensions that their ingredient uni-modal experiences do not have. This is illustrated in the movie Ratatouille when Remy and Emile realize that the taste of cheese and fruit together has unique flavor profile distinct from that of either cheese or fruit alone. The sensory profile of the multi-sensory experience of freshly baked cookies differs from the sum of their smell and taste profiles because it involves a type of sensation that is only possible to experience through the interaction of multiple uni-modal perceptual modes.
You don’t get coffee by putting coffee grounds on top of the coffee machine (combination). The coffee grounds and the coffee machine must interact in a special way to get coffee (condensation). Coffee is its own thing because it has unique qualities irreducible to those held by the things that interacted to produce it. Interaction creates dimension through condensation.
Once again, it’s useful to invoke mathematical vocabularies. Multiplication is a language for mathematically measuring the condensed outcomes of interaction. If A=5 and B=10, then A+B equals 15 while A*B equals 50. 50 is so much more than 15. 50 has a lot of things 15 doesn’t. When A and B interact multiplicatively, they produce something considerably greater than the sum of their parts. Why? Why do they do that? What is happening in multiplication?
The answer is that multiplication is a condensative operation. This means that multiplication recognizes 1) that when multiple things interact they condense to produce one new thing and 2) that condensed products have dimensions that can only emerge when multiple sets of dimensions interact. Addition only recognizes that multiple things sit together when combined. 15 is coffee grounds on top of the coffee machine, 50 is coffee. Algebra is a language for reverse engineering the dimension condensation produced by multiplication. If we know A*B=50 and that B=5, we can deduce that B=10 because a 5D thing has to interact with a 10D thing to produce a 50D thing. Numbers are signs indicating things’ dimensionality.
“Condensing” is usually interpreted as shrinking so my use of it to refer to a process that increases instead of decreases dimensionality may seem strange, but this interpretation is actually on the right track. Condensation creates dimension by shrinking things into summaries and then interacting the summaries to create a new thing with distinct properties. Condensation economizes information to make room for new types of information. When you first notice the smell of freshly baked cookies, the smell overwhelms you with information. If you’re curious about it, you can identify many of the smell’s qualities in your experience. Perhaps the smell is chocolatey, oatmealy, or peanut buttery. Perhaps it’s chocolatey and peanut buttery (my best case scenario). In order for the multiple uni-sensory experiences of taste and smell to interact in a way that produces a single multi-sensory experience, the informational content of the ingredient uni-sensory experiences must first be summarized.
You can’t identify chocolatey aromas in a smell*taste multi-sensory experience because smelling is a uni-sensory mode of perception. A smell*taste experience can only be perceived through a smell*taste perceptual mode. Once you begin to look for smells, you focus your attention on information perceived through smelling, but you perceive the multi-sensory experience through a more complex perceptual mode created through the interaction of the less complex perceptual modes of smell and taste. To identify the smell of a smell you must smell, to identify the taste of a taste you must taste, to identify the smaste of a smaste you must smaste.
Similarly, the concept of zorse condenses the informational content of horse and zebra into one thing by summarizing the information of horse and zebra and interacting the conceptual summaries. We can uni-modally understand a zorse by conceptualizing it interchangeably in horse terms and zebra terms. We can think, “Huh, this zorse has the stature of a horse but the stripes of a zebra.” But we can also multi-modally understand a zorse by conceptualizing it in zorse terms. We can think, “This zorse has fewer stripes than other zorses.” The informational content of zorse does not include all of the informational content in horse and zebra, as well as all the information specific to zorse, because that would be too much information to process and use. Zorse summarizes horse and zebra to make room for information specific to zorse like zorses’ average number of stripes.
(As the zorse example illustrates, we only see a perceptual mode as multi-modal when we have its ingredient perceptual modes in our mind’s eye. In a sense, the “multi-modal” zorse and smaste perceptual modes are uni-modal. They can be condensed with other perceptual modes to create new even more complex multi-modal modes that will eventually be understood as uni-modal modes when they are condensed with other modes.)
Bringing it back to habits: Automatic habits can be understood as unconscious activity summaries and habituation can be understood as the process through which activities are unconsciously summarized. When you automatize a habit, you create a mental summary of an activity that affords you the ability to condense that activity with another activity into a new more complex activity. Walking, talking, and thinking about what you will do later are multiple activities that can be independently performed, but they can also be condensed into a single activity through habituation.
You can only ever focus your attention on one thing. That one thing may be the condensation of multiple things, but it’s still ultimately one thing in your attention. When I look at downtown Dallas, I see many buildings. If I start looking at a specific building or cluster of buildings, I turn my attention away from downtown Dallas to something else. If multitasking means “the simultaneous conscious performance of multiple tasks,” then multitasking is impossible. However, if multitasking means “the conscious performance of one task and the simultaneous unconscious performance of other tasks,” then we multitask every second we live. We don’t consciously attend to our breathing, but we breathe while consciously attending to things other than our breath.
Habituation is the process by which we offload tasks from consciousness to unconsciousness to free up space in consciousness for things unrelated to the habituated tasks. We have to consciously attend to the practice of habits we intentionally aim to cultivate because we have to consciously explore a practice to create a useful mental model of it. Personal habit economizes activity by summarizing the information of a practice into a concise behavioral script that can be activated and deployed by the unconscious when attention is focused elsewhere. When we simultaneously do something consciously and a bunch of things unconsciously, we condense multiple activities into one.
When we understand habituation as summarization for condensation, the relationship between habit automaticity and distractibility makes some sense. Automatic habit enables distractibility when performing an activity because an automatic habit is a summary model of that activity activated by the unconscious. Through the summarization of habit, you can take in new types of information while performing a habituated task. That which you can do well while distracted you have habituated.
I’ll leave you with a mysterious observation: The way habit works for us is the way the universe changes. The universe progressively complexifies through the experimental transformation of habits. When a body of water that habitually sits still gets distracted by a new opening, it floods through the hole and explores it until it reaches a new equilibrium. It simultaneously sits and flows until it develops a new balance of habits in its now hole-inclusive environment. Viruses like COVID mutate when their habits cease to yield the benefits they expect because of changes we make to their environments through things like vaccines. The virus becomes distracted by our new defenses and experiments with new variants while maintaining most of its original habits. Every evolutionary adaption is a response to a distraction characterized by the experimental practice of new potential habits and the maintenance of many previously ingrained habits. Evolution is habitual experimentation by a habituated universe. When we self-habituate, we evolve.