alt Hacker NewsThere’s a big difference between processing multiple streams, and processing multiple streams simultaneously.
You can achieve the former, without the latter, by doing time slicing. Spending a small amount of time processing stream A, then dropping that and processing stream B for a moment, then swapping back. Just like how a single core CPU can process multiple threads.
Proving the brain is continuously processing and encoding multiple streams simultaneously is an interesting finding that helps us better understand how our brains handle multitasking. That’s absolutely something worth studying and understanding, even if the headline discovery “feels” obvious. It the precise mechanism that’s interesting, not the effect the mechanism produces.
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When I meditated a lot, I was able to sit in a cafe and listen to 3 conversations without switching and be able to understand them and remember them all. It happened to me few times. Also, once, sleeping in a tent, a voice from a dream interfered with sound of raindrops and became distorted and I woke up scared only to quickly get what just happened.
> Spending a small amount of time processing stream A, then dropping that and processing stream B for a moment, then swapping back. Just like how a single core CPU can process multiple threads.
The brain isn't a computer with a single CPU - just because computers are built that way doesn't mean the brain is.
Ie it's only surprising if you start with an erroneous computer based model of how the brain works.
The paper is interesting in that it looks at a core interesting issue - which is how conscious attention is managed given we know that behind the scenes it's 'everything all at once'.