Your brain can track several rhythms at the same time—the baseline beat, the melody, the harmony, all happening synchronously. This isn’t about switching attention between them. You process them simultaneously. A drummer can hear the bass line while playing the snare while anticipating the cymbal crash. These aren’t separate attentional streams you toggle between, the way vision is. They arrive together and get processed together. This parallel distributed processing is how auditory systems work—temporal patterns layered on top of each other, creating complex textures that exist all at once.