“I know someone who can actually attend to literally five conversations at once.”
I agree that some people are better at generic multitasking than others, and there are some people who are better at monitoring multiple conversations.
I also believe you know somebody who claims they can attend to 5 conversations at once.
But I’d comfortably bet even money that their ability to recall and process information drops off quickly once they’re trying to attend to more than 2. My model is that unintentionally tricking yourself into believing you have this ability is easier than actually learning it.
Beyond that I’m not sure that the multi/single thread dichotomy is a particularly useful abstraction to describe how human brains function nor does it provide much predictive power.
Here I am not claiming all humans are single or multi-threaded. I am disputing if it is even a meaningful abstraction.
I enjoyed the article and think it points at some important things, but agree with Stephen that it might not point to a useful distinction.
Purely anecdotally: I don’t get absorbed into books easily (I very much enjoy reading, but don’t get the level of immersion you describe), feel emotional conflict as two distinct feelings or thoughts warring in my mind, can have IFS conversations, etc. but am absolutely hopeless at multi-tasking, dividing my attention, etc.
Meanwhile, my wife is the polar opposite. She gets immersed in books, feels one emotion at a time, empathizes compulsively, etc. but is great at multi-tasking.
Maybe the threaded model just doesn’t apply to multi-tasking, but that seems unusual to me. I would expect multi-tasking to be an obvious benefit of having a “multi-threaded” brain.
“I know someone who can actually attend to literally five conversations at once.”
I agree that some people are better at generic multitasking than others, and there are some people who are better at monitoring multiple conversations.
I also believe you know somebody who claims they can attend to 5 conversations at once.
But I’d comfortably bet even money that their ability to recall and process information drops off quickly once they’re trying to attend to more than 2. My model is that unintentionally tricking yourself into believing you have this ability is easier than actually learning it.
Beyond that I’m not sure that the multi/single thread dichotomy is a particularly useful abstraction to describe how human brains function nor does it provide much predictive power.
Here I am not claiming all humans are single or multi-threaded. I am disputing if it is even a meaningful abstraction.
I enjoyed the article and think it points at some important things, but agree with Stephen that it might not point to a useful distinction.
Purely anecdotally: I don’t get absorbed into books easily (I very much enjoy reading, but don’t get the level of immersion you describe), feel emotional conflict as two distinct feelings or thoughts warring in my mind, can have IFS conversations, etc. but am absolutely hopeless at multi-tasking, dividing my attention, etc.
Meanwhile, my wife is the polar opposite. She gets immersed in books, feels one emotion at a time, empathizes compulsively, etc. but is great at multi-tasking.
Maybe the threaded model just doesn’t apply to multi-tasking, but that seems unusual to me. I would expect multi-tasking to be an obvious benefit of having a “multi-threaded” brain.