Time & Perspective Quote by Murray Gell-Mann

Gell-Mann is puncturing a flattering self-myth: the idea that our minds can be in multiple places at once. The line has the dry, lab-bench sting of a physicist translating a fuzzy human claim into an operational definition. If you insist you are "listening to several conversations", he offers a more mechanical model: time sharing. Not magic, not omniscience, just rapid switching - a resource being allocated in slices.

The intent is clarifying, but also deflationary. In physics and information theory, you learn to distrust impressions that can’t be measured. "They tell me" is doing quiet work here: he’s relaying a common report, almost like an experimental anecdote, then replacing it with a cleaner hypothesis. The subtext is that consciousness feels parallel because its handoffs are fast, not because it’s boundlessly capacious. What reads as multitasking is often serialization with a persuasive user interface.

Context matters: this is a Nobel-winning architect of quarks and complexity thinking about attention like a finite channel with bandwidth constraints. In the late 20th century, "time-sharing" also names a computing innovation - one machine serving many users by slicing up processor time. By borrowing that metaphor, he collapses the distance between minds and machines, suggesting that even the most intimate experiences can be explained in terms of limited capacity and scheduling.

The rhetorical power comes from its modesty: no grand moralizing about distraction, just a precise reframe that leaves you slightly embarrassed - and a lot more honest about what your attention can actually do.