How many tracks can your mind function on at the same time?

4 is it, according to this.

47 million

I was going to say 4 but I read @marinelife link first and that link confirmed what I felt I do almost all day long. Here at work I have email and Fluther open on my desktop all day long all the while taking phone calls and monitoring production as well as employee questions and training my new director of a division and helping her with her project needs.

It’s always been at least four for me, often more. Those are usually distributed like this:

• Whatever is in the forefront of my consciousness, such as a current activity or task
• Consciousness of whatever I’ve just done
• Anticipation of whatever I’m going to do next
• Recurring or ongoing intrusive thoughts of some worry or concern
• Awareness of where I am and automatic scanning for attractions, dangers, and course corrections
• Some reflective or interpretive component

There’s also always a musical soundtrack, automatic reading of any signage or other text in my line of sight, and a myriad of interpretations—memory, symbol, etc.—of sensory cues from my surroundings.

I’ll go with @marinelife‘s article, but I/m going to go with early researchers and say 7 max. When I wrote the question I was juggling 5, as listed above.

Holding four things in mind at once—remembering words, or arrangements of boxes, or whatever—seems to me to be very different from how many tracks you run on at once, which is what I thought you asked.

If I were holding onto a list of memorized words, I’d consider that one task, one track—the main one, if I were being tested; but the others would probably be secondary or background tasks. That’s what I thought you meant by tracks.

Only when I’m really getting into a Zen space does all the noise shut off a little, for a little while.

Seven, but not a single one effectively.