We follow Don Jose and Carmen and the toreador in ever new phases of the dramatic action and are constantly carried back to Don Jose's home village where his mother waits for him.
There indeed the dramatic tension has an element of nervousness, in contrast to the Geraldine Farrar version of Carmen which allows a more unbroken development of the single action.
But whether it is used with artistic reserve or with a certain dangerous exaggeration, in any case its psychological meaning is obvious.

It demonstrates to us in a new form the same principle which the perception of depth and of movement, the acts of attention and of memory and of imagination have shown.

_The objective world is molded by the interests of the mind.

Events which are far distant from one another so that we could not be physically present at all of them at the same time are fusing in our field of vision, just as they are brought together in our own consciousness._ Psychologists are still debating whether the mind can ever devote itself to several groups of ideas at the same time.

Some claim that any so-called division of attention is really a rapid alteration.