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> Why can we only think about one thing at a time? Maybe this is just a perception thing. Sure, you can only really keep up one stream of thought, visualizatio

> Why can we only think about one thing at a time? Maybe this is just a perception thing. Sure, you can only really keep up one stream of thought, visualization or inner dialogue (whatever you want to call it) at a time, but perhaps that's because we learn all our lives that direct communication is a one-channel, linear thing--speaking and listening focused on one topic at a time. Our brain does plenty of thinking in the background that leads to "a-ha!" moments even when the direct focus of our thoughts isn't on that topic. What if the mind could maintain multiple threads of thoughts at once, but our language coerces our thought patterns into being linear and non-concurrent?

thmsths 2y ago
I am not qualified to judge whether you're right or wrong but I love that concept!
jdbxhdd 2y ago
Also I do not agree with the premise that we can only think about one thing at a time. We routinely communicate with multiple people at once and also communicate with the same persons in multiple threads of conversations. Of cause this means that we switch between those tasks and do not really do them in parallel. At most we listen to one person, answer a second via speech, a third via text while thinking about what to respond to a fourth We just switch our focus of attention quite fast
- imzadi 2y ago
  This is the part that bothers me. I can definitely think of multiple things at a time. It really just depends on the complexity of the tasks. I can listen to and process and audiobook while driving to work every morning, for instance. I definitely can have multiple thoughts in parallel. I remember when I used to recite prayers, I would be reciting the memorized prayer while thinking about other things. Both things were happening at the same time. The memorized task takes less processing power, but it still requires some thought to execute.
Enginerrrd 2y ago
As someone without an inner monologue, and someone that's spent a LOT of time meditating, it's not the language. It's the attention mechanisms themselves. Buddhist scholars insist that while we can have multiple threads of attention in our awareness, like strings with pearls of experience/thoughts we can only actually hold one little pearl of information from that stream in our attention at a time, and that we flit between them quite rapidly. Personally, I sort of agree, but I notice that there seems to be a time-compression thing happening where the pearl delivered to attention can contain a compressed summary of continuous perception. This seems to work for 2 things at once in awareness. When you start monitoring 3+ streams, there are gaps. And even maintaining the 2 streams continuously is exhausting so the mind tends to relax a little and leave gaps on a normal basis, but it seems like it can monitor dual feeds when its particularly important. My understanding is that neuroscience largely seems to agree with the above. (Actually, I'll note that the USUAL mode of being doesn't even monitor one stream continuously. A lot of the weird effects (and deeply interesting ones!) they talk about in meditative arts seem to pop up when you progress to being able to hold truly continuous attention.)
- heyjamesknight 2y ago
  What you're describing here is software, not hardware—Cognitive Science is the relevant field, not Neuroscience. That said, your understanding is largely supported by our current understanding of consciousness, attention, and perception. The attention mechanism doesn't handle parallel processing well—but can operate "multi-threaded", where it juggles several foci at once (with some obvious cost to switching between them). But I think its a mistake to assume that decision making has to be done within this attention context. While we may only be aware of a single thread at any given time, the brain is doing a lot of parallel processing. We can only focus our attention on a single cognitive task, but that doesn't mean we're not actively performing many others.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - mhluongo 2y ago
    What you're describing here is dualism and Descartes, in response to a post that references Buddhist scholars, a philosophy famously focused on monism. "Cognitive science" vs "neuroscience" as a concept is just how we decided to slice the problem up for academia. Next time, maybe cut the first paragraph ;)
Bjartr 2y ago
I wonder if some people with dissociative identity disorder, or who at least identify as plural, experience overlapping simultaneous trains of thought
- pixl97 2y ago
  Heh if there are two yous occurring at the same time, one you would never know about it. Only third party observation would be able to tell you
  - Bjartr 2y ago
    That assumes clean swaps between personalities, I'd wager that it gets messier than that for some.
NoMoreNicksLeft 2y ago
We think about many things at a time. But for those with malfunctioning brains that have the internal monologue going constantly, they mistaken that monologue for their thoughts and so it must be "one thing at a time". The language they experience their monologue in is by its very nature, sequential, you can't speak or even hear/understand two parallel streams of speech. >Our brain does plenty of thinking in the background that leads to "a-ha!" moments even That's not "in the background". That's the real you, your real mind. That's the foreground. But, if your brain malfunctions as many do, then the monologue shows up and crowds out everything. Sometimes it is apparently loud enough that it even prevents those "a-ha!" moments. >but our language coerces our thought patterns into being linear and non-concurrent? The language should just be discarded. What you want is an internal silence.
- lanstin 2y ago
  I wouldn’t say it’s language so much as unnecessarily added language. Words and sentences can appear and be useful, but there is a lot of mental activity that is not essential but added on responses to things. I wouldn’t say a component that generates comments is a broken brain, it believing the comments or the beliefs embedded inside them can break your contentedness.
nonameiguess 2y ago
I don't know what ever became of the line of research, but there was a very interesting book I read decades ago called Descartes' Error by Antonio Damasio that examined case studies of patients who had their corpus collosum severed, resulting in a split brain. You could show their left and right eyes different images and ask them what they saw and they would write and speak different answers, because speech and writing are controlled by different brain hemispheres. This seems to suggest that any bottleneck in conscious attention is not an inherent limitation of an animal brain but rather a consensus mechanism we've developed to keep our chain of experience coherent. If we get rid of the constraint that all of our external communication channels need to present the same narrative, we can seemingly process more information even when it requires being a conscious center of attention.
- prmph 2y ago
  It's like UIs being single-threaded, because otherwise you would have chaos if several background threads are trying to update the UI at the same time.

thmsths 2y ago

I am not qualified to judge whether you're right or wrong but I love that concept!

jdbxhdd 2y ago

Also I do not agree with the premise that we can only think about one thing at a time. We routinely communicate with multiple people at once and also communicate with the same persons in multiple threads of conversations. Of cause this means that we switch between those tasks and do not really do them in parallel. At most we listen to one person, answer a second via speech, a third via text while thinking about what to respond to a fourth We just switch our focus of attention quite fast

imzadi 2y ago
This is the part that bothers me. I can definitely think of multiple things at a time. It really just depends on the complexity of the tasks. I can listen to and process and audiobook while driving to work every morning, for instance. I definitely can have multiple thoughts in parallel. I remember when I used to recite prayers, I would be reciting the memorized prayer while thinking about other things. Both things were happening at the same time. The memorized task takes less processing power, but it still requires some thought to execute.

Enginerrrd 2y ago

As someone without an inner monologue, and someone that's spent a LOT of time meditating, it's not the language. It's the attention mechanisms themselves. Buddhist scholars insist that while we can have multiple threads of attention in our awareness, like strings with pearls of experience/thoughts we can only actually hold one little pearl of information from that stream in our attention at a time, and that we flit between them quite rapidly. Personally, I sort of agree, but I notice that there seems to be a time-compression thing happening where the pearl delivered to attention can contain a compressed summary of continuous perception. This seems to work for 2 things at once in awareness. When you start monitoring 3+ streams, there are gaps. And even maintaining the 2 streams continuously is exhausting so the mind tends to relax a little and leave gaps on a normal basis, but it seems like it can monitor dual feeds when its particularly important. My understanding is that neuroscience largely seems to agree with the above. (Actually, I'll note that the USUAL mode of being doesn't even monitor one stream continuously. A lot of the weird effects (and deeply interesting ones!) they talk about in meditative arts seem to pop up when you progress to being able to hold truly continuous attention.)

heyjamesknight 2y ago
What you're describing here is software, not hardware—Cognitive Science is the relevant field, not Neuroscience. That said, your understanding is largely supported by our current understanding of consciousness, attention, and perception. The attention mechanism doesn't handle parallel processing well—but can operate "multi-threaded", where it juggles several foci at once (with some obvious cost to switching between them). But I think its a mistake to assume that decision making has to be done within this attention context. While we may only be aware of a single thread at any given time, the brain is doing a lot of parallel processing. We can only focus our attention on a single cognitive task, but that doesn't mean we're not actively performing many others.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- mhluongo 2y ago
  What you're describing here is dualism and Descartes, in response to a post that references Buddhist scholars, a philosophy famously focused on monism. "Cognitive science" vs "neuroscience" as a concept is just how we decided to slice the problem up for academia. Next time, maybe cut the first paragraph ;)

Bjartr 2y ago

I wonder if some people with dissociative identity disorder, or who at least identify as plural, experience overlapping simultaneous trains of thought

pixl97 2y ago
Heh if there are two yous occurring at the same time, one you would never know about it. Only third party observation would be able to tell you
- Bjartr 2y ago
  That assumes clean swaps between personalities, I'd wager that it gets messier than that for some.

NoMoreNicksLeft 2y ago

We think about many things at a time. But for those with malfunctioning brains that have the internal monologue going constantly, they mistaken that monologue for their thoughts and so it must be "one thing at a time". The language they experience their monologue in is by its very nature, sequential, you can't speak or even hear/understand two parallel streams of speech. >Our brain does plenty of thinking in the background that leads to "a-ha!" moments even That's not "in the background". That's the real you, your real mind. That's the foreground. But, if your brain malfunctions as many do, then the monologue shows up and crowds out everything. Sometimes it is apparently loud enough that it even prevents those "a-ha!" moments. >but our language coerces our thought patterns into being linear and non-concurrent? The language should just be discarded. What you want is an internal silence.

lanstin 2y ago
I wouldn’t say it’s language so much as unnecessarily added language. Words and sentences can appear and be useful, but there is a lot of mental activity that is not essential but added on responses to things. I wouldn’t say a component that generates comments is a broken brain, it believing the comments or the beliefs embedded inside them can break your contentedness.

nonameiguess 2y ago

I don't know what ever became of the line of research, but there was a very interesting book I read decades ago called Descartes' Error by Antonio Damasio that examined case studies of patients who had their corpus collosum severed, resulting in a split brain. You could show their left and right eyes different images and ask them what they saw and they would write and speak different answers, because speech and writing are controlled by different brain hemispheres. This seems to suggest that any bottleneck in conscious attention is not an inherent limitation of an animal brain but rather a consensus mechanism we've developed to keep our chain of experience coherent. If we get rid of the constraint that all of our external communication channels need to present the same narrative, we can seemingly process more information even when it requires being a conscious center of attention.

prmph 2y ago
It's like UIs being single-threaded, because otherwise you would have chaos if several background threads are trying to update the UI at the same time.