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Your Brain 'Blinks' When Your Attention Shifts, Researchers Discover (vanderbilt.edu)
Science_afficionado quotes Vanderbilt University's Research News:
When your attention shifts from one place to another, your brain blinks. The blinks are momentary unconscious gaps in visual perception and came as a surprise to the team of Vanderbilt psychologists who discovered the phenomenon while studying the benefits of attention...
The research was conducted with macaque monkeys that were trained to shift their attention among different objects on a display screen while the researchers monitored the pattern of neuron activity taking place in their brains... By combining advanced recording techniques that simultaneously track large numbers of neurons with sophisticated computational analyses, the researchers discovered that the activity of the neurons in the visual cortex were momentarily disrupted when the game required the animals to shift their attention. They also traced the source of the disruptions to parts of the brain involved in guiding attention, not back to the eyes.
Scientists discover people open their mouths when yawning, sometimes leading to breathing.
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And a star was born.
Sorry, could you repeat that? I was distracted.
Who wrote this unmaintainable shit? No comments, variable names like "azfh232", and a complete lack of whitespace are bad enough, but there's race conditions, zero edge-case handling, and an overall structure that's more organic than planned.
This is why we have code reviews, people!
Changing visual focus means moving your eyes or head. There's a huge rush of information as everything in between passes by in a blur. If you don't ignore that information it tries to take over your focus. I'm sure that this is probably learned behavior, much like learning to drive means learning to ignore most visual input and only see the things that matter.
My brain blinks when I think of something I need to do in another room and after I walk there, it blinks to something else and I forget the reason I went there.
#oldageblinkingsucks
Didn't I read this 40 years ago?
"Macaque monkey's brain blinks when his attention shifts, researchers discover"
You're welcome.
Sig ?
...Blipverts. Excuse me, I need a Pepsi...
Care killed the cat, but satisfaction brought it back.
So my whole brain doesn't 'blink'. Just that part ... [Hnggg. Hot babe just walked by.] .... that has to wait for it's input to settle down.
Have gnu, will travel.
Probably just a context switch, no?
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
I thought this was well known. It stops you getting dizzy when you move your eyes, and is responsible for the stopped clock illusion:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
The deeper the thinker, the longer the pause.
Ah yes the old "Correlation doesn't imply causation" fallacy...
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
Or you will miss it!
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
I wonder if this is something we can train ourselves out of? Or will we forever be doomed to not being able to text and drive?
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Maybe they shouldn't have skipped that lecture.
-- A change is as good as a reboot.
if you where a macaque monkey then your brain would blink? How about other brains out there?
Right, exactly! Where is the monkey? We can't know for certain at the same time if your brain is blinking, or if you're a monkey.
No, it is clearly CISC-based and it has to flush the pipeline to change execution contexts.
Your brain farts right before you start into an 'Orange Clown' / Demonrats / Repugnicans rant =D
Requiem for the American Dream
Humans are basically monkeys. We even have vestigial tails.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
It's hard for computers, hard for people too.
Did you ever walk through a door and forget what you had planned to get in that room?
Shifting context (attention) requires a large amount of processing. It's not surprising that the brain "blinks."
Just like a computer screen refreshes...or a browser refreshes...It's just that we are N times faster
Saccadic masking describes the mental time cost of processing moving images. Think of watching a single fan blade spin. Your eyes must first match the velocity of the fan blade movement, to create a sort of reference frame. The brain interprets/assumes the acquisition and processing times to be 0, and as such, perception of 'real' time, skips.
I wonder how this is related to ADHD, and the efficacy of 'finger spinners' in addressing symptoms. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
...by combining advanced recording techniques that simultaneously track large numbers of neurons with sophisticated computational analyses, the researchers discovered that the activity of the neurons in the visual cortex were momentarily disrupted ...
A few points, if I may.
1. This study was done on MONKEYS. Humans are not monkeys. Though we have much the same DNA, that does not make us the same. Though we have common ancestors, that does not make us the same. (My feelings aren't hurt by this notion, it's simply foolish to assume that because some similarities exist, that other similarities can be safely assumed, because they often cannot.
2. The 'magic' of 'advanced computer algorithms' is as far as I'm concerned, like the expression 'then a miracle happens' in step 2 in that old comic in which a scientist looking over another's explanation of something (step 1) and the end-result (step 3), saying (in the caption,) "you need to be a little more explicit in step 2, Johnson" or something like that. Unless someone can verify that the software algorithm really does what they claim, they have an automatic out when other people cannot reproduce their results, which means their research lacks the all-important requirement in scientific experiment of "falsifiability". So the research is basically garbage.
3. After 2 above, there's little point in going on but I will. This "moment of unconsciousness" is not, I don't think, the great and fabulous, fascinating find they think it is. Even if we can ignore points 1 and 2 above, (and a previous responder mentioned a similar point to this, but I feel this notion is slightly different, and I thought of it before reading the other comments, which of course I can't prove, but anyway...) if you didn't mentally blank that, when the brain hooked the output of the visual system, (meaning everything from the eyes' lenses to the occiput,) the part of the brain in which the new task is being processed would be confused and have to sort-out the irrelevant information from the relevant, since in NATURE, (apart from the very new artificial world we've created,) when you switch TASKS, it's generally because you're looking at something else. For instance, when you eat dinner, you plunge a fork, lessay, into a piece of steak, you lift it to your mouth, insert it, or grab it with your teeth, or a combination of both, and then chew. You can repeat this sequence of tasks, largely unthinking. Then you get thirsty and go to take a drink of water from a small glass sitting near you. This requires an array of tasks unrelated, in neurological terms, to eating steak. One, you don't use your fork. You don't generally need to cut liquid water with your steak knife, and it's considered crass by many people to use a water-knife at the table. You reach for a vessel containing a volume of liquid, possibly with suspended chunks of solid floating near the top of the water. You might have had to set down your fork to do this. You held the fork one way, and if you try to use the same grip on the glass, you'll likely push it over because a fork's handle is a few millimeters wide, while a glass is dozens of times fatter. Instead of placing water into your mouth on the end of an implement, you have to place the rim of the glass either against, or directly above your mouth, and pour it in... it's a whole different collection of gestures and actions, and generally, before picking something up, it's a good idea to pay attention to the layout of the flatware and glasses. Odds are, you looked at the glass, to guide your fingers to it without knocking it over.
Etc. etc. etc.
Our reign has gone on long enough. Indeed. Summon the meteors.
Humans are basically worms. We have an alimentary tract.
Humans are basically bags of water.
Humans are basically part of a thin film of organic matter on the planet's surface.
Reducing to a generalization isn't in itself terribly informative. Are you claiming that because monkeys and humans are both primates,[1] processes observed in monkey brains can be presumed to apply in human brains as well? With high probability? Maybe?
Mind you, I'm not saying I necessarily disagree with any of those. But if you want to make a claim, why not make a substantive one, rather than waving vaguely in the direction of phylogenetic relationship?
[1] I'll omit any discussion of the monkey / ape distinction here, because, god, who has the patience for this?