> I think we are going to find that attention is dominated by working set memory, and people who can juggle even twice as much stuff are going to operate fundam

> I think we are going to find that attention is dominated by working set memory, and people who can juggle even twice as much stuff are going to operate fundamentally differently I would be careful equivocating working memory, attention and processing power. Attention is much more complicated than what one can juggle in mind actively, what is chosen to enter and leave it also matters, just as the shape and form of the task it conforms to. There is no singular unit in brain that “creates” attention, it is best thought as an emergent property of several, if not all, parts working together. Besides that, even if we assumed a von Neumann architecture for human cognition, an increase in memory wouldn’t have expanded total processing capacity unless it was starved of it. I don’t think that is the case for humans, if there was a selective advantage to having more working memory as general problem solvers, we would have had it already. Granted, the types of tasks we undertake today can be different in shape, but not completely; still need to survive a physical world, still need to have successful relationships, still have to manage emotions, still have to do all of these while doing our specialized abstract cognitive tasks.