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How the Human Brain Decides What Is Important and What's Not (neurosciencenews.com)
New submitter baalcat writes: A new study reported by Neuroscience News sheds light on how we learn to pay attention in order to make the most of our life experiences. From the report: "The Wizard of Oz told Dorothy to 'pay no attention to that man behind the curtain' in an effort to distract her, but a new Princeton University study sheds light on how people learn and make decisions in real-world situations. The findings could eventually contribute to improved teaching and learning and the treatment of mental and addiction disorders in which people's perspectives are dysfunctional or fractured. Participants in the study performed a multidimensional trial-and-error learning task, while researchers scanned their brains using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). The researchers found that selective attention is used to determine the value of different options. The results also showed that selective attention shapes what we learn when something unexpected happens. For example, if your pizza is better or worse than expected, you attribute the learning to whatever your attention was focused on and not to features you decided to ignore. Finally, the researchers found that what we learn through this process teaches us what to pay attention to, creating a feedback cycle -- we learn about what we attend to, and we attend to what we learned high values for. 'If we want to understand learning, we can't ignore the fact that learning is almost always done in a multidimensional 'cluttered' environment,' says senior author Yael Niv, an associate professor in psychology and the Princeton Neuroscience Institute. 'We want kids to listen to the teacher, but a lot is going on in the classroom -- there is so much to look at inside it and out the window. So, it's important to understand how exactly attention and learning interact and how they shape each other.'" The study has been published in the journal Neuron.
This has been well studied https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stimulus_control
Life becomes a lot simpler once you learn that most things you see/hear/read aren't important and you're able to filter them out.
The findings could eventually contribute to improved teaching and learning and the treatment of mental and addiction disorders in which people's perspectives are dysfunctional or fractured.
Yeah, no, this will help advertising, which will drive more addictions, not cure them.
Is that what makes the rabbit rush out of danger and then dart back under the wheels? My Lapine is a bit rusty, but are they shouting, "Oooo, look at the candy apple red on that pretty truck!"?
Hundreds, maybe thousands, of ingrained calculations are at work when you cross a busy street... unless you're a millenial on a cell phone.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
My brain decides to store things I don't care about and refuses to store things I specifically study. I can remember many memory tricks, but using them does not help. I can rattle off the wives of Henry the VIIIth despite not taking history since high school, but not the names of people I just met and have tried to remember. I can tell you a lot about some random things I looked up once, but don't ask me my license plate number.
but a lot is going on in the classroom -- there is so much to look at inside it and out the window.
This is a little worrying, since we are told that a rich classroom environment stimulates the young mind. It almost sounds as if we should go back to the drab, austere, classrooms of past decades. That way the children will have few distractions and will be better able to pay attention to their teacher.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
An interesting example of how the human brain filters out information it deems useless, sometimes incorrectly, is Mozilla's new logo.
Their logo is basically the name "mozilla" with the characters "ill" replaced with "://", giving "moz://a".
As evidenced by our discussion about it here at Slashdot, a lot of people read the logo as saying "moz a", "moz-a", "moza", "motza", or some other variant:
https://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=10135707&cid=53692003
https://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=10135707&cid=53690807
https://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=10135707&cid=53691285
https://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=10135707&cid=53691017
https://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=10135707&cid=53691919
https://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=10135707&cid=53692263
So while most people can eventually see how "://" is supposed to represent "ill", it isn't apparent at first and takes extra mental effort to make the connection. Most people see "://" and think of them not as useful characters, but as symbols to be filtered out. So they automatically do so, and see the name as "moz a" or some other variant on that.
It's kind of unbelievable that Mozilla would use such a confusing logo. If people here at Slashdot are confused by it, even if just briefly, it will be incomprehensible to a wider, non-technical audience.
Just curious, how did the study account for:
YOLO
FOMO
IDGAF
All relevant variables driving the average attention span of today.
“We want kids to listen to the teacher, but a lot is going on in the classroom — there is so much to look at inside it and out the window..."
You want kids to listen to the teacher? Take the fucking cell phones out of the classroom. It's rather obvious what "window" students are mindlessly staring at all day.
if (information.source.contains("slashdot"))
{
information.importance = 0.0;
}
Didn't RTFS, but doesn't sound like something worth reading.
I know because I danced and it rained.
Funny that this works for most of SW developers I worked with as well as for huge number of MBA drones too. I suspect MBA drones may be faking it in quest to reach a bonus but they are humans too so most probably randomly arrive at what is the connections between cause and effect.
The worst thing however is that they may be right about choosing the simple way - there is hardly an economic gratification for determining the actual state of reality. For minority there may be a bonus in learning about this study. The majority will be just to distracted to understand and even if they understood this would bring only pain into their lives.
Translate: who is willing to pay for this? The PR industry.
If it important to CowboyNeal then it important to me.
I have a wife that tells me what is important and what is not.
...but I decided not to read it. I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader as to how I relate to the article.
At least it would have been if my brain decided getting first post was important.
One thing to consider is the existence of what SF calls "bullet time", or when time appears to slow.
This is what it feels like when, in addition to your heart racing, you literally are recording everything you perceive. We get rid of almost everything we see, hear, feel, touch, and taste, but in bullet time, or emergency time, we turn the recorders on full, so that we can analyze how we escaped the dingoes trying to eat us, or the event that might have killed us.
If we did that all the time, we'd run out of storage. So we toss most of it away.
On a personal level, it is kind of cool. But it's there for a reason, to help you learn to avoid things that might get you killed, or almost did.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Will it kill me now?
Can I eat it?
Can I fuck it?
Can I trade it?
Is it bling?
Well-written summary? Nope.
Respectable source? Fuhgetaboutit.
Contains useful links? Not worth my time.
Brings in clicks? High importance!