As Heuser mentions with regard to all (or many) cities, New Orleans has encouraged me to think of a different kind of “multi-tasking.” It is not the usual multi-tasking associated with doing a number of different cognitive tasks and seeking to accomplish a number of chores at the same time. We all know this kind of challenge in our busy lives—especially with the emerging world of multiple apps and social networking. I remember a colleague of mine in graduate school who would be reading a course assignment, while playing music and listening to a television program. Did he get less from each source: Advanced Cognitive Psychology, John Lee Hooker and an old episode of I Love Lucy? Yes, he probably did, though I suspect that the Advanced Cognitive Psychology text received the greatest attention, since he is a quite successful psychologist these days. I wonder, however, if there was some strange potion being brewed when my colleague combined cognitive psychology with John Lee Hooker’s blues and Lucy’s domestic chaos. Perhaps my colleague was formulating a new model of psychology that blended cognitive processing with depression and domestic crisis, as well as the therapeutic value of music and comedy.
When I am in New Orleans, all of my senses are alerted and they are intermixing. While walking down a street in the French Quarter I am surrounded with the sounds of music and the smell of food. I ease-drop on conversations being conducted in many languages and Louisiana dialects and feel the rich scented breezes arriving from the Louisiana Bayous. When I am sipping on a cup of hot chocolate or eating a sugar-frosted beignet at the Café du Monde, I listen to the jazz being played by musicians lingering around the edge of the Café. I also hear bells being tolled at the nearby cathedral and smell the flowers from the even closer Jackson Square. The street mimes, fortune tellers and artists displaying their often not-very-impressive paintings are also capturing my attention. This is not the matter of multiple tasks occupying my mind or of pressing business in many different sectors of my life. This is a matter of multiple source saturation that leaves me not exhausted, but rather exhilarated and filled with many new impressions and ideas.
I wonder if this is what many artists are trying to accomplish when they advocate the combination of multiple media in a single performance. Are many of the creators of opera and Broadway musicals seeking to accomplish this goal when envisioning works that interweave music, lyrics, dance and a compelling storyline? When Jonah Lehrer (2009) writes about the value of interplay between our prefrontal cortex and our more primitive (and more experienced) limbic system, is he capturing the essence of this productive multi-tasking experience? The interweaving of systematic reasoning (prefrontal) with intuition (limbic) might be something of what I am experiencing when enmeshed in the world of New Orleans. This may be at the heart of a New Orleans State of Mind and may at times be a condition that we wish to encourage and facilitate with our coaching clients.
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