This is a nutty little idea that I’ve had floating around my head of late.  It would be an example of cognitive surplus in action.

As per Clay Shirky, cognitive surplus is the free time that our brains have in this post-agrarian age which we often devote to unproductive things like watching television because we don’t need the extra brain cycles to hunt food, build shelter, or otherwise simply survive.  Cognitive surplus is a benefit from moving off farms into more urban settings and largely adhering to the 40 hour work week.

Sometimes we take this left-over time and collectively do some interesting things like creating and maintaining Wikipedia, social news and bookmarking sites (e.g. Mixx, Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon, Ning groups, etc.) and the amazing collections of images on Flickr, including the famous Coney Island Mermaid Parade that Shirky has talked about before.  If you want a more recent example of collective yet lightly coordinated action, go to Twitter Search and see the staggering amount of Tweets that use the term #sxsw, used to tag information about the annual South by Southwest conference.

At the same time you have interesting examples of distributing processing of information, such as:

• the  SETI@Home program that allows volunteers to devote some of their computer’s spare processing cycles to analyzing data that has been detected by Earth’s radio telescopes, which the hope of finding signs of extra-terrestrial life
• Wikipedia is, again, another example
• Project Gutenberg, in which paper publications are gradually being converted from paper to electronic formats that can be read by anyone with a computer and an Internet connection.  In each case, hundreds or thousands of individuals are contributing small pieces of work to help achieve a goal.

These projects can exist through the combination of technologies and “free time” that we can devote to things above and beyond survival.

The thing is, we’re not necessarily limited to computers to actually do distributed work, although the coordination aspect would be almost impossible without them.  But the work itself could be incredibly simple.
Consider counting to the number 1,000,000 (one million) for a moment.  In English.

The first few numbers are easy as they are mostly monosyllabic.  You can say two of those numbers in a second.  Then, as the digits and syllables increase, each number takes longer.

Try saying 888,888 (eight hundred thousand, eight hundred and eighty-eight) out loud for a moment.  A number of that size can take 3 – 4 seconds to say in a reasonable length of time.  You could probably do it in less time than that, but it would be hard to keep doing it quickly without eventually making a mistake and losing count.

If we assume, for argument’s sake, that it takes 3.0 seconds to count a number (on average), it would take 3 million seconds for one person to count from 1 to 1,000,000.  That’s 833.3 hours or 34.7 days spent non-stop counting (which is impossible because that doesn’t leave time for meals, bio breaks, or sleep.)  Assuming a 40 hour work week spent counting, it would take that same person 104.16 days to count from 1 to 1,000,000.

Although it’s not possible for 9 women to collectively birth a healthy child from the time of concept to delivery in one month, there are ways to slice and dice the counting operation of Count One Million:

Two people could do the job in roughly 17.35 of those non-stop counting days if one person takes the numbers 1 – 500,000 and the other takes the rest.

Ten people could do the job in roughly 3.5 non-stop counting days if each took a block of 100,000 numbers.

One hundred people could do the job in roughly 8.3 hours if each counted in blocks of 10,000.

And so on.  So adding people certainly makes things go faster.

In fact, they can go even faster if people count in units of less than 1,000 numbers, because it takes less time to say (or think) each number if they are three digits or less than if these numbers have 4 – 6 digits.  By splitting it that way, each person can easily say each number in one second.  So, not only do you shorten the elapsed time by splitting up the workload like this, but you can also cut down the workload to one-half or one-third of its original amount by arranging the work into more efficient packages and distributing it among multiple people like this.

You could well argue that it makes no sense to have a group count a large number like this in this age of computers.  However, this simple example speaks volumes about the potential power of harnessing cognitive surplus to do big things.

Other posts that you might enjoy reading:

• Clay Shirky interviewed on CBC Radio show Spark
• Newspapers, serendipity, and the time to browse
• Power laws
• Why do we participate in group projects?
• Help build this list of cognitive surplus ideas and projects