See Tufte: http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=0...
"That essay reviews psychological experiments that discovered people had a hard time remembering more than about 7 unrelated pieces of really dull data all at once."
Lions are surprisingly not vicious towards humans at all--since there's no species that can fuck with them they don't have the vicious fear response most animals have. That's the real trick to lion taming--and the reason you can tame a lion but not a jaguar. Tigers are the same way. The big danger with either of them is actually playfulness--they don't always realize how strong they are.
“Dave Hoover:
“The chair has four legs... Now, an animal has a one track mind, For instance, the animal is coming after you with the idea of tearing your head off... You put the chair up, and all of a sudden, he has four points of interest. He loses his original train of thought because this agitates him. He can’t comprehend those four points of interest, so what he does he attacks the chair. He takes his wrath out on the chair. His mind now had been completely distracted from his original thought: ‘Eat the man in the white pants.’
“It’s basically animal psychology. You try to keep the animal afraid of you in that he does not understand you. He does not understand that you’re weaker than he is. [...]”
(The next few paragraphs are also quite interesting, and I recommend the film generally.)
//file this under benefits of a liberal arts education...
They're often perplexed if I'm late to a meeting or aren't up to date on the latest email. I generally keep Outlook closed which manages my calendar and email.
You see, the human mind can only hold so many concepts in active thought at the same time. It's somewhere around 7. If paying attention to your surroundings is 1, there's only 6 left. If someone -happens- in the surroundings, there's at least 1 more gone. If something -interesting- happens, there 2 or 3 more as you go off on tangents thinking about them.
Yeah, half your mind is taken with your surroundings at times.
My solution is to pay attention to my surroundings when working on easy projects, and for projects that -really- need my attention, I put in earphones and block everything out. I have a few different music sets that I've heard so many times and/or they have a sound that doesn't ask my brain to process them.
With my earphones in, people have to yell (or call my phone or IM) to get my attention. I don't check even check my email.
I usually don't have to resort to the earphones. One line of thinking is that if it takes all your ability to write the code, you couldn't possibly fix bugs in it. You should be writing well below your ability so that you can fix it when it breaks. This usually means the code is easier to read as well. But some things are just innately complex, and there's nothing you can do about it.