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The one repeated statement throughout the article, if I interpreted it correctly, is that our brains pretty much process all the data in parallel, but result in
by necovek 1y ago
The one repeated statement throughout the article, if I interpreted it correctly, is that our brains pretty much process all the data in parallel, but result in a single set of actions to perform.
But don't we all know that not to be true? This is clearly evident with training sports, learning to play an instrument, or even forcing yourself to start using your non-natural hand for writing — and really, anything you are doing for the first time.
While we are adapting our brain to perform a certain set of new actions, we build our capability to do those in parallel: eg. imagine when you start playing tennis and you need to focus on your position, posture, grip, observing the ball, observing the opposing player, looking at your surroundings, and then you make decisions on the spot about how hard to run, in what direction, how do you turn the racquet head, how strong is your grip, what follow-through to use, + the conscious strategy that always lags a bit behind.
In a sense, we can't really describe our "stream of consciousness" well with language, but it's anything but single-threaded. I believe the problem comes from the same root cause as any concurrent programming challenge — these are simply hard problems, even if our brains are good at it and the principles are simple.
At the same time, I wouldn't even go so far to say we are unable to think conscious thoughts in parallel either, it's just that we are trained from early age to sanitize our "output". Did we ever have someone try learning to verbalize thoughts with the sign language, while vocalizing different thoughts through speaking? I am not convinced it's impossible, but we might not have figured out the training for it.
- joeyrideout 1y agoOn the contrary, I would argue that conscious attention is only focused on one of those subroutines at a time. When the ball is in play you focus in it, and everything from your posture to racket handling fades into the background as a subconscious routine. When you make a handling mistake or want to improve something like posture, your focus shifts to that; you attend to it with your attention, and then you focus on something else. In either case, with working memory for example, conscious contents are limited to at most a basket of 6-7 chunks. This number is very small compared to the incredible parallelism of the unconscious mind.
- necovek 1y agoMy point is that what we call conscious and subconscious is limited by our ability to express it in language: since we can't verbalize what's going on quickly enough, we separate those out. Could we learn to verbalize two things at the same time (we all do that as well with say different words and different body language, even consciously, but can we take it a step further? eg. imagine saying nice things to someone and raising the middle finger for someone else behind your back :)) As the whole article is really about the full brain, and it seems you agree our "unconscious mind" producing actions in parallel, I think the focus is wrongly put on brain size, when we lack the expressiveness for what the brain can already do. Edit: And don't get me wrong, I personally suck at multi-tasking :)
- andoando 1y agoWhat you consider a single thought is a bit ill defined. A multitude of thoughts together can be formed as a packet, which then can be processed sequentially. Intelligence is the ability to capture, and predicts events in space and time, and as such it must have the capability to model both things occurring in simultaneity and sequentially. Sticking to your example, a routine for making a decision in tennis would look something like at a higher level "Run to the left and backstroke the ball", which broken down would be something like "Turn hip and shoulder to the left, extend left leg, extend right, left, right, turn hip/shoulder to the right, swing arm." and so on.
- yathaid 1y agoThere is a long tradition in India, which started with oral transmission of the Vedas, of parallel cognition. It is almost an art form or a mental sport - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avadhanam https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avadhanam
- pakitan 1y agoSounds very much sequential, even if very difficult: > The performer's first reply is not an entire poem. Rather, the poem is created one line at a time. The first questioner speaks and the performer replies with one line. The second questioner then speaks and the performer replies with the previous first line and then a new line. The third questioner then speaks and performer gives his previous first and second lines and a new line and so on. That is, each questioner demands a new task or restriction, the previous tasks, the previous lines of the poem, and a new line.
- someothherguyy 1y agoCertain areas of neurological systems are time and volume constrained way more than others, and subjective experience doesn't really inform objective observation. For instance, see confabulation.
- necovek 1y agoI agree, but I am not sure how it relates to the article's claim of us only ever doing one action, which I feel is grossly incorrect. Are you referring to our language capabilities? Even there, I have my doubts about our capabilities in the brain (we are limited by our speech apparatus) which might be unrealized (and while so, it's going to be hard to objectively measure, though likely possible in simpler scenarios). Do you have any pointers about any measurement of what happens in a brain when you simultaneously communicate different thoughts (thumbs up to one person, while talking on a different topic to another)?
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- HexPhantom 1y agoConcurrency is messy and unpredictable, and the brain feels less like a cleanly designed pipeline and more like a legacy system with hacks and workarounds that somehow (mostly) hold together
- krzat 1y agoConscious experience seems to be single threaded, we know that brain synchronizes senses (for example sound of a bouncing ball needs to be aligned with visual of bouncing ball), but IMO it's not so obvious what is the reason for it. The point of having the experience may not be acting in the moment, but monitoring how the unconscious systems behave and adjusting (aka learning).
- idiotsecant 1y agoWe have very little insight to our own cognition. We know the 'output layer' that we call the conscious self seems to be single threaded in this way, but that's like the blind man who feels the elephants trunk and announces that the elephant is like a snake.
- Symmetry 1y agoWell, serializing our experiences into memories is a big one. There's been a big project in psychology probing the boundary between conscious and subliminal experiences and while subliminal stimuli can affect our behavior in the moment all trace of them is gone after a second or two.
- criddell 1y agoHaven't there been experiments on people who have had their corpus callosum severed where they seem to have dual competing conscious experiences?
- HappMacDonald 1y agoYep, folks should look up "Alien hand syndrome".
- exe34 1y agoYou might like Dennett's multiple drafts hypothesis. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_drafts_model https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_drafts_model
- agumonkey 1y agoI'm very very interested in discussions about this, having personally experienced cracks at the neuropsychiatric level where multiple parallel streams of thoughts (symbolic and biomechanical) leaked out in flashes, I'm now obsessed with the matter. if anybody knows books or boards/groups talking about this, hit me.
- phkahler 1y agoForm TFA: "And, yes, this is probably why we have a single thread of “conscious experience”, rather than a whole collection of experiences associated with the activities of all our neurons." That made me think of schizophrenics who can apparently have a plurality of voices in their head. A next level down would be the Internal Family Systems model which implicates a plurality of "subpersonalities" inside us which can kind of take control one at a time. I'm not explaining that well, but IFS turned out to be my path to understanding some of my own motivations and behaviors. Been a while since I googled it: https://ifs-institute.com/ https://ifs-institute.com/ This is also the basis for the movie "Inside Out".
- agumonkey 1y agoThanks a lot
- HappMacDonald 1y agoWell, anyone who can remember a vivid dream where multiple things were happening at once or where they were speaking or otherwise interacting with other dream figures whose theory of mind was inscrutable to them during the dream should clarify that the mind is quite capable of orchestrating far more "trains of thought" at once than whatever we directly experience as our own personal consciousness. That would be my input for people to not have to experience schizophrenia directly in order to appreciate the concept of "multiple voices at once" within one's own mind. Personally, my understanding is that our own experience of consciousness is that of a language-driven narrative (most frequently experienced as an internal monologue, though different people definitely experience this in different ways and at different times) only because that is how most of us have come to commit our personal experiences to long term memory, not because that was the sum total of all thoughts we were actually having. So namely, any thoughts you had — including thoughts like how you chose to change your gait to avoid stepping on a rock long after it left the bottom of your visual field — that never make it to long term memory are by and large the ones which we wind up post facto calling "subconscious": that what is conscious is simply the thoughts we can recall having after the fact.
- 542354234235 1y ago>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.
- phkahler 1y agoI 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.
- throw10920 1y agoI'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.
- anton-c 1y agoYeah 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.
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- stonemetal12 1y agoIsn't that the point of learning to juggle? You split your mind in to focusing on a left hand action, a right hand action, and tracking the items in the air.