{"id":61105,"date":"2022-06-06T15:15:00","date_gmt":"2022-06-06T19:15:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cas\/?p=61105"},"modified":"2022-07-15T14:27:04","modified_gmt":"2022-07-15T18:27:04","slug":"are-you-paying-attention","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cas\/are-you-paying-attention\/","title":{"rendered":"Are You Paying Attention?"},"content":{"rendered":"
By Marc Chalufour<\/h6>\n

Sam Ling\u2019s remote teaching experience will sound familiar to anyone who spent the pandemic tied to their computer: A grid of faces in Zoom covered a mosaic of open website tabs, emails, and Google Docs. A phone, ready to ding or flash a notification at any second, lay nearby. To avoid the cacophony of animated ads and alerts, Ling<\/a>, an associate professor of psychological and brain sciences, would switch Zoom to full-screen mode and flip his phone face down.<\/p>\n

\"\"Pushing potential distractions out of sight is an obvious\u2014and effective\u2014way to focus on a task, like teaching a class. But why is that? Ling, who directs the Visual Neuroscience Lab<\/a>, is quick to say that we don\u2019t actually know.<\/p>\n

Exactly how the brain processes vision and elevates the things that we intentionally or unintentionally focus on is a mystery Ling and his colleagues are working to solve. \u201cIt\u2019s as if the volume has been cranked up for what you attend to, but we don’t really know the mechanisms that give rise to that,\u201d Ling says. \u201cIt\u2019s kind of like a magic trick that happens in the visual cortex.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\"\"\u201cThere\u2019s a seemingly endless number of interpretations in just a single shot of a retinal input. One of the goals of the whole brain is to turn that into something discernible, coherent, and meaningful.\u201d \u2014Sam Ling, Associate Professor of Psychological and Brain Sciences<\/span><\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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To learn more, Ling and his colleagues show test subjects a variety of simple visuals, like a black-and-white checkerboard or a wavy line, and measure their brains\u2019 reactions on an MRI scan. The images they use represent the elements that our brain breaks a scene into while processing it, like shapes and contrasts.<\/p>\n

\u201c\u2018Attention,\u2019 while we all know what it is, we use it as a colloquialism,\u201d Ling says. With his research, he\u2019s trying to define the process by which we focus on, or attend to, certain things. So much is unknown that Ling is hesitant to offer advice on how we might focus better in this age of information overload. \u201cWhat the brain is doing is still enough of a mystery that I would be lying if I said we know that there are some great best practices,\u201d he says. Instead, he offers some useful insight into what is known\u2014and how that knowledge is being used.<\/p>\n

\"Sam
Brain scan, showing activity in the early visual system; an image of a desert scene, depicting the structure of information that \u2018populations\u2019 of neurons carry in visual cortex \u2014 some are uniquely carrying information about vertical information through the brain, thus, the filtered image with cacti (bottom panel), and some convey information about horizontal information, such as the horizon.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

1. Our brains must deal with an information glut<\/em><\/p>\n

Everything in our sight is information that our brains must process. Colors, contours, contrasts, movements\u2014all of those building-block elements used in Ling\u2019s experiments. \u201cThere\u2019s a seemingly endless number of interpretations in just a single shot of a retinal input,\u201d Ling says. \u201cOne of the goals of the whole brain is to turn that into something discernible, coherent, and meaningful.\u201d<\/p>\n

2. \u2026 but they are uniquely equipped for the challenge<\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cOur brain is plastic, by which I mean it\u2019s adaptive,\u201d Ling says. \u201cIf you go from a dark room out onto a beach, it\u2019s really intense and jarring at first. But the retina is adapting, you\u2019re going to recalibrate.\u201d Likewise, our brains are able to keep pace with a fast-paced, digital world, Ling says. \u201cThe idea that, as our worlds get busier, there\u2019s some sort of catastrophic hit on the human brain\u2019s ability to process things and that people are less able to attend to things\u2014I push back on that.\u201d<\/p>\n

3. Conserve your personal bandwidth<\/em><\/p>\n

Going back to the example of eliminating onscreen distractions when he needs to focus, Ling offers simple advice: \u201cIt sounds obvious\u2014reduce distractions that are in your control,\u201d especially things engineered to distract, like phone notifications. \u201cYou have finite resources at any given moment and distributing attention to multiple things comes at a cost.\u201d<\/p>\n

4. Marketers want your attention\u2014and know how to get it<\/em><\/p>\n

Marketers are also studying vision and attention, and using that information to distract us. \u201cThere are more temptations to draw you away from a focused task\u2014and that is by design,\u201d Ling says. \u201cAdvertisers are aware of this, explicitly, so they have things that flash and grab your attention reflexively. They\u2019re actually drawing from attention research to do this.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Associate Professor Sam Ling wants to understand how the human brain processes vision and allows us to focus.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":15025,"featured_media":61109,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[8,195],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61105"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/15025"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=61105"}],"version-history":[{"count":23,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61105\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":61761,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61105\/revisions\/61761"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/61109"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=61105"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=61105"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=61105"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}