Why Your Brain Hates Slowpokes

http://nautil.us/issue/22/slow/why-your-brain-hates-slowpokes

by dnetesn • 11 years ago

51 35 11 years ago

makmanalp2• 11 years ago

For me it's a combo between this /and/ just people's attitude - it's fine if you want to be slow, but you have to be considerate of others. I wouldn't be mad if you were walking slowly on the side of the street - probably wouldn't even notice - but I'll be mad if you're walking slowly in the middle. It often costs nothing to be considerate, and it makes life more pleasant for everyone!

baronofcheese• 11 years ago

It is the exact same thing as with slow cars driving in the middle or outer lane. They can really spur up some road rage in people.

tvanantwerp• 11 years ago

I agree--most, probably all, of my "slowness rage" is due to people being inconsiderate. If I need to stop and get my bearings or check my itinerary on my phone, I try my best to stand aside and out of the way. It's not difficult. I wish more people would do this. No one is obligated to be in a hurry, but it should be common courtesy to not jam things up for those who are.

mynegation• 11 years ago

I live in Toronto, and there is PATH - 30 km (and growing) network of tunnels and concourses connecting major downtown towers, buildings, subway stations and shopping malls. It is indispensable in winter and hot summer where you can buy goods and services without ever going outside.

The problem with PATH is, ironically, pedestrians. My biggest gripe are people walking slowly, 3 or 4 abreast. The list goes on: stopping and turning 180 suddenly, bumping into each other cutting corners etc.

It bothers me enough that I started to fantasize about adopting road-like rules for walking in busy places: no more than 2 persons side to side, no sudden stops, green and red lights in the row of doors to regulate the direction of the flow, cutting corners is only allowed for right turns...

kazinator2• 11 years ago

That's nothing. If you ever enter a big, popular 5 or 10 km running race in Canada, expect people who are running in the "shortest line of sight" sections of the course to suddenly stop, drop and tie their shoe laces, without so much as glancing backwards, even though they obviously know that people are running all around, within two or three feet of each other.

Given that runners can't think about others in such a specific situation, you can forget consideration on walkways, which are subject to different concurrent uses.

Oh, oh, here is something! Sometimes I do interval training on an outdoor, rubberized running track. For some reason, though the town has many parks, people go to this track to walk around. And they walk around in the inner lane, lane 1! Some of them don't get out of the way and use a different lane when people do running workouts even after being passed several times. The last time I was there, a woman came with a baby stroller, and parked it in the curve, some 15 meters down from the starting line, in Lane 1! Of all the places in the city where you can go with a baby stroller and park it, she picked that spot. The mental process behind that must be astonishing ...

vanderZwan2• 11 years ago

Whenever I read about people considered to be inconsiderate, I wonder: did anyone bother to make this clear to the "inconsiderate" people in question?

Zuider4• 11 years ago

It is a basic social obligation to be alert to the impact that one is having on others.

jakobegger2• 11 years ago

You're being pretty inconsiderate yourself! You expect everyone else to constantly make an effort to get out of your way and don't consider how your rush is impeding others!

Sometimes I like going for a walk with friends, we'll walk slowly and next to another so we can talk and enjoy the beautiful weather. And you expect us to walk behind another along the right side of the sidewalk?

Please consider my priorities before calling me inconsiderate!

Zuider4• 11 years ago

O.K, I've considered your priorities. Now move!

makmanalp2• 11 years ago

I'm guessing this is slightly tongue in cheek, but I'll bite anyway in the interests of decoding the hidden social rules :P

* considerate: walking in the middle, but fast

* considerate: walking on the side

* considerate: walking slowly or multiple people abreast, when there's enough room

* considerate: walking slowly or multiple people abreast, when there's no room, but paying attention behind you

Really, you (in the general sense here) have all these easy options to be nice, but you'll refuse even the most minor inconvenience?

Also, I'm not being inconsiderate for wanting to get somewhere - that's what most roads are /made for/. Roads made for leisurely strolling are made wide anyway. And it's not like I'm ramming through - I also do my best to avoid bothering the people I'm passing by. I'm taking the effort, so why shouldn't you? Inconsiderate would be me pushing through or telling you to make way when there's already room.

Sometimes a simple "scuse me", without even a frustrated tone, elicits the grumpiest responses so mostly I just walk slowly behind and don't even bother asking.

Anyway, this is longer than I even thought I would consider this issue!

efewf• 11 years ago

This is the why I despise most cyclists. I wont speak for every cyclists, but around here (Portland, OR), cyclists often ride in the street (bike lane available), slow down traffic, do not obey stop signs, turn without signals, blow do-not-walk signals, etc.

Some of the most entitled, selfish people there are.

crazcarl• 11 years ago

The conclusion (spoiler alert) that showing gratitude can help fight the negative emotional reaction to impatience sounds a lot like stoicism. Particularly the idea that you should think about the positive things that you have, rather than the negative thing happening to you right now (being stuck in a slow moving line).

tls• 11 years ago

Once upon a time writers actually took the time to investigate their "tools", like flying to Hawaii and sitting down with a psychologist in a small cafe and going over the numbers if you must.

Not everyone is in a New York state of mind. Once you Once Upon a time it speaks to narrowness.

pavel_lishin• 11 years ago

This comment looks like a markov chain to me.

lighthazard• 11 years ago

Yes.

breadbox• 11 years ago

I have terrible sidewalk rage, but it has nothing to do with slowpokes -- I can't stand people who walk straight down the middle and don't make room. "Oh, I'm so sorry your highness, I didn't realize this was your sidewalk" [says the voice in my head that I can't vocalize because unlike being in an automobile the other person would hear me].

maw• 11 years ago

I've said "con permiso, abuelita" -- roughly "excuse me, grandma" -- to dudes half my age waddling down the street.

I should do it more.

habitue• 11 years ago

"Patience is a virtue that’s been vanquished in the Twitter age."

Oh, it's one of those. Where unnamed "cognitive scientists" verify that everything was better in the good old days, and the world is just too fast now.

agumonkey3• 11 years ago

Was it true that people were happy waiting 2 seconds for a webpage 10 years ago ?

The unrewarding theory is still genius nonetheless. The faster the worse ?

gone35• 11 years ago

I'm pretty sure her source is this series of Forrester studies commissioned by Akamai in 2006 and 2009 [1,2,3].

Note they focused on online shoppers though. Also, subjectively, if anything it feels to me as if pages load much slower than in the mid-2000s --especially with all this new "Web 3.0" crap. But that's just me...

[1] http://www.akamai.com/html/about/press/releases/2009/press_0...

[2] http://royal.pingdom.com/2009/09/17/internet-users-expect-we...

[3] http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/01/technology/impatient-web-u...

agumonkey3• 11 years ago

The model is finer grained, less predictable and not bringing real value compared to the old single page model. I feel relaxed whenever I run into a vintage website.

Thanks for the links, very interesting to see.

bentcorner• 11 years ago

I don't mind waiting 2 seconds (or more) for a webpage to load iff:

1.) There is a notion of progress being made earlier than the 2s mark, and

2.) It's "worth it" for however long it has to take. Loading up a comment reply page in HN should be instantaneous, displaying a large PDF can be acceptably longer (as long as #1 holds)

barrkel• 11 years ago

I was waiting much more than 2 seconds, 20 years ago. But you'd do things like disable images to speed things up.

agumonkey3• 11 years ago

Depending on content and age, one could wait a seriously long time for an image. I remember eating each new pixel out of the first Playstation 2 pictures and game screenshots.

Zuider4• 11 years ago

The pages used to display an active load-bar to reassure the user that something was happening. One expected slowness back then, especially on dial-up, and you could always hit [esc] once enough of the page loaded.

There was a time, especially on older, slower Windows, that people would stab and swipe feverishly at the icon on the screen, resulting in multiple instances of the app when it finally emerged from the Stygian depths of the HD, and many copies of the icon on the desktop, since swiping served to copy the icon.

Dylan16807• 11 years ago

Whether it's true or not, I get upset with web pages for being shoddily coded and running orders of magnitude slower than they should, not because of absolute loading speed.

spatten• 11 years ago

Maybe I'm just rationalizing it because I want to think of myself as a calm, non-ragey person, but to me it feels like something else.

I agree with others that it feels rude when someone else takes up the whole sidewalk.

But it's also that I walk a lot, and use it as a form of transportation. I go twice as fast as a lot of people on the sidewalk, and it seems like if people just sped up a bit they'd find walking more useful, which would make them drive less, which is a good thing, and it drives me crazy that this isn't obvious to them.

Like I said, I'm probably just rationalizing :)

speakeron• 11 years ago

"I started to fear that we would be so late for our reservation that we would miss it. But when we got to the restaurant, we were no more than a couple minutes behind. My sense of time had warped."

Isn't the solution in this case simply a watch or some other form of portable timepiece?

petercooper• 11 years ago

To twist it around, I don't think it's the "slowpokes", I'm annoyed by not being able to do things at my own pace. So if I can go around someone or use a different checkout, great! I suspect it's not a problem with slowpokes, it's more the loss of personal control and autonomy. (I bought a car specifically for its crazy levels of acceleration for this reason :-))

wes-k• 11 years ago

I use to be a fast walker myself. Still fall back into it from time to time. I've enjoyed slowing down my pace and taking in a bit more of the scenery. It's also fun going slowly and seeing the hectic world rush by.

And always, always, try and walk on the side so others can pass easily!

kazinator2• 11 years ago

It's a dopamine thing. When things are going according to a boring routine (like getting from point A to point B at constant speed, unimpeded by any jam), you get a dopamine reward. Supposedly, this is evolutionary. Being happy while bored helps you sit on a tree branch for hours until the predator below goes away. Once you've gone agricultural, it helps you do repetitive field work from dawn to dusk.

This is not specifically just "sidewalk rage". For instance, the annoyance at being disrupted in the middle of playing a video game is a facet of the same thing.

Why Your Brain Hates Slowpokes

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