The Scarcity Trap, Bandwidth, and My ADD

Oh yeah, writing! I forgot all about it this week.  I need to get back to it for sure.  I have several possible blog posts circulating in my head, and I need to rewrite my speech and practice it. I think that speech, about climbing the Needle with my dad, will be a fun post to write as well.  It has been a fairly busy week so far with Susan having to do homework every night, and with me starting on the R class.  I still have a bit of cleaning to do in our house as well, and I don’t have mom’s house rented yet.  I don’t understand why so many people are dragging their feet.   

It's been too nice outside to sit in and write.  It was T-shirt weather at 13,000 feet at Arapaho Basin for skiing on Saturday.  

What have I been thinking about? I suppose the concept of “bandwidth” and how we distribute it was bouncing around in my head yesterday.  I listened to a “Hidden Brain” podcast about the concept of The Scarcity Trap.  Of course if the scarce resource is food we would obviously focus our bandwidth on trying to find more of it. This eventually led me to consider how the concept of bandwidth can help me understand, or at least describe, myself.   

It is interesting that we will do this no matter what the scarce resource is. Money is one that people have always known about, but the reaction to being poor has long been misunderstood.  It, of course, makes a lot of sense when you think of the reaction to being poor as the exact same psychological response as the response to being hungry: one will focus their available bandwidth on obtaining the scarce resource.  Right now Susan’s scarce resource is time.  

It has long been noted that poor people tend to focus on short term economic goals such as putting food on the table today. They do seem to be better at coming up with short term necessities than people who are not under the same temporal pressures.  This has always come at the cost of long term financial planning.  The traditional response of philanthropists has been to attempt to educate the poor on long term financial planning, often with very little results.  

The problem is not that poor people who are under immediate financial stress necessarily don’t understand the value of long term planning. The problem is that all their bandwidth is taken up to focus on the more immediate issue, and therefore are physically, or psychologically, unable to consider the long term.

I was considering the concept of bandwidth while meditating yesterday. I am currently doing the focus lessons on Headspace, and one of the exercises is to move the mind’s attention incrementally across different parts of the body. Two interesting things occur as one does this. The first is that there seems to be an additional sensation to whatever you might be feeling.  I can only characterize it as sometimes tingling, sometimes heat, sometimes flushness, and sometimes totally nondescript.  The second is more obvious, but perhaps more enlightening as well.  In focusing on the various parts of the body you become aware of the various sensations that are present in those parts of the body.  You become aware of tensions, or pressures, or itches, or pain, or simply the contact of your skin with the fabric of the clothes you are wearing.  

All these sensations are always there, but you are never aware of them unless you are actively focusing on them, or when they are so annoying that they demand your attention.  This is because we don’t have the conscious bandwidth to process all that is going on at once.  While our brains as whole entities can be thought of as super computers more powerful than anything created artificially by humans, the portion concerned with consciousness has a RAM and processor speed that is stuck in the 1970s.  This computer analogy can get a bit messy as computers and the brain do not function in the same manner, but there are some useful similarities.  

Pretending that consciousness functions similarly to a computer, it has been posited that we can process 16 bits of information at a time.  I suppose that actually brings us up to the late 1980s.  If we also assume that everyone has about the same processing power, what differentiates us cognitively is how we are able to apply that focus to the underlying processes, which appear to be of unlimited calculational capacity.  

16 Bits!

This piqued my curiosity because of the unique functionality of my own brain, and the similar peculiarities of others with classic ADD. This can be parsed out by examining the standard diagnostics for ADD derived from IQ and GAI (General Ability Index) tests.

You might have heard that ADD will cause a 15 point drop (a whole standard deviation) in the score on an IQ test.  In a lot of literature online the author will presume that IQ scores for ADD people are necessarily lower than those of their peers. This is not in fact true. People with ADD often score higher than average on IQ tests, on often score very high.  The 15 point drop comes from inattention in one very important part of the composite score: working memory. However this deficit can often be more than made up for in other areas of the composite score.

What does this have to do with bandwidth? Remember that we only have a limited amount of bandwidth, but there is a way to simulate augmenting it: rapid task switching.  This is not the same thing as multi-tasking, which fundamentally doesn’t exist anyway and is also achieved by task switching.  The ADD brain will focus less on a particular task or part of a task and rapidly switch between related tasks that are being processed in the background. In this way total bandwidth is augmented, which is one reason why many ADD people seem to find creativity to be easier. If there were a computer analog to this, perhaps it would be processor speed. There is not more memory available, but there is the ability to process multiple parts of the same task at once.   

This can negatively affect working memory as there is a temporal component to working memory.  To temporarily store objects in the memory, one needs to focus on them and keep them forward for some seconds. This task can prove impossible to achieve when the brain is constantly switching tasks.

Some people believe that the General Ability Index is a better composite than IQ as it weights working memory to a much lesser degree than does IQ.  I tend to disagree with this notion as I personally value working memory very highly as a measure of cognitive ability.  Perhaps this exposes my bias in that as I have the working memory of a goldfish, my scores from my last psych evaluation in both IQ and GAI appear to me to be much higher than I have ever been able to represent in any real world application.  

Shifting back to meditation and the focus exercise, I am now wondering if I can train myself to chose how I am utilizing my bandwidth through mindfulness and meditation exercises.  Is it possible for me to narrow my focus so that I can increase my working memory? Can I then still keep the ability to augment my bandwidth through higher frequency processing if I so choose?