How many pieces of music can you listen to simultaneously?

[Jim R.]

This is fascinating, strongly suggest giving it a listen (about 15 minutes or so):

http://www.radiolab.org/blogs/radiolab-blog/2011/jul/26/4-track-mind/

[Grainger49]

This guy reminds me of a secretary we had at Alcoa (she and we called her a secretary way back then).  Diane could carry on a conversation and type at the speed of light at the same time.  She glanced at the paper she was typing every once and a while. 

She typed so fast that she could jam an IBM Selectric typewriter, the one with the ball.  A computer allowed her to run full speed.  She told me that she could be typing her own termination notice and never know it.

[Yoder]

When in college I tried doing something kind of similar. I  would listen to audio with lyrics while simultaneously reading, all the while trying to understand both sources. The problem was that I would do it once in awhile, but as soon as I hit the state my ego would go "oh wow" and I would slip out of the state. One of those Krisnamurti things. I gave up after a couple of months and just fell back to reading with the drone of music in the background.

[Jim R.]

Looks like the producer of RadioLab just won a MacArthur.

One of my partners in a software company back in the early 80s could write code for our product on one computer, write his prototype music sequencing program on another, carry on a perfectly coherent conversation with myself and the other partner about some very intracte innards of the back end of our compiler, and play his synthesizer, all at the same time.  He was one of those guys who went directly from high school junior to Harvard sophomore in one jump and ultimately ended up not being able to complete anything.  A true genius, but his own worst enemy.

-- Jim

[Paul Joppa]

A famous study of computer science students compared writing mathematical code with and without background music. The music had no effect on their efficiency. However, only those who coded in silence noticed that the mathematics reduced to calculating the number one - all the logarithms, cosines, etc. cancelled each other at some point in the algorithm.

Even the woodcutter sometimes needs to see the forest, not just the trees.

[dbishopbliss]

Blessing or curse?  My daughter has "learning differences".  She was very sensitive to sound when she was younger.  One of the tests given to her was listening to simultaneous conversations through headphones:  they started with one, then added another, and another, etc.  She was able to tell you what was happening in 6 simultaneous conversations.  While this would be a great skill to have it you could harness it.  She has had to work hard to be able to discern between important information and "noise".

[keto]

All these stories are amazing

[Thoburn]

Quite a few if the volumn is very, very low.