Eating this fruit once a day is neuroprotective.
People can learn to control their brain waves when they are given feedback about the electrical activity in their brains.
This is the first study to look at its effect on teams.
There will be a test, so I hope you are paying attention.
There will be a test, so I hope you are paying attention.
When a person starts to blink more rapidly, it suggests their mind is wandering, research finds.
Blinking sets up a tiny barrier against the outside world, allowing the brain to focus on something different.
The researchers were inspired by neuroscientific findings that parts of the brain are less active when the mind wanders.
Dr Daniel Smilek, the study’s first author, said:
“And we thought, OK, if that’s the case, maybe we’d see that the body would start to do things to prevent the brain from receiving external information.
The simplest thing that might happen is you might close your eyes more.”
For the study people read a passage from a book while their eye movements and blinks were monitored.
Randomly, people were stopped and asked whether they were paying attention or not.
The results showed people blinked more when they had switched off from the text and were thinking of something else.
Dr Smilek said:
“What we suggest is that when you start to mind-wander, you start to gate the information even at the sensory endings — you basically close your eyelid so there’s less information coming into the brain.”
The study was published in the journal Psychological Science (Smilek et al., 2010).
Multitasking may affect crucial areas of the brain’s emotional and cognitive centres.
Multitasking may affect crucial areas of the brain’s emotional and cognitive centres.
Using laptops, phones and other media devices at the same time could be shrinking important structures in our brains, a new study may indicate.
For the first time, neuroscientists have found that people who use multiple devices simultaneously have lower gray-matter density in an area of the brain associated with cognitive and emotional control (Loh & Kanai, 2014).
Multitasking might include listening to music while playing a video game or watching TV while making a phone call or even reading the newspaper with the TV on.
Kep Kee Loh, the study’s lead author, said:
“Media multitasking is becoming more prevalent in our lives today and there is increasing concern about its impacts on our cognition and social-emotional well-being.
Our study was the first to reveal links between media multitasking and brain structure.”
The study used scans of people’s brains along with a questionnaire about their use of media devices, newspapers and television.
People who multitasked more across different media had lower gray-matter density in the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC: indicated by white dots in the image above).
This part of the brain, which lies towards the front, is mostly involved in aspects of cognitive and emotional control: things like empathy, decision-making and how we process rewards.
The study fits in with previous research suggesting that media multitasking is associated with emotional problems, like anxiety and depression, as well as cognitive problems, like poor attention.
The researchers found that this association had nothing to do with personality.
Both the study’s authors were quick to point out that this is a preliminary study which only finds a connection; it does not tell us what is causing what.
For example, it could be that those with a smaller ACC are more prone to media multitasking, not that multitasking is causing these changes in the brain.
However, Loh said:
“The exact mechanisms of these changes are still unclear.
Although it is conceivable that individuals with small ACC are more susceptible to multitasking situations due to weaker ability in cognitive control or socio-emotional regulation, it is equally plausible that higher levels of exposure to multitasking situations leads to structural changes in the ACC.”
We will have to wait for a future study which follows people over time.
This can examine how multitasking and brain structures change, and can give us another clue to this intriguing puzzle.
Image credit: Loh & Kanai (2014)
Attention is only partly about what we focus on, but also about what we manage to ignore.
Attention is only partly about what we focus on, but also about what we manage to ignore.
Neuroscientists have pinpointed the neural activity involved in avoiding distraction, a new study reports.
This is the first study showing that our brains rely on an active suppression system to help us focus on the task at hand (Gaspar & McDonald, 2014).
The study’s lead author, John Gaspar, explained the traditional view of attentional control:
“This is an important discovery for neuroscientists and psychologists because most contemporary ideas of attention highlight brain processes that are involved in picking out relevant objects from the visual field.
It’s like finding Waldo in a Where’s Waldo illustration.”
While this process is important, it doesn’t tell the whole story of how attention works.
Gaspar continued:
“Our results show clearly that this is only one part of the equation and that active suppression of the irrelevant objects is another important part.”
The study, published in the Journal of Neuroscience, involved 47 students carrying out a visual search task while their brain signals were monitored.
The finding may have important implications for psychological disorders which involve problems with attention.
The study’s senior author, John McDonald, said:
“…disorders associated with attention deficits, such as ADHD and schizophrenia, may turn out to be due to difficulties in suppressing irrelevant objects rather than difficulty selecting relevant ones.”
Image credit: Bruno Butot
“Anything you may hold firmly in your imagination can be yours.” ― William James
“Anything you may hold firmly in your imagination can be yours.” ― William James
William James, the American philosopher and psychologist, wrote over 100 years ago that:
“One of the most extraordinary facts about our life is that, although we are besieged at every moment by impressions from our whole sensory surface, we notice so very small a part of them. […] Yet the physical impressions which do not count are there as much as those that do, and affect our sense-organs just as energetically. Why they fail to pierce the mind is a mystery…” (William James : Writings 1878-1899)
What William James was talking about was our incredible ability to focus selectively on one thing, while blocking out almost everything else.
It’s something we often do so easily that it’s surprising to find out just how good we are at it–much better than many might imagine.
That’s one of the reasons that one particular research paper, called Gorillas in our midst: Sustained inattentional blindness for dynamic events, published in 1999, has become so well-known.
Here’s a video, called ‘The Monkey Business Illusion‘ that explains the study:
Watching this again it still seems incredible to me that this ‘works’ on so many people, myself included.
We might feel like fools for getting ‘caught’ by the monkey business illusion, but we should take comfort in the fact that it demonstrates the ability to focus attention.
This, according to William James, is the road to mastery:
“…whether the attention come by grace of genius or dint of will, the longer one does attend to a topic the more mastery of it one has. And the faculty of voluntarily bringing back a wandering attention over and over again is the very root of judgment, character, and will. […] And education which should improve this faculty would be the education par excellence.” (William James : Writings 1878-1899)
Do gender differences in multitasking exist?
First a confession: I have never understood the popular fascination with whether women (or men) are better at multitasking.
That’s because multitasking is something that’s best avoided for any task that needs concentration. Humans don’t multitask well, unless one of the activities is automatic and doesn’t require much (conscious) processing.
Still, one of the reasons the question keeps coming back is because of the media obsession with the battle of the sexes; they like to report anything that shows even the most minuscule psychological gender differences.
As a result what we get is the news that, one week, women are better at multitasking and the next week it’s men.
Part of the reason you see these articles is that some studies do indeed find a small superiority for women and some find a small superiority for men, depending on the exact tasks.
But let’s take a real-world activity like driving. What if you compare how good men and women are at driving while talking on a mobile phone? Now, somewhere at the back of your mind, perhaps, there may be prejudices brewing.
Stifle those thoughts, though, because Watson and Strayer (2010) have found no difference between men and women on this sort of multitasking.
And it turns out that this is the case in general for multitasking. Overall studies struggle to find strong, consistent evidence one way or the other (Strayer et al., 2013).
Certainly, some people, both men and women, are better multitaskers than others, and that is interesting. But as for the difference between men and women, the truth is there is much more variation amongst men and women than there is between men and women.
As ever with a young science like psychology, the balance of evidence may change in the future, but at the moment the best guess is that the differences are very small or non-existent.
So the next time someone makes a comment about gender differences in multitasking, you can say: “Rubbish, I read on PsyBlog that there are no proven differences between men and women at multitasking.”
Image credit: Rodrigo Sombra
How attention works, what happens when it fails and how it can be improved.
Every day we we are bombarded with perceptions, ideas and emotions and what we choose to pay attention to shapes our lives, it makes us who we are.
Participants in psychology studies, after focusing their attention on a particular target, show a strange gap in their attention: a kind of blind spot.
Yesterday I was sitting in a park staring off into the distance, without a care in the world.
The park was empty, the sky blue, trees rustling; a small lake shimmering in the distance, nudging its banks. A lone figure approached across the grass, not yet identifiable as a man or a woman in the haze; I returned to my reverie, lulled by the air sliding across my brow, lost to sensation.
Then in an instant the figure, now obviously a man, was not 5 metres away, striding towards me. He had travelled 50 metres in what seemed like the blink of an eye. My muscles tensed and I prepared to defend myself. He reached where I sat, then turned away, following the path past and away from me, leaving me looking both surprised and foolish.
It was obvious I had been distracted for much longer than I thought — long enough for the man to walk 50 metres — but still it felt to me as though he had covered the distance in an instant. In fact the man had simply fallen through the cracks in my consciousness.
Just how frequent these cracks are is demonstrated by a classic study which was the first in the psychological literature to report the phenomenon of ‘attentional blink’ (Broadbent and Broadbent, 1987). These researchers were inspired by unpublished reports that participants in psychology studies, after focusing their attention on a particular target, showed a strange gap in their attention — a kind of blind spot.
To examine it Broadbent and Broadbent flashed up a series of five-letter words to participants at about 10 every second and asked them to search for two particular words. Normally people are remarkably good at this sort of test despite the words only being shown for a tenth of a second — they will usually spot about 80% of the targets.
But what Broadbent and Broadbent found was that when one target followed the other in quick succession (less than half a second apart) participants didn’t notice the second item and the average proportion of correct reports went down to almost 0%. It was as though participants’ attention had ‘blinked’ for half a second after spotting the first target and so they didn’t notice the second.
This phenomenon has subsequently been extensively examined and even found in the auditory domain (Koelewijn & Van der Burg, 2007). One strong explanation for it is a processing bottle-neck. When spotting the first thing we’re looking for it takes an attentional effort to focus on it. This maxes out the brain’s processing abilities for as much as half a second, during which time our attention is effectively blinking.
During that half a second it’s as though the unconscious is knocking on the door of consciousness to report something interesting. Effectively it takes us half a second to answer the door and see who’s there, but in the meantime we don’t notice the phone ringing and the kettle boiling.
What the attentional blink demonstrates is the illusory component of our everyday experience of consciousness. We experience the world as one long continuous stream of thoughts, feelings and events, each neatly seguing into the next. But the existence of the attentional blink points to a somewhat different story.
Our brains are actually paying attention to one event or thing which swallows up our attention, blocking out other inputs for short periods, then it releases and fixates on something else. In this sense consciousness is less of a smooth stream and more of a bumpy ride.
Reading is a good analogy. When we read the conscious experience is of the eye gliding smoothly across the page. In fact the eye is rapidly saccading, fixating every 7-9 characters — a fact bourne out by eye-tracking studies.
Just as the difference between the experience of reading and how it really works is huge, so the difference between the experience of attention and how it really works is also huge. For good or ill we are caught in a world of metaphorical attentional blinks which, like literal eye-blinks, we usually don’t notice because consciousness papers over the cracks.
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