I’ve been trying to make sense of minds since I was 12. My mother called it navel-gazing because I especially liked staring at my own (no matter that my mind is nowhere near my navel). I’d buy Steven Pinker and Noam Chomsky books with my allowance, and everything I devoured felt true and satisfying. Then they’d contradict each other, and I learned that a lot of psychological models are just armchair guesses we use as placeholders until neuroscience eventually catches up^[1]

So I went to grab my own armchair and now want to suggest a different psychological concept: Threading.

Threads are attentional streams that run in parallel. You might be able to hear five conversations happening at once, but you can generally only attend to one at a time cause you only have one thread.

Unless you don’t.

I know someone who can actually attend to literally five conversations at once. He is clearly multi-threaded.

What does that look like exactly?

Well, people who are mono-threaded will become consumed by their feelings and their current experiences to the exclusion of anything else. They can only attend to one information stream at a time. People who are multi-threaded can generate tulpas and have entire IFS-style conversations in their head between all their parts. They can attend to multiple information streams at a time.

And of course there are the intermediate threads.

One of my greatest saving graces is having, what I call, a strong Observer. I’m nearly entirely mono-threaded as far as I can tell. I’ll lose track of my own emotions if I mirror someone too hard, read a really engaging story, or just … feel very Sad or Happy or Angry and forget I ever felt anything else.

In comes the Observer - a mini-thread that is a tiny attentional stream running across your main attentional stream. It is not experientially as rich as the main thread. It only notices and remembers. It doesn’t feel anything. It’s, as far as I can tell, the thread you try to make Buff As All Hell when you do mindfulness training. Your Observer can pass messages between your states across time, and if you are mono-threaded like me then you live life as an emotional finite state machine who definitely needs to get these memos from the past.

What good is this insight though? Now we have threads and this helps how?

Well to pilot your own brain, I’m guessing the different setups have different trade-offs and the better you manage them, the better you do. My expertise is mostly on the benefits and downsides of mono-threading: I feel One Thing At A Time. This is really useful actually for getting the things done that are in line with that feeling. Imagine yourself as a human in a mecha-suit, and the mecha-suit transforms into different shapes for different functions: Rest Mode, Attack Mode, Connect Mode, Explore Mode.

That’s emotions for a mono-threaded person. As long as you hit the beats right and get into the right states at the right time you’re golden^[2].

But the downside is lack of intertemporal coherence: Your Anger state may want to burn bridges, but your Fear state is concerned about the consequences, and your Happy state doesn’t see the problem. Draw a lottery ticket and see which one you are in at Decision Time, and you can see how one might end up flipflopping all over the place when trying to make decisions as a mono-threaded entity.

So that’s the downside, and that’s why you’d want to cultivate an Observer if you are mono-threaded. You want to spin up a tiny little subthread that passes notes between states cause really, one thread is not enough to remain coherent over time.

But what if you are multithreaded?

I’m not sure!

I’m very much Not That!

My best guess is that it’s harder to not go crazy? Also harder to not get internal deadlock from all the different threads competing? You do get to actually run two feelings at the same time, or more. You do get to poll two perspectives at a time, or more. That sounds like a super power! I’d love to know if most of the high achievers in the world are multi-threaded, cause it gives you a bunch to work with, but I have no idea.

Why do I think some people are multithreaded? Well, they can do IFS, they can feel inner conflict as two or more warring emotions at once, they can run shoulder models of other people they talk to, they read books and don’t become the protagonist and then have to shake this off, they can talk to other people and hear their experiences and not become that person for the duration of the conversation. All of that requires an additional thread to run the emotions and person models of others on while you keep track of your own.

I’ve never been able to do that. Where would that information even go in my brain? There is only one place to feel things and that place is either me or my simulation of someone else. I’m dying to know if there is a way to become multi-threaded and if so, how to do it. But in the mean time, I’ll just pilot my emotional mecha-suit as best as I can while keeping my Observer buff as hell.

Hi <3

1. ^{^}

   The Big Five Digression (cause who needs linear writing)

   There is one exception though: The Big Five Personality test is based on the Lexical Hypothesis - the idea that if people made a word for a trait then probably this reflects something real. If you get 1000s of people to rate themselves on these trait words and run factor analysis on the answers, you get 5 factors: The Big Five - Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism (one of these is less desirable than the others).

   But is the lexical hypothesis any good? Well, it beats the alternatives. At least it has a ground truth instead of people sitting down and theorizing about what seems probable to them (looking at you, MBTI). The Big Five even replicates nicely in most languages. Except Openness. As the weakest factor, it sometimes gets up and turns into something else. Like in my native language (Dutch) where it turns into Rebelliousness.

   Hi.

   Which raises questions about how language shapes thought. Any multi-lingual person can tell you it’s harder to think certain thoughts in certain languages. Having a dramatic argument in Dutch is hard - we are far too down to earth for that. Being romantic is similarly more challenging, and we have no casual way of telling people we love them, cause that’s a whole friggin declaration.

2. ^{^}

   gonna gonna be golden ooooh!