There’s a great post by Molly over at the Green Apple Core about reading while not actually reading:

Last night, though, while reading what is so far a very good book in such an environment, I suddenly sat up straighter with a startled feeling, like I’d just come around a corner in my own brain and caught myself doing something that always makes me feel guilty…

Funny, I was just talking to my husband about a similar kind of experience the other day. I’d been reading a bedtime book to my son, and at one point my son asked me, “What just happened?” and I had no idea. It was a Roald Dahl book, and though I adore Roald Dahl, I had to go back several pages to get my bearings. Even the pictures didn’t ring a bell. In my mind I’d been playing out conversations from earlier in the day, making plans, etc.

Aside from the obvious fact that I was not being at all “in the moment,” what’s strange and even a little exciting to me about this experience is the fact that the mind manages to process the printed words themselves without absorbing meaning, while simultaneously processing  and analyzing an entirely different set of words and images…it’s as though there’s a parallel universe at work in the mind. The double-chambered brain. Which of course brings to mind all those theories about how little of our gray matter we actually use at any given moment. Could a single person, for example, work two jobs simultaneously–one in person and one remotely, by aid of some as-yet-undiscovered technology? Would it be possible to be completely tuned in and attentive to two different channels in the mind at the same time?

(Read about Dahl and his writing space in Robert Smedley’s post, The Curious Curios of Roald Dahl)