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Show "Blanks" in Mind Occur Several Times a Minute Chicago. Your mind "goes blank" several times every minute. min-ute. During these blank periods pe-riods you involuntarily stop work for a couple of seconds. If you are tired, the stops occur oftencr maybe eight or ten times each minute and they may last twice as long. This automatic putting on of brakes by the brain was discovered in experiments conducted at the psychology laboratory of the University Uni-versity of Chicago here, under the direction of Prof. Arthur G. Bills. Mind Stops Work. The "blocks," as Professor Bills calls these blank periods, are not complete, he explains. The individual in-dividual does not lose track of what is going on, but he must mentally stop work on the task at hand. Blocks partly account for the "er-r-r" and "Ah" which public speakers speak-ers put between words. These blanks are particularly conspicuous when a person is doing rapid calculating. calcu-lating. Every so often, he is unable to proceed and stalls. Fatigue increases in-creases both the frequency and the duration of the blocks, causing bunching of responses or spurts of work. How Stutterers React. Stutterers block about twice as often as normal persons and their blocks last longer, it was found. "It is safe to assume that there is a common neurological basis between be-tween blocking and stuttering," Professor Bills concluded. Mental blocks are enforced resting rest-ing periods, he explained. They may account for the fact that continuous con-tinuous mental work does not impair im-pair mental efficiency to nearly the same extent that muscular work impairs muscular efficiency. |