And, let's add theatrical experiences to the many situations in which 
we can track many things at once (it would be hard for us to change 
focus on anything if we weren't paying attention to other things 
going on as well). Some people don't like "consciousness" as a term, 
but whatever you want to call it, it is often very theatrical in 
nature in its organization of many processes with varying degrees of 
focus and attention. This should not be surprising.

Cheers,

Alan

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At 2:57 PM -0700 10/27/01, Andres Valloud wrote:
>Hi.
>
>>  By the way, how did you knew this was a text in a triangle,
>>  something you can read?  Only for this image-recognition part
>>  Stephan Kosslyn (Harvard) proposed a model with at least 15
>>  subsystems in 1987.
>
>What I said before about having one observer thread observing another
>thread is just like what you describe.  We experience just the most
>brief flash of "it is a triangle", "it has words", "it looks like
>English" and then we're reading.  Through all of this, the results come
>from "interrupting" threads which take our attention.  The fact that we
>pay attention to only one does not mean there's only one, and certainly
>they execute in parallel.
>
>There must be some degree in which we can pay attention to a bunch of
>things at the same time.  Alan points out music, and I remember I had a
>conversation with one of my professors back in college about how
>music-intelligent people were.  He told me they found that some people
>remember music they heard just as a single track series of notes, while
>others could remember the whole polyphony with proper sounding
>instruments and everything.
>
>Andres.


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