TL;DR I used to run a cognitive surplus (I’ll define that later. But you get the idea) As I get older the surplus decreases, and I frequently run deficits. I still like my present mind and I would not trade what passes for wisdom for a faster CPU. But this is what’s likely to happen, youngsters, as your cognitive surplus turns to a deficit. Better get ready.

Cognitive surplus

Imagine, having a conversation. If the conversation is superficial, it can be done automatically. If not, then it requires thinking mixed with speaking and understanding mixed with listening. Let’s concentrate on the thinking and speaking part because that’s what people care about and mostly do.

Thinking and speaking impose a cognitive load. The load for speaking is usually less than the load for thinking. People can think faster than they can translate their thoughts into words. So the rate at which a participant carries out their part of the conversation is limited by the rate at which they can speak. The if the cognitive resources that someone needs to keep their speech buffers filled are greater than the cognitive resources that are available, the difference between supply and demand is cognitive surplus.

Cognitive surplus varies throughout a conversation. It also varies across conversations based on the topic and currently available cognitive capacity. Stress lowers capacity, and ceteris paribus drops the surplus. (By the way, I always get ceteris paribus and mutatis mutandis confused. Now I won’t. But that’s another story) A complex topic requires more capacity, and ceteris paribus lowers surplus. A conversational counterpart with a different background or a different epistemological frame of reference topic requires more capacity, and ceteris paribus lowers surplus.

(OK, gonna quit with the ceteris paribus for the rest)

When younger I operated with a considerable surplus (thanks Mom and Dad for the good genes.) I could use some of my surplus to carry out another activity. In my prime could carry out a challenging conversation while doing my physics homework. Then I couldn’t do that. But I could not, but I could carry on a conversation while doing something like carrying out an unfamiliar repair. Then I couldn’t do that. Now I can talk while driving but only if the conversation is not too demanding and if there’s not much traffic.

The days of high surpluses are gone!

Today, If I’m following a recipe and someone asks me a question I can’t answer it. I put up my hand and wait until I’ve reached an undemanding part of the recipe, or I use the little surplus I have (after accounting for the small cognitive load of cooking and my degraded capacity) to formulate a response and speak it.

Cognitive deficit and changes in demand

Cognitive deficit Is the opposite of cognitive surplus. It is the gap between the amount of cognitive capacity needed for a task and the amount that is available.

Automation lowers cognitive demand. Social protocols (“How are you?” “Good?” “How about you?” “Fine” “And the family….”) are almost entirely automated, and thus largely undemanding My wife’s father had advanced Alzheimer’s when he died. Social protocols were the last thing to go. I remember him looking at his newborn daughter and laughing, “Look at her! She’s got less hair than me!” He looked like a functioning human being. But if he turned away and turned back, he’d say the same thing again, in the same way.

If I think about something in advance, the cognitive work that I’ve done goes into work-in-process inventory. The cognitive demand required to turn ideas that are in inventory into ideas that are finished enough to be expressible is lower than the cognitive demand required to produce an idea from raw data and rules for reasoning.

Listening to someone dramatically raises cognitive demand. That explains why people try to avoid listening. Most time when someone is speaking, people are working on building their response and not deeply considering what’s being said. When someone goes into cognitive deficit when speaking their peace, they need time to recover—and prepare their rejoinder. No time to listen, because listening does not give you recovery time. Worse, it’s more demanding to understand someone else’s ideas and fit them into your own intellectual framework. It’s far easier to take ideas that you have in inventory and doing the minimum work required to adapt them to the conversational context.

Writing this post

I created the first draft of this post using my mobile phone and Google’s “voice typing” capability. My speech was punctuated by pauses. Where my ideas were already well formed because I’d done some thinking and put those ideas into work-in-process inventory, I was able to speak whole sentences or more. When I was filling in gaps, the pauses were longer. There were long periods of silence when I had to build cognitive surplus and inventory and then fluidly translate those ideas into words.

There are trade-offs between using voice typing and finger typing. Voice typing is harder. It puts me in cognitive deficit more easily. To keep up my speech rate I have to focus and minimize distractions—both mental and physicals.

Finger typing is slower. I can’t type as fast as I can think, so I generate a substantial cognitive surplus. I might use that surplus to think more deeply, and sometimes I believe I do that. I might also use some of it to focus on my fingers and keep my typing rate up. But most of the time I some of that surplus on distractions. I look at what I have already written and imagine ways to improve a sentence or paragraph. That might improve the quality of my product at a cost to its quantity and to my satisfaction.

I want those ideas out of my head and onto the page.

So voice typing it is.

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