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.

Comments

*Glances through PrimateBrain.cpp*

[AdamStarks]

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!

Signal to Noise issue

[omnichad]

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.

Re:Signal to Noise issue

[Aighearach]

If you were a more regular reader you'd have seen other studies that examined the physical mechanisms of context-switching and the physical quantization of time perception. It is a localized biological process, it is not reasonable to presume it would be learned.

Just because you can form an idea that sounds intuitive to you, it doesn't mean you've acquired knowledge. Or even done an analysis. It just means you're credulous of your own wild and factually unsupported prognostications.

Re: Signal to Noise issue

[Anonymous Coward]

But TFA explicitly says that this is different from saccades. It's about mind focus, not visual focus.

Visual cortex only?

[PPH]

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.

Re:Godel, Esher and Bach

[hey!]

From the article:

Primates are particularly suited for the study because they can shift their attention without moving their eyes. Most animals do not have this ability.

Saccadic masking occurs during eye movement, so this is a different phenomenon; or perhaps it is the same phenomenon but it turns out that eye movement isn't really the triggering condition.

Re:Next up...

[fahrbot-bot]

Scientists discover people open their mouths when yawning, sometimes leading to breathing.

Careful, breathing too much will kill you - 100% of all dead people were habitual breathers.