The Centipede’s Dilemma: What It Is And What It Tells Us About Human Thinking
Concentration is an ally to do things well, an indisputable truth, or is it not? Are there situations where paying attention to what we do can be a disadvantage? Can more concentration be synonymous with worse performance?
Well it turns out that it can be. In the most automated tasks, if we stop to think about what steps we follow or each small action we take, it may be the case that we lose our rhythm, that we do something wrong that we have done hundreds and hundreds of times.
This idea is what we find in the centipede’s dilemma, a curious and counterintuitive situation to which, if we delve deeper into it, we find complete meaning. If you want to discover why this happens, we invite you to continue reading.
The centipede’s dilemma, also called Humphrey’s law or task hyperreflection, is a curious principle that shows that, Sometimes Mindfulness Is Not Always Positive The author of this law was the psychologist George Humphrey (1889–1966) in 1923, exposing it in his work “The Story of Man’s Mind” (The history of the human mind). This dilemma suggests that conscious attention to a task that is usually performed automatically can make its execution difficult.
Humphrey’s law states that if a person has acquired enough skill to do something automatically, the simple act of stopping to think about it, what steps to follow or what the specific actions and movements involved in the task, ends up harming execution.
The reason why this idea is also known as the centipede’s dilemma is directly related to the way these myriapods walk. To formulate his law, Humphrey was inspired by a poem that was very popular at the beginning of the 20th century which spoke precisely about a centipede:
He told him: “Tell me, in what order do you move your legs?”
It filled him with doubts to such an extent
Who fell exhausted on the road
Without knowing how to run.
Upon learning of this poem, whose authorship is disputed and attributed to Katherine Craster (1841–1874), Humphrey considered that no person skilled in his profession needs constant or full attention to routine tasks If he paid attention, his work would surely be spoiled.
This same reflection was taken up by several psychologists and philosophers contemporary to George Humphrey. Among the most interesting intellectuals we find the psychoanalyst Theo L. Dorpat who went one step further and spoke that for a centipede the following question could be fatal: What happens to your thirty-fourth left foot?
Also noteworthy is the reflection of the philosopher Karl Popper, who cited the centipede’s dilemma in his book “The body and the mind: unpublished writings about knowledge and the body-mind problem.” In it he commented that, When we have learned certain movements to the point that they are unconscious, trying to do them consciously interferes with them so seriously that we ended up stopping.
Popper gave as an example of this curious phenomenon a real case that happened to the violinist Adolf Busch who, when his colleague Bronisław Huberman asked him how to play a passage from Beethoven’s Violin Concerto, Huberman replied that it was quite simple. However, when trying to demonstrate it to him he discovered that, suddenly, he was no longer able to execute it with the same precision, speed and grace as he did when he did it without thinking about it.
Humphrey’s law and conscious thought
The idea of the centipede’s dilemma sounds somewhat shocking and contradictory. How can it be that paying more attention to what we do makes our work more difficult? We understand that paying more attention to something is increasing the number of mental resources oriented towards it, so shouldn’t we do the task better? How do you explain that more concentration leads to worse performance?
In this life not everything is black or white, and this can also be observed in the functioning of our executive skills and other cognitive functions. Our brain is a very complex organ, about which we still have a lot to know. Although its premise may seem counterintuitive, the truth is that Humphrey’s law has allowed us to better understand the human mind.
It is true that paying more attention to how we do a task usually means better performance. Nevertheless, Skills reach their maximum sophistication and perfection when they reach the point where they are done unconsciously without realizing it, something that we can see in tasks as complex but at the same time as automated as driving or writing.
Based on this, the existence of a pyramid of skills has been proposed that would follow the following order:
1. Unconscious incompetence
Unconscious incompetence is the point at which you do not know how to do a certain task nor do you know that you do not know
2. Conscious incompetence
Conscious incompetence occurs when you discover that you do not know how to do a task, that is, there is ignorance about how to do something but one is aware of it It is at this moment that the learning process would begin.
3. Conscious competition
Conscious competition occurs when you learn to do something and you are aware that you have learned
4. Unconscious competition
Finally, we reach the phase of unconscious competence. This is the highest point in the pyramid, which can be called mastery or mastery of a certain skill. Is the ability to do something well done but without thinking too much about what is being done
The Break in Humphrey’s Law
The centipede’s dilemma or Humphrey’s law It would be applied at the moment of having reached the level of unconscious competence, that is, when the person is capable of doing something without thinking too much about it The moment they interrupt her and ask her to think and tell us about each step she follows while carrying out a certain task or skill, that is when she becomes more clumsy, it is more difficult for her to do that.
We can see this in a person who knows how to type quickly with the computer keyboard. He has reached the level of mastery in typing when he no longer has to look at the keyboard all the time to make sure which key he is pressing, he has them all well memorized and located in space. However, if we interrupt you and ask you to type exactly one “w”, for example, your response time will probably skyrocket or you will even make a mistake.
And not only on computers, but also in the simplest and most everyday tasks such as tying your shoelaces, unlocking your cell phone, tying a tie or cooking. If we are doing any task that we have mastered and that involves following several steps, if we are asked which ones to follow, it is quite likely that we will go a little blank, that we will not know how to continue, or we will even have to go back. to start again.
It should be said that Interruption is not necessarily a bad thing, nor does it always have to hurt performance We can understand this in cases in which something has been learned incorrectly, situations in which it is necessary to break the automation and generate the error to restart the entire process and relearn, this time in the correct way.
