Posthuman Blues

Science fiction writer Peter Watts ("Starfish," "Blindsight") returns to the intriguing possibility of intelligence without cumbersome, neurologically extravagant awareness:

Do-It-Yourself Zombiehood

But what especially interested me was the suggestion of mechanism behind some of those results. Both Blindsight and Blog cite studies showing that being distracted from a problem actually improves your decision-making skills, or that we are paradoxically better at detecting subtle stimuli in "noisy" environments than in "clean" ones.