>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.