Buzzing smart phones, a filling email inbox, the chatter of colleagues and friends. In today’s society, focus often feels futile. Now researchers say they have figured out how the brain pays attention. The work could explain what goes awry in attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder and other attention conditions.
“There are a million things out there in the world bombarding our eyes, our ears, our skin and other sensory organs,” Shreesh Mysore, a neuroscientist at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland who led the new research, said in a statement. “Of all those things, what particular piece of information do we most need to pay attention to at any instant to drive our behavior?”
The answer Mysore and his colleagues landed on is that focus does not involve paying more attention to something, but actually ignoring the other distractions. They identified some of the brain cells that help us do that and ...
