Brain & Behavior

      I decided to do this blog about how the brain pays attention.  I found this topic interesting because everyone has trouble paying attention and I thought that maybe if I found out how the brain pays attention then it would benefit me and improve this skill.  The first thing that captured my attention was the way he discussed how the mind concentrates.  There are two types of attention, over attention and covert attention.  We use both all the time in our everyday lives, and it is important to know the difference and how it works so that we can understand our brains better.

      Mehdi Ordikhani-Seyedlar, in the video, is discussing the parts of the brain that controls how and what you pay attention to.  The brain can actually switch from one thing to another just by thinking in your head which one you want to pay attention to.  We do this every day like when there are a bunch of people having different conversations you can actually switch from one conversation to another just by thinking which one you want to listen to.  This is possible because just like how your brain pays attention, it also takes as much brain power to block out all the other stuff.  Your brain has to work to block all the other conversations out so that you can hear the one conversation you want to pay attention to.  This is necessary because we have so much going on and our attention is being pulled in every direction.  This is where the front part of your brain, which is responsible for the higher cognitive function, comes into play.  The frontal part of your brain is where the filter is. It only lets in the information of the thing that you are trying to focus on as well as trying to block out the other.

      Mehdi also talks about how in the future there will be computers that can talk to those who do not have the ability to do so themselves.  A scientist can accomplish this by reading the brain waves and knowing what the brain is trying to say.  The computer would look for brain wave patterns like when a person thinks of a letter or a word.  For example, when a person thinks of the letter A, the computer would pick up that specific brainwave that would be different than the brainwave of the letter J.  Mehdi then discusses for a brief moment the possibility of this technology being used to tell what a person in a comma is thinking.  This technology is not available to us yet, but according to Mehdi, it will be soon.

      Overall, Mehdi's video really helped me understand how your brain pays attention to one thing while blocking out others.  He also helped me understand a little bit about what people with ADHD go through and why they can not pay attention to one thing for an extended amount of time.  This is because their frontal part of their brain is not good or may not even have the ability to block out all the other information coming at them.  So instead of focusing on one thing, they focus on everything at once or when it is too much they focus on nothing because everything becomes mixed together.  I was interested in this portion of the video because I have a small case of ADHD and this happens to me all the time.  It becomes hard for me to focus when too many other things are going on around me.


Sources:

Frontal Lobe Anatomy & Picture
https://www.healthline.com/human-body-maps/frontal-lobe/male

Mehdi Ordikhani-Seyedlar: What happens in your brain when you pay attention?
https://www.ted.com/talks/mehdi_ordikhani_seyedlar_what_happens_in_your_brain_when_you_pay_attentio