Seth Godin as a brief article about a time he sat next to Boing Boing cofounder Cory Doctorow at a conference. He describes the experience thusly:

I sat next to Cory at a conference today. It was like playing basketball next to Michael Jordan. Cory was looking at more than 30 screens a minute. He was bouncing from his mail to his calendar to a travel site and then back. His fingers were a blur as he processed inbound mail, visiting more than a dozen sites in the amount of time it took for my neck to cramp up. I’m very fast, but Cory is in a different league entirely.

This is something I’ve started to notice about myself and how I process information — I can cover a lot of data, but I also tend to lose organization as my processing increases. And what Doctorow has is also yet another angle of intelligence that cannot be crystallized by a static, traditional IQ score.

People like Doctorow possess an insanely high ability to process and organize information very rapidly, presumably for further handling. In his case, it’s information coming from his blog or to be used later as something to drive content. It’s emails from the thousands of correspondents he gets every day. It’s his travel details, as his success affords him many engagement opportunities and other meetings. It’s any number of tasks and sub-tasks.

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