Brain: Synchronized Brain Waves Focus Our Attention

From Denny: From the wonderful site Wired Science comes another interesting article about how the brain focuses our attention. Researchers are just now beginning to find out how our brain does it.

"Separate brain regions firing in unison may be what keeps us focused on important things while we ignore distractions.

A deluge of visual information hits our eyes every second, yet we’re able to focus on the minuscule fraction that’s relevant to our goals. When we try to find our way through an unfamiliar area of town, for example, we manage to ignore the foliage, litter and strolling pedestrians, and focus our attention on the street signs.

Now, researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have discovered that the brain’s control center syncs up to its visual center with high-frequency brain waves, directing attention to select features of the visual world.

“It’s been known that the prefrontal cortex plays an important role in focusing our attention, but the mystery was how,” said neuroscientist Robert Desimone, who led the study, published in Science Friday. “Now we have some insight into how it has that focusing role — through this synchrony with our sensory systems.”

For the rest of this interesting article on the latest about our brain's ability to focus and how this can impact research and understanding of problems like ADD, go here.

Bad News for Teachers: Research Says Doodling Boosts Concentration

Image via Wikipedia

"Doodling isn’t the distraction it’s commonly thought to be, researchers say–in fact, it aids concentration, and memory. A new study suggests that doodling takes up just enough attention to keep the brain from wandering further afield, explains lead researcher Jackie Andrade.

'If someone is doing a boring task, like listening to a dull telephone conversation, they may start to daydream. Daydreaming distracts them from the task, resulting in poor performance. A simple task, like doodling, may be sufficient to stop daydreaming without affecting performance on the main task' [BBC News], Andrade says."

From Denny: As a class "A" doodler I now hearby feel vindicated. These days it's called mind mapping. :) Seriously, it does make sense for people to doodle because of one thing: the brain thinks in pictures!

What's fun about doodling is that the images are symbols of detailed meanings specific to that one person. You have your own encrypted code! You have to know the person well in order to hack their internal computer.

How distractible are you? The answer may lie in your working memory capacity

"Some people, however, seem to be able to be incredibly productive despite a huge number of distractions -- Twitter status updates, email, crying babies, you name it. Indeed, some people can't work well if things are too quiet. For them, uninterrupted silence is more distracting than cacophony.

But whatever their working environment, it's clear that some people are simply better at focusing on the task at hand. What makes people's minds more or less likely to wander? Several studies point to working memory capacity as the key."

By Dave Munger

From Denny: Bummer! This sounds like you're basically screwed if you are unable to increase your working memory capacity. This might explain the issue with ADD disorder and the immature brain.

In the end, a lot of factors go into our ability to focus for long periods of time and do so in a riveted fashion until the project is completed - like do you eat right in order to feed your brain.

This study makes me wonder that when the mind wanders it is really resting itself and resetting its working memory capacity, sort of like flushing the cache of the useless and resetting to a cleaner environment. Just my speculative thoughts...

Photo by d3 Dan @ flickr