Undoing the damage from 25 years of internet addiction. Part II: counting.

I’ve been addicted to computer games since the age of seven and to the internet since I discovered it. Over the last twenty-five years this addiction has wrecked havoc on my life and cognitive abilities. So, I’ve decided to write a series of articles documenting my progress in the battle to repair my own brain. The first such article talks about a trick that helps me memorise long texts while this article deals mostly with the process of counting at cognitive level.

Why counting?

I’ll start with this joke:

Two passengers are riding on a high speed bullet train and are having a conversation. The train speeds by a large herd of sheep grazing on a field. One of the passengers glances quickly at the herd and says: “There are exactly 768 sheep in that herd.”. Then resumes the conversation with the other passenger as if nothing had happened.

With eyes wide open, the other passenger interrupts the conversation and asks “How did you do that?”

“Oh, that? It was very easy — I counted the legs and divided by four.”

Over the last six months, due to reasons outside of the scope of this article I have been incarcerated. There isn’t that much to do on the inside, and if you are used to the constant mental stimulus that the internet provides then you are going to be so bored in jail you may go insane. So I decided to start counting things.

The easy stuff: physical objects

The metal bars on a window, chairs in the canteen, fluorescent lights on the ceiling, security cameras in the halls, steps on a stairway — those are quite easy to count as their number is usually low. I found that it is possible to speed up the counting process significantly by combining visual recognition with simple algebra. I’ll explain the method I developed in a language familiar to every computer enthusiast from the 80s (I don’t remember the exact syntax but you will get the idea):

10 LET i = 0
20 SEE 3 ITEMS
30 SEE 2 MORE ITEMS
40 i = i + 5
50 GOTO 20

Here is the reasoning behind my choices of the constants: 2 and 3 are easy to identify visually. It is faster to spot three items and you will know their number without having to count “one”, ”two”, ”three” explicitly. It is very easy to add a 5 to multiple of 5, your brain literally has to do almost zero algebra.

I put 3 first and 2 second for a reason which I will touch upon in a later article.

The moderately difficult: your own steps while holding a conversation

I’m not planning an escape or anything like that (Pinky — swear!), but I thought it would be cool to know exactly how many steps are there from my cell to the nearest metal detector frame. And since it helps to be on good terms with the guards, I had to be polite and friendly at all times.

And that’s where I ran into a serious problem — if I wanted to pay attention to the number of my own steps, my mind just wasn’t there when I had to respond to a joke or to a witty remark by another human. And vice versa, if I tried to remain responsive to any conversation attempts maintaining the step counter in my head quickly became painful and highly error-prone.

Putting the above into computer systems jargon

I was suffering from high context — switch overhead. There has been a lot of research into reducing this overhead on Von Neumann (pictured below) architectures but ultimately that research stalled with the advent of multi-core systems. It is much easier to put a large number of processing cores in a single system than to optimize the relevant assembly language routines in the kernels of the operating systems as the latter yields diminishing returns.

Sadly, adding more cores doesn’t quite work for living creatures. The approach I devised to get around this is to count with a quieter inner voice, and to allow myself slightly more time when it was necessary to respond to a joke. At first I lost a few competitions who was the wittiest but the accuracy of my counting improved. After that, it was a matter of training and gradual improvement.

If I had to describe my approach using computer systems jargon, I’d say I used to have two competing processes at highest possible priority, whereas now I have one at medium priority (the counting of steps) and one with low priority (being a smartass).

I hope you have found what you have read so far interesting. In a future article I plan to describe the most important and difficult exercise that I did in order to improve not only my counting skills but which also had a positive effect on my emotional well — being: counting advertisements on TV during commercial breaks.

Hope to see you there!