Free The Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman Page A

steps:
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  1.     Wiggle the second finger of your hand.
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  2.     Wiggle the third finger of the same hand.
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  3.     Describe what you did differently those two times.
    On the surface, the answer seems simple: I thought about moving my fingers and they moved. The difference is that I thoughtabout a different finger each time. Yes, that’s true. But how did that thought get transmitted into action, into the commands that caused different muscles in the arm to control the tendons that wiggled the fingers? This is completely hidden from consciousness.
    The human mind is immensely complex, having evolved over a long period with many specialized structures. The study of the mind is the subject of multiple disciplines, including the behavioral and social sciences, cognitive science, neuroscience, philosophy, and the information and computer sciences. Despite many advances in our understanding, much still remains mysterious, yet to be learned. One of the mysteries concerns the nature of and distinction between those activities that are conscious and those that are not. Most of the brain’s operations are subconscious, hidden beneath our awareness. It is only the highest level, what I call reflective , that is conscious.
    Conscious attention is necessary to learn most things, but after the initial learning, continued practice and study, sometimes for thousands of hours over a period of years, produces what psychologists call “overlearning,” Once skills have been overlearned, performance appears to be effortless, done automatically, with little or no awareness. For example, answer these questions:
    What is the phone number of a friend?
    What is Beethoven’s phone number?
    What is the capital of:
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  •    Brazil?
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  •    Wales?
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  •    The United States?
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  •    Estonia?
    Think about how you answered these questions. The answers you knew come immediately to mind, but with no awareness of how that happened. You simply “know” the answer. Even the ones you got wrong came to mind without any awareness. You might have been aware of some doubt, but not of how the name entered your consciousness. As for the countries for which you didn’tknow the answer, you probably knew you didn’t know those immediately, without effort. Even if you knew you knew, but couldn’t quite recall it, you didn’t know how you knew that, or what was happening as you tried to remember.
    You might have had trouble with the phone number of a friend because most of us have turned over to our technology the job of remembering phone numbers. I don’t know anybody’s phone number—I barely remember my own. When I wish to call someone, I just do a quick search in my contact list and have the telephone place the call. Or I just push the “2” button on the phone for a few seconds, which autodials my home. Or in my auto, I can simply speak: “Call home.” What’s the number? I don’t know: my technology knows. Do we count our technology as an extension of our memory systems? Of our thought processes? Of our mind?
    What about Beethoven’s phone number? If I asked my computer, it would take a long time, because it would have to search all the people I know to see whether any one of them was Beethoven. But you immediately discarded the question as nonsensical. You don’t personally know Beethoven. And anyway, he is dead. Besides, he died in the early 1800s and the phone wasn’t invented until the late 1800s. How do we know what we do not know so rapidly? Yet some things that we do know can take a long time to retrieve. For example, answer