The one repeated statement throughout the article, if I interpreted it correctly, is that our brains pretty much process all the data in parallel, but result in a single set of actions to perform.
But don't we all know that not to be true? This is clearly evident with training sports, learning to play an instrument, or even forcing yourself to start using your non-natural hand for writing — and really, anything you are doing for the first time.
While we are adapting our brain to perform a certain set of new actions, we build our capability to do those in parallel: eg. imagine when you start playing tennis and you need to focus on your position, posture, grip, observing the ball, observing the opposing player, looking at your surroundings, and then you make decisions on the spot about how hard to run, in what direction, how do you turn the racquet head, how strong is your grip, what follow-through to use, + the conscious strategy that always lags a bit behind.
In a sense, we can't really describe our "stream of consciousness" well with language, but it's anything but single-threaded. I believe the problem comes from the same root cause as any concurrent programming challenge — these are simply hard problems, even if our brains are good at it and the principles are simple.
At the same time, I wouldn't even go so far to say we are unable to think conscious thoughts in parallel either, it's just that we are trained from early age to sanitize our "output". Did we ever have someone try learning to verbalize thoughts with the sign language, while vocalizing different thoughts through speaking? I am not convinced it's impossible, but we might not have figured out the training for it.
On the contrary, I would argue that conscious attention is only focused on one of those subroutines at a time. When the ball is in play you focus in it, and everything from your posture to racket handling fades into the background as a subconscious routine. When you make a handling mistake or want to improve something like posture, your focus shifts to that; you attend to it with your attention, and then you focus on something else.
In either case, with working memory for example, conscious contents are limited to at most a basket of 6-7 chunks. This number is very small compared to the incredible parallelism of the unconscious mind.
For all we know, there might be tons of conscious attention processes active in parallel. "You" only get to observe one, but there could be many. You'd never know because the processes do not observably communicate with each other. They do communicate with the same body though, but that is less relevant.
When you are learning a high-performance activity like a sport or musical instrument, the good coaches always get you to focus on only one or at most two things at any time.
The key value of a coach is their ability to assess your skills and the current goals to select what aspect you most need to focus on at that time.
Of course, there can be sequences, like "focus on accurately tossing to a higher point while you serve, then your footwork in the volley", but those really are just one thing at a time.
(edit, add) Yes, all the other aspects of play are going on in the background of your mind, but you are not working actively on changing them.
One of the most insightful observations one of my coaches made on my path to World-Cup level alpine ski racing was:
"We're training your instincts.".
What he meant by that was we were doing drills and focus to change the default — unthinking — mind-body response to an input. so, when X happened, instead of doing the untrained response then having to think about how to do it better (next time because it's already too late), the mind-body's "instinctive" or instant response is the trained motion. And of course doing that all the way across the skill-sets.
And pretty much the only way to train your instincts like that is to focus on it until the desired response is the one that happens without thinking. And then to focus on it again until it's not only the default, but you are now able to finely modulate in that response.
This is completely anecdotal.
But a years ago while playing beer pong i fuund could get get the ball in the opposing teams cup nearly every time.
By not looking at the cups until the last possible second.
If I took the time to focus and aim I almost always missed.
Yes, how, when, & where you focus your eyes is very key to performance. In your case, it seems like the last-second-focus both let your eye track the ball better to your paddle, then focusing on the target let your reflex aim take over, which was evidently pretty good. Not sure if I'd say the long-focus-on-target compromised the early tracking on the ball, or made your swing more 'artificial'.
A funny finding from a study I read which put top pro athletes through a range of perceptual-motor tests. One of the tests was how rapidly they could change focus from near-far-near-far, which of course all kinds of ball players excelled at. The researchers were initially horrified to find racecar drivers were really bad at it, thinking about having to track the world coming at them at nearly 200mph. It turns out of course, that racecar drivers don't use their eyes that way - they are almost always looking further in the distance at the next braking or turn-in point, bump in the track, or whatever, and even in traffic, the other cars aren't changing relative-distance very rapidly.
You were on to something!
In this context, we differentiate between the conscious and unconscious based on observability: the conscious is that which is observed, while the unconscious comprises what is not observed.
No, what I was trying to convey is that there could theoretically be multiple consciousnesses in one brain. These are however unaware of each other.
A person might have the impression that there is only one "me", but there could be tens, hundreds, or millions of those.
It might help to get away from the problem of finding where the presumed singular consciousness is located.
Then there is the beautiful issue of memory: maybe you are X consciousnesses but only one leaves a memory trace?
Consciousness and memory are two very different things. Don’t think too much about this when you have to undergo surgery. Maybe you are aware during the process but only memory-formation is blocked.
Or perhaps they all leave traces, but all write to the same log? And when reconstructing memory from the log, each constructed consciousness experiences itself as singular?
Which one controls the body? There is a problem there. You can’t just have a bunch of disembodied consciousnesses. Well, maybe.. but that sounds kind of strange.
What makes you think a singular consciousness controls the body?
It’s a single narrative that controls the body is what I mean. If one consciousness says “I am Peter” then other consciousnesses would know that and be conflicted about, if they don’t call themselves that.
What I mean is that a single narrative “wins”, not a multitude. This has to be explained somehow.
How do you know there aren't several different consciousnesses that all think they are Peter?
How do you know they aren't just constructing whatever narrative they prefer to construct from the common pool of memory, ending up with what looks like a single narrative because the parts of the narrative come from the same pool and get written back to the same pool?
Perhaps each consciousness is just a process, like other bodily processes.
Perhaps a human being is less like a machine with a master control and more like an ecosystem of cooperating processes.
Of course, the consciousnesses like to claim to be in charge, but I don't see why I should take their word for it.
No matter how you twist it at some point two consciousnesses differentiate on some contradictory issue maybe not name, but surely they differ on some issue otherwise they wouldn’t be .. different consciousnesses. Life as a human moves and is narrated as a single story, not the story of a thousand processes.
If that were true I can call my heart a process, my liver, etc. They are in a way part of me but they do not just ex nihilo cohere into a single narrative. That is an active process and whatever does that is the only really interesting one (IMO). So I think there might be a bunch of processes, sub personalities maybe, but there remains the problem of integration. Whatever integrates is the one that really fascinates me.
Anyway, thanks for indulging me. It is hard to go into any depth in this medium. I think you have really interesting ideas. Have a nice weekend.
At some moments there has to be a singular decision taken, such as which of two possible options to take. In such a moment some particular consciousness makes the decision, if it’s a decision made by a consciousness (though consciousness takes credit for more decisions than it actually makes, I think).
But granting that point does not grant that there is a single consciousness that is always (or ever) in charge, and it does not grant that any specific consciousness is associated with any specific singular narrative.
We know, scientifically speaking, some things that call the idea of a single consciousness with a single narrative into question. We know, for example from psychology of testimony that the same person’s memory of the same events differs at different times, and that the act of remembering rewrites memories. We have reason to suspect that the brain attributes to conscious choice decisions that are made too quickly for sensory data to reach the brain (and which may therefore be made elsewhere in the nervous system, even though the brain claims to have made the choice after the fact).
And I know from personal experience that some phenomena that normally appear to be singular conscious experiences can devolve into something else under some circumstances. For example, I have experienced blindsight, in which I cannot see something but can nevertheless collect accurate information from it by pointing my eyes at it. I have also experienced being asleep and awake at the same time.
Experiences like these are hard to account for if I assume that my consciousness is singular and continuous and in charge, but not so hard to account for if I assume that it’s a useful illusion cobbled together by a network of cooperating processes that usually (but not always) work well together. For example, many people might claim that it’s nonsense to say that a person can be asleep and awake at the same time, but it’s nonsense only if asleep and awake are mutually exclusive states of a singular consciousness. If, on the other hand, they are two neurological processes that are normally coordinated so that they don’t occur at the same time (because it’s less than useful for them to do so), then it’s not nonsense to observe that under unusual circumstances that coordination might be disrupted. Similarly, if seeing something is one process and consciously experiencing seeing it is a different process—normally, but not necessarily coordinated—then blindsight is not so hard to account for.
Not to mention that it’s trivially easy to find examples of consciousness not being in charge of our behavior, although it likes to think that it is.
I suggest that the supposed singular consciousness, supposedly in charge, may be an illusion constructed by a system of mostly, but not perfectly, coordinated cooperating processes.
There is a long tradition in India, which started with oral transmission of the Vedas, of parallel cognition. It is almost an art form or a mental sport - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avadhanam
Mental sport - Yes.
It is the exploration and enumeration of the possible rhythms that led to the discovery of Fibonacci sequence and binary representation in around 200 BC.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pingala#Combinatorics
Sounds very much sequential, even if very difficult:
> The performer's first reply is not an entire poem. Rather, the poem is created one line at a time. The first questioner speaks and the performer replies with one line. The second questioner then speaks and the performer replies with the previous first line and then a new line. The third questioner then speaks and performer gives his previous first and second lines and a new line and so on. That is, each questioner demands a new task or restriction, the previous tasks, the previous lines of the poem, and a new line.
The replies are sequential to adjust with new inputs, but the mental process to produce each new line has to do lots of computations
My point is that what we call conscious and subconscious is limited by our ability to express it in language: since we can't verbalize what's going on quickly enough, we separate those out. Could we learn to verbalize two things at the same time (we all do that as well with say different words and different body language, even consciously, but can we take it a step further? eg. imagine saying nice things to someone and raising the middle finger for someone else behind your back :))
As the whole article is really about the full brain, and it seems you agree our "unconscious mind" producing actions in parallel, I think the focus is wrongly put on brain size, when we lack the expressiveness for what the brain can already do.
Edit: And don't get me wrong, I personally suck at multi-tasking :)
What you consider a single thought is a bit ill defined. A multitude of thoughts together can be formed as a packet, which then can be processed sequentially.
Intelligence is the ability to capture, and predicts events in space and time, and as such it must have the capability to model both things occurring in simultaneity and sequentially.
Sticking to your example, a routine for making a decision in tennis would look something like at a higher level "Run to the left and backstroke the ball", which broken down would be something like "Turn hip and shoulder to the left, extend left leg, extend right, left, right, turn hip/shoulder to the right, swing arm." and so on.
Yes . But maybe there's multiple such "conscious attention" instances at the same time. And "you" are only one of them.
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>Did we ever have someone try learning to verbalize thoughts with the sign language, while vocalizing different thoughts through speaking?
Can you carry on a phone conversation at the same time as carrying on an active chat conversation. Can you type a thought to one person while speaking about a different thought at the same time? Can you read a response and listen to a response simultaneously? I feel like this would be pretty easy to test. Just coordinate between the speaking person and the typing person, so that they each give 30 seconds of input information, then you have to provide at least 20 or 25 seconds out of 30 responding.
I am pretty confident I could not do this.
When I started training as phone support at Tmobile 20 years ago I immediately identified the problem that I'd have to be having a conversation with the customer, while typing notation about the customer's problem at the same time.. what I was saying-or-listening-to and typing would be very different and have to be orchestrated simultaneously. I had no way to even envision how I would do that.
Fast forward 8 months or so of practicing it in fits and starts, and then I was in fact able to handle the task with aplomb and was proud of having developed that skill. :)
I knew someone who could type 80 WPM while holding a conversation with me on the phone. I concluded that reading->typing could use an entirely different part of the brain than hearing->thinking->speaking, and she agreed. I'm not sure if what would happen if both tasks required thinking about the words.
I can do that. I think about the typing just long enough to put it in a buffer and then switch my focus back to the conversation (whose thread I'm holding in my head). I do this very quickly but at no point would I say my conscious focus or effort are on both things. When I was younger and my brain's processing and scheduler were both faster, I could chat in person and online, but it was a lot more effort and it was just a lot of quickly switching back and forth.
I don't really think it is much different than reading ahead in a book. Your eyes and brain are reading a few words ahead while you're thinking about the words "where you are".
> my conscious focus or effort are on both things.
If this switcheroo is really fast and allows you to switch between two different thoughts so quickly while keeping a pointer to the position of the thought (so you can continue it with every switch), this is indistinguishable from doing it in parallel — and it still seems it's mostly blocking on your verbal, language apparatus, not on your thought process.
Reminds me of the early days of multithreading on a single core CPU and using the TSS (Task Switch Segment IIRC) on Intel CPUs to (re)store the context quickly.
Certainly from the outside it is indistinguishable, but that's not the conscious experience of it. I can type the words in the buffer without thinking about them at all. It is possible that at that point they are no longer language, depending on how my brain actually does this. However, the conscious experience of it is that "I" need to decide what to say in both conversations and I can only experience that decision a conversation at a time, even if the thoughts themselves are generated and/or in parallel.
A similar effect occurs when playing music. I can only consciously work on improving a single thing at a time. What does happen over time is that what a "single thing" is can become more encompassing. For instance, with the piano I had to first concentrate on what the chord I wanted was, then concentrate on hitting each note of the chord. Now I can just play that chord, without thinking consciously about the notes involved or how to hit them. So if a song calls for a C chord, I can just focus on "hit a C chord" rather than "hit the notes C, E, and G". Then the C chord itself grows into its various inversions, major/minor, arpeggiation, etc.
But at no point in my entire life have I ever had the conscious experience of multiple conscious experiences in parallel.
I've noticed myself being able to do this, but modulo the thinking part. I can think about at most one thing at once, but I can think about what I want to type and start my fingers on their dance to get it out, while switching to a conversation that I'm in, replaying the last few seconds of what the other party said, formulating a response, and queuing that up for speech.
I strongly believe that the vast majority of people are also only able to basically do that - I've never met someone who is simultaneously form more than one "word stream" at once.
Yeah I agree, my brain works in that rapid switching kinda way. I feel you can set up the subconscious one to do a task while your conscious brain works on something else. Trying to output two conscious 'word streams' simultaneously as you said, feels impossible.
I readily admit that my language processing center is not up to the task. Others are bringing up examples of people who seem to be.
However, the point is that we tie our thoughts to their verbalization, but the question is if verbalization equals thoughts? Others are bringing up memory here as well.
If we are capable of having parallel thoughts, just like the brain is able to run multiple parallel systems, could we also train to do parallel verbalization? Would we even need to?
Is it that different than a drummer running four different beat patterns across all four appendages? Drummers frequently describe having "four brains". I think these things seem impossible and daunting to start but I bet with practice they become pretty natural as our brain adjusts and adapts.
Speaking as a drummer: yes, it’s completely different. The movements of a drummer are part of a single coordinated and complementary whole. Carrying on two conversations at once would be more like playing two different songs simultaneously. I’ve never heard of anyone doing that.
That said, Bob Milne could actually reliably play multiple songs in his head at once - in an MRI, could report the exact moment he was at in each song at an arbitrary time - but that guy is basically an alien. More on Bob: https://radiolab.org/podcast/148670-4-track-mind/transcript.
Wow, that ability is incredible! Thank you for sharing.
I mean, as someone who's played drums from a very young age (30+ years now), I disagree with that description of how playing drums works. I went ahead and looked up that phrase, and it seems to be popular in the last couple of years, but it's the first time I've heard it. I'd honestly liken it to typing; each of your fingers are attempting to accomplish independent goals along with your other fingers to accomplish a coordinated task. In percussion, your limbs are maintaining rhythms separate from each other, but need to coordinate as a whole to express the overall phrase, rhythm, and structure of the music you're playing. When you're first learning a new style (the various latin beats are great examples), it can feel very disjunct, but as you practice more and more the whole feels very cohesive and makes sense as a chorus of beats together, not separate beats that happen to work together.
Possible. Reminds me of playing the piano with both hands and other stuff like walking stairs, talking, carrying things, planning your day and thinking about some abstract philosophical thing at the same time. It’s not easy or natural, but I am not at all convinced it is impossible.
When you have kids you learn to listen to the TV and your kids at the same time, not losing detail on both. I can also code while listening a meeting.
I would pass that test without any issues. You need to learn divided attention and practice it, it's a skill.
Conscious experience seems to be single threaded, we know that brain synchronizes senses (for example sound of a bouncing ball needs to be aligned with visual of bouncing ball), but IMO it's not so obvious what is the reason for it. The point of having the experience may not be acting in the moment, but monitoring how the unconscious systems behave and adjusting (aka learning).
Haven't there been experiments on people who have had their corpus callosum severed where they seem to have dual competing conscious experiences?
Yep, folks should look up "Alien hand syndrome".
Well, serializing our experiences into memories is a big one. There's been a big project in psychology probing the boundary between conscious and subliminal experiences and while subliminal stimuli can affect our behavior in the moment all trace of them is gone after a second or two.
We have very little insight to our own cognition. We know the 'output layer' that we call the conscious self seems to be single threaded in this way, but that's like the blind man who feels the elephants trunk and announces that the elephant is like a snake.
Certain areas of neurological systems are time and volume constrained way more than others, and subjective experience doesn't really inform objective observation. For instance, see confabulation.
I agree, but I am not sure how it relates to the article's claim of us only ever doing one action, which I feel is grossly incorrect.
Are you referring to our language capabilities? Even there, I have my doubts about our capabilities in the brain (we are limited by our speech apparatus) which might be unrealized (and while so, it's going to be hard to objectively measure, though likely possible in simpler scenarios).
Do you have any pointers about any measurement of what happens in a brain when you simultaneously communicate different thoughts (thumbs up to one person, while talking on a different topic to another)?
Concurrency is messy and unpredictable, and the brain feels less like a cleanly designed pipeline and more like a legacy system with hacks and workarounds that somehow (mostly) hold together
You might like Dennett's multiple drafts hypothesis.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_drafts_model
I'm very very interested in discussions about this, having personally experienced cracks at the neuropsychiatric level where multiple parallel streams of thoughts (symbolic and biomechanical) leaked out in flashes, I'm now obsessed with the matter.
if anybody knows books or boards/groups talking about this, hit me.
Form TFA: "And, yes, this is probably why we have a single thread of “conscious experience”, rather than a whole collection of experiences associated with the activities of all our neurons."
That made me think of schizophrenics who can apparently have a plurality of voices in their head.
A next level down would be the Internal Family Systems model which implicates a plurality of "subpersonalities" inside us which can kind of take control one at a time. I'm not explaining that well, but IFS turned out to be my path to understanding some of my own motivations and behaviors.
Been a while since I googled it:
https://ifs-institute.com/
This is also the basis for the movie "Inside Out".
Well, anyone who can remember a vivid dream where multiple things were happening at once or where they were speaking or otherwise interacting with other dream figures whose theory of mind was inscrutable to them during the dream should clarify that the mind is quite capable of orchestrating far more "trains of thought" at once than whatever we directly experience as our own personal consciousness.
That would be my input for people to not have to experience schizophrenia directly in order to appreciate the concept of "multiple voices at once" within one's own mind.
Personally, my understanding is that our own experience of consciousness is that of a language-driven narrative (most frequently experienced as an internal monologue, though different people definitely experience this in different ways and at different times) only because that is how most of us have come to commit our personal experiences to long term memory, not because that was the sum total of all thoughts we were actually having.
So namely, any thoughts you had — including thoughts like how you chose to change your gait to avoid stepping on a rock long after it left the bottom of your visual field — that never make it to long term memory are by and large the ones which we wind up post facto calling "subconscious": that what is conscious is simply the thoughts we can recall having after the fact.
Thanks a lot
Isn't that the point of learning to juggle? You split your mind in to focusing on a left hand action, a right hand action, and tracking the items in the air.