Polyphasism

[Allan MacLeod <allan.macleod@usask.ca>]

I just thought I'd add my own totally unscientific thoughts in this
subject.
My guess is that in order to understand our ability to deal with
multiple media inputs at once we need to keept two things in mind:
    1)  Gould's polyphasic ability referrred to his ability to process
different sources of information simultaneously and not the same source
at once.  In other words, not even Gould, I believe, could listen to a
radio broadcast of Brucknrer and a recording of Bach at the same time,
except to the extent that he already had tucked away in his fabulous
memory the score/sound of those works so that he wasn't really listening
to them at all, but conjuring up his own mental images.
    2)  We need to make a distinction between foreground, midground and
background.  What we think of us polyphasic experiences may refer to a
midgrounding experience.  I can sit in a park here, and be aware of the
grass, trees, river, boats, sky, dogs, and people walking, jogging,
bicycling, roller-balding, throwing a frisbee, all at once.  But don't
ask me to tell you in detail about any of them--what the people looked
like, or what sort of dog they were walking.  And in that state I do
feel relaxed and dreamy.  But if I foreground a person's dog, let us
say, everything else recedes dramatically.  We all can probably read a
newspaper, watch television and carry on a conversation with someone, if
all of these activities require little attentiveness on our part.  And
we are processing all 3 at once, for a sudden change in tone, a key
word, or an interesting visual will attract our attention.  In that
sense we have been attentive to all three information sources, but not
very attentive.  I suspect this is what Gould did, but that even he,
when he was seriously concentrating on something, could not address
himself to other information sources simultaneously.
    Allan