We're smart, Aren't we?

"Pop quiz: What is 357 times 289? No pencils allowed. No calculators. Just use your brain.
Got an answer yet? Got it now? How about now? Chances are you still don’t. As you solved the problem one step at a time, you lost track of the numbers. Maybe you tried to start over, lost track again, and eventually gave up in frustration before you could discover that the answer was 103,173."

Now, why in the world was it practically impossible for us, the humans with brains that can process complex information, such as scanning a crowd and picking out people you knew and memorizing the new faces in a matter of seconds, something that is even difficult for computers nowadays, to solve a simple math problem such as 357 times 289?
Called a "Crack in the Wall," this absurd difficulty in our thought processing has left many psychologists puzzled. This struggle with some simple tasks help the scientists try to piece together how our brains are wired, and in this instance, because of the complexity of our brains and the speed at which they can function, "a bottleneck of processing" occurs when the information gets stuck in a traffic jam.

The discoverer of these strange happenings was in 1931 by a psychologist named Charles Witt Telford. He conducted an experiment with 29 graduate students at the University of North Dakota, and had them all press a button once they heard a sound. What he found out was that depending on the distance of time between the sound, the speed at which the button was pressed varied.

"If the interval was one or two seconds, it took the students about a quarter of a second to react. But if Telford reduced the interval to half a second, the students consistently slowed down on their response to sound number two. It took them an extra tenth of a second to press the key."

From this information, Telford was reminded of a muscle jerk reaction in response to electric shocks. Muscles need time to recover from these electric shocks before they can respond to the next one. If the time for relaxation is not given to the muscles, and a shock is given too soon, the muscles will not respond. He speculated that "the brain needs time to reset itself after a pulse of thought before it can carry out another one."
After 80 years of other scientists going through the same experiment and receiving the same results, this "period of relation" began to be called the "psychological refractory period," and it began to be defined as what happens "if we don’t have enough time between two tasks, [so] we slow down on the second one." Though this lag can seem insignificant at first, in reality it can mean the difference between life and death.

An example this is, say you are in a car with your friends and the light turns green, so the driver moves its foot to the gas pedal and begins to press. A car runs the red light and heads straight for your vehicle. The driver must now respond to this new information in a split second to save your life. What if it can't?
Harold Pashler ran an experiment almost exactly like the example above. He would instruct the subject to sit in a car simulator "complete with gas and brake pedals. As they drove along a virtual road behind another car, the volunteers would hear tones from time to time. They had to call out 'one' or 'two' depending on the number of tones they heard. Occasionally, the car in front would put on its brakes, and the subjects had to brake as well. Pashler and his colleagues found that it typically took just under a second for people to respond to the brake lights on the car ahead. But it took longer for them to react if they had responded to a tone within one-third of a second before the lights went on. Pashler found that, on average, the test subjects’ reaction time increased by 0.174 second. That may not seem like a big difference, but if you are driving 65 miles an hour, it translates into an extra 16 feet. That distance can mean the difference between a close call and a high-speed rear-end collision," and life and death.

So, what if this happened to you in real life? What if your brain had a traffic jam, when you needed it most? What if this was the difference between life and death? What would happen?

Though the research above shows are brain has difficulty multitasking, is this actually true? We can pat our heads and rub our tummies. We can do complex math such as calculus, understand the greatness of the universe, the minimality of an atom, plus "as you read this column, your brain can also manage your heartbeat, perceive the melody of a song playing on your iPod, and send out complicated instructions to drink a soda," yet I'll ask again, why can we not solve a simple math problem?

This is because all the separate tasks are separated into hundreds of relatively self-contained regions. "These regions can work on different tasks at the same time. Yet there are simple jobs—like math problems—that our brains can handle only one at a time. It is as if signals were flying down a 20-lane superhighway, and then the road narrowed to a single lane," leading to a traffic-jam.

Bibliography:

Zimmer, Carl. "The Brain: The 'Router' in Your Head—a Bottleneck of Processing."
     Discover: Mind/Brain. Kalmbach Publishing Co., n.d. Web. 8 May 2011.
     <http://discovermagazine.com/2010/nov/
     15-the-brain-router-in-our-heads-processing-bottleneck/
     article_view?b_start:int=1&-C=>.

smart brain. N.p., n.d. Web. 8 May 2011. <http://www.google.com/
     imgres?imgurl=http://ambassador.rit.edu/blog/jeff/files/2006/02/
     smart_computer.jpg>.

car crash. N.p., n.d. Web. 8 May 2011. <http://www.google.com/
     imgres?imgurl=http://s3.amazonaws.com/answer-board-image/
     2008112322441633630746813580000925.jpg>.

electric shock. N.p., n.d. Web. 8 May 2011. <http://www.google.com/
     imgres?imgurl=http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_fIRbT5WQY6c/TB-faTHh8uI/AAAAAAAAAHk/
     VtN1sYOhM7E/s400/electric%2Bshock2.jpg>.

multi-tasking. N.p., n.d. Web. 8 May 2011. <http://www.google.com/
     imgres?imgurl=http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_Bo2OkHBt4Ng/SY2GF7gu2WI/AAAAAAAACd4/
     0toGWWgvOZw/s320/multitasking.jpg>.