That’s a good question. Dehaene explicitly talks about the “objects” corresponding to chunks, so that one of the chunks would be consciousness at a time. There’s also a finding that when people are asked to maintain a number of words or digits in memory, the amount of items that they can maintain depends on how many syllables those items have. And since e.g. Chinese has shorter words for various digits than English does, native Chinese speakers can maintain more digits in their working memory than native English speakers.
One standard interpretation has been that “working memory” is composed of a number of different storage systems, each of which is capable of rehearsing a memory trace for a limited time. It would be something like a submodule connected to the workspace, which can take items from the workspace and then “play them back”, but its memory decays quickly and it has to keep refreshing that memory by putting object that it has stored back into the workspace in order to then re-store them. So consciousness could still only hold one item, but it was augmented by “caches” which allowed it to rapidly circle through a number of items.
The thing about seeing whole pictures confuses me a bit too, though change blindness experiments would suggest that seeing all of it at once is indeed an illusion to at least some extent. One of the things that people tend to notice when learning to draw is also that they actually don’t really see the world as it is, and have to separately learn this.
If we’re willing to move away from psychological experiments and also incorporate stuff from the theory of meditation, The Mind Illuminated also has the “only one item object at a time” thing, but distinguishes between objects of attention and objects of awareness:
… any moment of consciousness—whether it’s a moment of seeing, hearing, thinking, etc.—takes the form of either a moment of attention, or a moment of peripheral awareness. Consider a moment of seeing. It could be either a moment of seeing as part of attention, or a moment of seeing as part of peripheral awareness. These are the two options. If it’s a moment of awareness, it will be broad, inclusive, and holistic—regardless of which of the seven categories it belongs to. A moment of attention, on the other hand, will isolate one particular aspect of experience to focus on.
If we examine moments of attention and moments of awareness a bit closer, we see two major differences. First, moments of awareness can contain many objects, while moments of attention contain only a few. Second, the content of moments of awareness undergoes relatively little mental processing, while the content of moments of attention is subject to much more in-depth processing. [...]
Consider the first difference, many objects versus only a few, in terms of hearing. Our ears take in everything audible from our environment. Then our brain processes that information and puts it together in two different ways. First, it creates an auditory background that includes more or less all the different sounds our ears have detected. When that’s projected into consciousness, it becomes a moment of auditory peripheral awareness. The other way the brain processes that information is to pick out just some part—say, one person’s voice—from the total sound in our awareness. When projected into consciousness, that isolated sound becomes the content of a moment of auditory attention. So, the brain has two modes of information processing: one creates moments of awareness with many objects, while the other creates moments of attention with just a few.
These two modes apply to every kind of sensory information, not just hearing. For example, say you’re sitting on a cabin deck in the mountains, gazing out at the view. Each moment of visual awareness will include a variety of objects—mountains, trees, birds, and sky—all at the same time. Auditory moments of awareness will include all the various sounds that make up the audible background—birdsong, wind in the trees, a babbling brook, and so forth—again, all at the same time. On the other hand, moments of visual attention might be restricted just to the bird you’re watching on a nearby branch. Auditory attention might include only the sounds the birds are making. Even when your attention is divided among several things at once—perhaps you’re knitting or whittling a piece of wood while you sit—moments of attention are still limited to a small number of objects. Finally, binding moments of attention and binding moments of awareness take the content from the preceding sensory moments and combine them into a whole: “Sitting on the deck, looking out at the mountain, while carving a piece of wood.”
Thanks. Yes, this is how I feel it—I have low level attention to the whole field, and high concentrated cursor-pointer jumping over it constantly, may be few times a second. I’ve read and practiced a little a practice of “deconcentration of attention” which is attempt to make the the attention as wide as awareness, which is claimed to increase processing capabilities.
That’s a good question. Dehaene explicitly talks about the “objects” corresponding to chunks, so that one of the chunks would be consciousness at a time. There’s also a finding that when people are asked to maintain a number of words or digits in memory, the amount of items that they can maintain depends on how many syllables those items have. And since e.g. Chinese has shorter words for various digits than English does, native Chinese speakers can maintain more digits in their working memory than native English speakers.
One standard interpretation has been that “working memory” is composed of a number of different storage systems, each of which is capable of rehearsing a memory trace for a limited time. It would be something like a submodule connected to the workspace, which can take items from the workspace and then “play them back”, but its memory decays quickly and it has to keep refreshing that memory by putting object that it has stored back into the workspace in order to then re-store them. So consciousness could still only hold one item, but it was augmented by “caches” which allowed it to rapidly circle through a number of items.
The thing about seeing whole pictures confuses me a bit too, though change blindness experiments would suggest that seeing all of it at once is indeed an illusion to at least some extent. One of the things that people tend to notice when learning to draw is also that they actually don’t really see the world as it is, and have to separately learn this.
If we’re willing to move away from psychological experiments and also incorporate stuff from the theory of meditation, The Mind Illuminated also has the “only one item object at a time” thing, but distinguishes between objects of attention and objects of awareness:
Thanks. Yes, this is how I feel it—I have low level attention to the whole field, and high concentrated cursor-pointer jumping over it constantly, may be few times a second. I’ve read and practiced a little a practice of “deconcentration of attention” which is attempt to make the the attention as wide as awareness, which is claimed to increase processing capabilities.