Mentat training

[gfish]

I've been listening to the Dune books (the original 6, that is, fuck the rest of that noise), which has been quite pleasing. I've reread Dune itself several times, but only did the entire series once, roughly 20 years ago. I liked them then, and I think I actually like them more now.

As part of this process, I decided it would only be appropriate to push my playback speed. I've been plateaued at 2X for the last year, often dropping lower for dense material, occasionally slightly higher for a particularly slow narrator. So on a long drive down to Oregon and back to deliver Murmuration to an art show, I started pushing playback speed up. I'm now at 2.5X, where I think I will stay for now. At least with these productions, it's still entirely legible, though freeway road noise starts to be a problem. Even crystal clear with headphones, though, it takes noticeably more concentration to follow. Fine when walking or driving, but certainly nothing more distracting than that. In effect, I'm removing much of the redundancy that makes spoken communication so resilient to signal degradation.

It makes me wonder if this will be the real upper limit -- it feels like I could go considerably faster still, certainly past 3X, but at what point will it demand so much attention that I can't be doing anything else while listening? Where does the total data transfer curve start to drop back down because I'm pausing all the time when the smallest thing distracts me? I'm not sure how to measure that, as my audio consumption already varies wildly depending on what I happen to be doing that week. (If I'm deep in a shop project with a lot of mindless repetitive steps, I'll burn through 20 hours a week realtime easy.) Wherever it is, I certainly don't want to go past that peak. I could probably get up to 4 or 5X floating in a sensory deprivation tank, but that doesn't sound like a particularly great use of time compared to just, you know, reading visually.

Anyway, that's the state of my mentat training.

Comments

[juli]

Hee. I like the idea of that curve, I'm not sure if you've talked about that before. Like, am I better able to spend 3 hours slowly reading something with broken focus, or to spend 1 hour with intense focus? I don't do a lot of the latter in my life, and a part of me thinks it might be better in a lot of ways, but I'm not sure if there's other qualitative stuff related not to focus but to imagination.

At 2.5X, what is your mind's eye experience like? Does it veer towards reading for information, with a sort of necessary, temporary aphantasia? Or does the higher amount of focus actually have an intense experiential component? Is it less intense, more intense, or simply different?

I have many questions.

[gfish]

It feels much the same, other than noticing that I have to pause for even the slightest distraction. For normally being a highly visual person, my mind's eye while reading fiction has always been more of a gestalt than purely visual. Like a memory of a dream, where everything seems fully detailed until I actually try to describe it.