Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Miscellaneous/2022 November 20

= November 20 =

Information overload
I just experienced information overload for the first time. Not sure why it’s never happened before, but I was listening to a recorded lecture and it happened. Might be because I’m getting old and I reached some kind of tipping point where my brain basically gave up. Admittedly, I was doing caloric restriction and hadn’t eaten in like eight hours, so that might have something to do with it. How does one usually deal with such a thing? I was listening to a lecture for research on an article I am working on and suddenly I felt torn in multiple directions. Should I just write an outline based on the lecture? Would that help? Viriditas (talk) 08:50, 20 November 2022 (UTC)
 * Try eating something and taking a nap. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 13:39, 20 November 2022 (UTC)
 * It sounds like your brain ran out of energy and cut out low priority tasks, such as paying attention to a lecture. If that was what happened, it had little to do with information overload; the same could have happened with any task requiring concentrated attention but irrelevant to immediate survival. --Lambiam 19:20, 20 November 2022 (UTC)
 * Yes, that sounds right, but there's another piece to the puzzle. It felt like the blue screen of death.  One part of my brain was desperately trying to figure out what the lecturer was saying, as she had a very thick, French accent.  The other part of my brain was trying to focus on driving a car. Still, another part of my brain was trying to organize what the lecturer was saying and fit it into already existing categories I had created for expanding the article I was writing in my head.  At some point, I could no longer hear or understand what was being said, as my brain gave up trying to focus on all the different parts and retreated to a semblance of white noise or silence in its thought process.  Very strange. It really did feel like information overload, and the only metaphor I can find to describe it is some kind of realization or conception of the coastline paradox, but instead of the length of a coastline approaching infinity, I glimpsed the topics and subtopics within what the lecturer was saying and how they all connected together approaching infinity. And that's when the conscious awareness of my attention span and focus on the topic collapsed to a single point and flatlined.  It felt like being crushed by an immense weight and being unable to move, or in this case, to think.  There was also the sense of being pulled into many different directions by the information, but staying in one place, unable to make a decision as to which direction to take, which is why I think it fits the information overload description, which before this, I've never really experienced. Viriditas (talk) 20:57, 20 November 2022 (UTC)
 * Maybe you should talk to your doctor. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 22:08, 20 November 2022 (UTC)
 * About what, exactly? Do you often drive while listening to a lecture while trying to compose a Wikipedia article in your head?  At some point, you will reach the limits of what your brain can do.  I reached mine. Doing all three of these things at the same time led to information overload. I don't think talking to my doctor will help. I often try to push my body and brain to do things most people won't do just to see what it is capable of doing.  And it really isn't capable of all that much.  I would very much like to be able to split different parts of my brain up into active processes so that I can focus on many things at once.  As it turns out, our brains can't really do it.  Ideally, I would want to, for example, drive my car to do basic chores like shopping; listen to academic lectures while I'm driving; think about what I'm listening to and actively try to compose material for an article; even better, I would love to be able to think about ten different things all at once.  Do you think my doctor will be able to help with that? I'm not a computer capable of processing many things at the same time.  Hence the problem. Viriditas (talk) 22:45, 20 November 2022 (UTC)
 * Yeah, the human brain and body have limits, and you've just discovered what some of them are. No harm generally in testing what your limits are – but, while failing at one or more simultaneous tasks usually has no lasting consequences, how about avoiding one of those being driving a vehicle on a public road, because if you fail at that you may well kill other people (as well as your self). {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 90.217.47.60 (talk) 00:06, 21 November 2022 (UTC)
 * If you drive, then you know it is mostly automatic, and doesn’t require much thought except for defensive perceptual control. In any event, a lot of people drive and listen to music, podcasts, or carry on conversations with other people.  I thank you for your safety tips and acknowledge them, but let’s put driving aside for just a moment.  My general complaint is that my body is perfectly okay with doing hundreds of things at once to control and maintain homeostasis.  And my brain is likely involved in some of those things.  But when it comes to actively trying to think about different things in different domains, why don’t we have the general ability to do that just like our body? My understanding is that some non-human brains do have this ability, for example dolphin brains.  Which makes me wonder if we also have this ability. Let’s say I want to think about and ruminate on problem A.  What’s to stop me from leaving that process running while I start to think about problem B? And C, and D, etc.  Why does my brain have to focus and think about one thing instead of many, and what is stopping or preventing me from doing this? If you look at examples of extreme focus, attention, and flow states, it becomes obvious that there’s a paradox occurring.  These unitary states of consciousness are characterized by the impression of no thought—the artist becoming one with the canvas, the musician with their performance, the driver with the road, the writer with the text, the runner with the track, ad infinitum.  But if you look closely at these unitary states, the brain is doing a lot of different and discrete things; the unitary flow state is an illusion that the brain creates to keep the attention targeted, like a hunter focusing on its prey.  So what if you could hack that state and redirect the discrete processes to voluntarily do all those different processes at will? You could then maintain different trains of thought, each proceeding on different tracks, and leading to different outcomes and conclusions in different domains. Viriditas (talk) 00:56, 21 November 2022 (UTC)
 * The following is not supported (AFAIK) by the literature but reflects my personal theries. An important aspect of cognitive task execution is supervision, which will intercede and apply corrections if the execution is going off-track. Supervision is a scarce resource. Tasks that normally can be executed "automatically", meaning that they require hardly any any supervision, can also be executed in parallel. Almost any type of cognitive task can be mastered to a level in which it becomes automatic. But if several of such tasks executed in parallel go simultaneously off-track and the corrections are not simple, supervision will be overloaded and some of the tasks will not be executed satisfactorily. Most of this cannot be perceived by introspection, since automatically executed tasks not requiring correction leave no trace in memory; only when execution was not automatic but in some way out of the ordinary can an episode be remembered. --Lambiam 09:54, 21 November 2022 (UTC)
 * It occurs to me that the Proust effect (involuntary memory) may be a form of semi-conscious or aware cognitive parallel processing occurring in real time, and that exploring ideas as memories might be the way forward towards being able to think about two ideas at once. Viriditas (talk) 20:45, 21 November 2022 (UTC)
 * Since you were driving at the time, distracted driving is relevant (also dangerous and illegal). 136.56.52.157 (talk) 02:02, 21 November 2022 (UTC)
 * People who drive and listen to lectures and think about them are generally not distracted from the road. What was discussed was my lack of attention to the lecture, not to my driving. This may come as some surprise to you, but there are thousands of people driving with extremely loud music playing on their stereos.  I really don't think a soft-spoken academic lecturing about art is going to cause me to get into an accident, but what do I know, I've only been driving for many decades. Viriditas (talk) 02:14, 21 November 2022 (UTC)
 * Don't be too sure about your first sentence. If you're not focused 100 percent on your driving, there's a greater risk of accident. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 02:36, 21 November 2022 (UTC)
 * Thanks for your concern, but I'm sure. I've been listening to lectures in my car since podcasts were invented in 2004 or so, and I've been listening to music in my car for many decades before that.  I'm pretty confident that I can drive safely while doing it.  The real concern with distracted driving is texting or using your phone, and it's accepted by most people studying the phenomenon that it's more dangerous than driving under the influence.  I don't think you'll find many people passing laws against listening to audiobooks in your car. Thinking about it further, the idea of focusing 100% on a task may be the conventional wisdom, but it goes against what we know about engaging in a task requiring safety and precision.  In the case of good driving, you need situational awareness first and foremost, and this requires, somewhat counterintuitively, to be loose and relaxed, not 100% focused.  That means driving safely based on the changing, dynamic conditions.  Too much focus, and you will get a kind of tunnel vision, preventing you from noticing things that require almost instantaneous reactions. So the rule is not to focus so much, but to relax and loosen up, and this opens you up to everything that’s going on around you and gives you mental headspace to react as circumstances change.  It could be argued, therefore, that safe practices such as having a lecture playing in the background could relax the driver and improve situational awareness. Viriditas (talk) 06:03, 21 November 2022 (UTC)
 * Can I ask follow-up questions? You wrote somewhere that the lecturer had an accent. Was it in general difficult to follow? Second, was the volume limited or excessive? Thing is, your brain might have had difficulty figuring out what was being said in the first place (acoustic perception) even before you could process the content (cognition). It might have happened that your brain got overloaded by the former and couldn't handle the latter. I have that. If I would be listening to someone talking in a complicated accent and/ or too quietly, and I would need to focus on something else as well at the time (but a low-level task), then I feel I could somehow have such an experience whereby at one point the lecture would sound gibberish to me. And this is the brain's way of telling you to hold your horses. Your situation of not having eaten in a while at that point (i. e. lack of nutrients for the brain, which it needs to work correctly) could have contributed to the situation. By the way, I'm forty and a linguist. I hope You respond because it's interesting. --Ouro (blah blah) 10:41, 21 November 2022 (UTC)
 * Yes, I believe that is what happened, and I'm glad you picked up on it. The lecturer was Sylvie Patry of the Musée d'Orsay speaking at the Museum Folkwang.  You can listen to it here.  Her English is excellent and is easy to understand for the most part, but her French accent makes it a bit difficult to understand more complex words.  And yes, she does move away from the microphone at times during the talk to try and figure out why her slide show is out of order, so there are times where you have to struggle to hear what she is saying. There's an amusing moment in the talk when she has to talk about Renoir's illegitimate children, and quite understandably, the word "illegitimate" trips her up several times.  It's extremely cute.  Anyhoo, yes, my brain got tripped up by the accent and some parts that were hard to understand (mostly French words and phrases, not English) and my brain just shut down. I should note that it's a great lecture and has a lot of moving historical parts from which a lot of complexity emerges from what appears to be a simple historical narrative. Viriditas (talk) 20:32, 21 November 2022 (UTC)
 * Thank you for linking to a video lecture on impressionist art that I found both comprehensible and interesting. However I stayed with it out of interest and not feeling any need to remember details. If I were collecting data for research, as you say you were doing, I would certainly feel stressed trying to make a note of every detail mentioned. Surely the solution is to use the Pause button to regulate the information flow? Philvoids (talk) 22:42, 23 November 2022 (UTC)
 * I’m sure you are right. Viriditas (talk) 08:54, 24 November 2022 (UTC)


 * BTW, ...a study by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration of the United States, 25% of road crashes were attributed to in-vehicle driver distraction, including music-listening, having a conversation with passengers, etc.
 * Effect of Music Listening on Physiological Condition, Mental Workload, and Driving Performance with Consideration of Driver Temperament (2019)
 * Alansplodge (talk) 11:54, 25 November 2022 (UTC)
 * Wonderful. I listened to Elgar's Violin Concerto in B minor, Op. 61 performed by WDR Symphony Orchestra Cologne tonight while driving and I’d do it again. BCNU.
 * Results of mixed analysis of variance (M-ANOVA) indicated that the effects of music genre and driver character on driving performance were significant. The arousal level perceived mental workload, standard deviation of speed, and frequency of lane crossing were higher when driving under the influence of rock music than that when driving under the influence of light music or an absence of music.
 * Viriditas (talk) 08:35, 27 November 2022 (UTC)

Continents by distance from Cody, Wyoming and Kentville, Nova Scotia?
Can anyone list the continents from Cody, Wyoming by distance, and also Kentville, Nova Scotia (other than the continent they're in, both of them North America)? Thanks. 67.215.28.226 (talk) 19:19, 20 November 2022 (UTC)
 * Google maps can. Find Cody or Kentville, right click and select "Measure distance". Left click on a second point to which you want the distance. You can then drag the second point around until you're happy. --Wrongfilter (talk) 20:47, 20 November 2022 (UTC)
 * I want you to find the closest routes to other continents from Cody, Wyoming and Kentville, Nova Scotia, then list them by distance. Do your best! 67.215.28.226 (talk) 02:23, 21 November 2022 (UTC)
 * You're the one that wants to know, so it behooves you to work on it. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 02:35, 21 November 2022 (UTC)
 * Okay. 67.215.28.226 (talk) 03:08, 21 November 2022 (UTC)

Soccer goal support
Could the elbow supports of the old goals, which differ from the 'pole' ones placed behind them, because they were located inside the structure hypothetically be in the way of the ball, and prevent the ball from entering the goal? They were perfectly approved, so in theory this question should not arise, but they were still a 'foreign body', were they not? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 93.44.47.7 (talk) 20:42, 20 November 2022 (UTC)
 * Which side of the goal line are they on? ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 22:07, 20 November 2022 (UTC)

Opening the link on the right, there is the enlarged image. They are basically at the top, at the intersection of the posts. I think they're made of iron, it's called an elbow or an inverted v, whatever. https://www.google.it/search?q=porta+con+reggirete+a+gomito&client=safari&channel=iphone_bm&sxsrf=ALiCzsb6IOZ39bAGIXn8AAS1x356aQbeKQ:1668982346651&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwi84aHf4737AhWohv0HHfYPD0MQ_AUoAXoECAEQAw&biw=1964&bih=985&dpr=0.9#imgrc=SeNYIqHWbJHdhM — Preceding unsigned comment added by 93.41.97.54 (talk) 22:17, 20 November 2022 (UTC)
 * No. Nanonic (talk) 22:14, 20 November 2022 (UTC)


 * If the ball is not entering straight, but its velocity has a sideways component, it can strike the support before the entirety of the ball has passed over the goal line. This will alter its velocity, but its forward momentum is unchanged. So the ball will continue to move in as if there had been no collision, and the goal will be made, regardless of the collision with the support. (Something that – rather theoretically but not physically impossible – may make a difference in the outcome is the goalkeeper successfully intercepting the ball on its altered course before the goal is made, while their attempt would have failed for the original course. Note that this could theoretically also happen through the incoming ball contacting the fabric net.) --Lambiam 08:41, 21 November 2022 (UTC)