Yes, you can only spend your attention on one coherent thing at a time. That coherent thing can be a movie (sound and video synced to create coherence), sex in

Yes, you can only spend your attention on one coherent thing at a time. That coherent thing can be a movie (sound and video synced to create coherence), sex in the dark (tactile + sound), or a podcast (only sound - no correlation to other stimuli). All the things you aren't focusing on, kind of run on auto pilot. Why would that mean they're subject to different, separate consciousnesses? I'd just call them separate clusters of attention, running in low power mode, but connected to the same single consciousness nonetheless. The different clusters obviously influence each other, especially when an unexpectedly strong sensation triggers one of them, e.g. a beeping alarm makes you look for the source. According to the author, upon hearing an alarm, the acoustic consciousness must now expand itself to become the main consciousness, which then somehow also integrates with a bunch of previously different consciousnesses (e.g. the one to observe your surroundings) to solve a new problem. We just call that attention.