Your Brain 'Blinks' When Your Attention Shifts, Researchers Discover (vanderbilt.edu) 87
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.
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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.
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Humans are basically monkeys. We even have vestigial tails.
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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
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No, it is clearly CISC-based and it has to flush the pipeline to change execution contexts.
Next up... (Score:2)
Scientists discover people open their mouths when yawning, sometimes leading to breathing.
--
And a star was born.
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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.
What? (Score:1)
Sorry, could you repeat that? I was distracted.
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They said that using the mouse isn't actually faster than using the keyboard, it is slower, but your brain pauses for you when you switch focus so that you can feel smarter.
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I think you got that backwards.
The blink happens when recalling shortcuts, even if it's instinct.
I'm not vouching for the truth, but that's what I read.
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No, this is about shifting your visual focus in the case where you didn't even have to move your eyes.
The research on recall shows quantization but not a pause.
With a mouse you have to identify the pointer, and also the target, you can't do anything with the mouse without a visual context switch. Using a command line you don't even need to be looking at the screen or have your eyes open if you're a good typist.
*Glances through PrimateBrain.cpp* (Score:4, Funny)
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!
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Nevermind the unintended side-effects that arise from spawning new processes.
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Signal to Noise issue (Score:4, Insightful)
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 (Score:1)
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.
Wow, you are astonishing.
You could have saved them a metric ton of money.
Please quit your day job.
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WTF are you on about? GP's description of how the the visual system works is correct. It might seem continuous and detailed but in fact it's a series of frames and only the central portion has decent resolution.
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But TFA explicitly says that this is different from saccades. It's about mind focus, not visual focus.
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The summary doesn't.
And why do you think you've got the right to tell someone not to drive, or why that's even relevant?
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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.
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It will help if you do not think of thought as being a stationary state in the brain. Think of it more as repeating thought patterns, happening over and over again, a lopping structure into which new input is added and output is produced upon repeated continuous basis. Sort of like a train track, going round and round, with new inputs added to the train and new outputs dropped off by the train. Change thought and you shut to another track and the new input output pattern must be generated. Some people can m
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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
Were you thinking about the study mentioned in this article?
https://www.psychologytoday.co... [psychologytoday.com]
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Godel, Esher and Bach (Score:2)
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I was thinking the same damned thing. It was also in an old "Infinite Monkey Cage" episode (apropos, I suppose). The idea that the brain stops processing visual input while attention shifts is pretty common knowledge.
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OK, I looked it up. saccadic masking [wikipedia.org] was discovered in 1898.
Maybe these researchers have found the root neuronal cause of this, but it's hard to tell from their press release. The press release makes it seem like they discovered something wholly new rather than a new understanding of a very old bit of knowledge.
Re:Godel, Esher and Bach (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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How do they do that? Do they have multiple foveas?
That aside, if I was writing a summary about something that's quite similar to something else I'd add a sentence explaining why it's different, but I'm a bit eccentric sometimes.
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Wow a bot claiming to be a human but who doesn't know that peripheral vision is a thing!
Your vocabulary betrays you; no human would be so ignorant, and yet use medical jargon terms.
Turing test failed, but good try to the programmer, keep working at it you'll get there!
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I've heard of peripheral vision. That's how I know it's not the focus of attention. It's only really good for motion detection.
Talking to to yourself? First sign of madness, that.
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Peripheral vision can be focused on. There's a natural tendency to look over there with the fovea, but that doesn't have to happen.
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Right, right, but after having just "heard of it," it helps to also read the wiki page. Or like, take one fucking physiology class.
Fixed Headline (Score:2)
"Macaque monkey's brain blinks when his attention shifts, researchers discover"
You're welcome.
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Humans do this too, and it's been known about for years. I don't know why it's such a surprise.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
I think those are called... (Score:2)
...Blipverts. Excuse me, I need a Pepsi...
Visual cortex only? (Score:3)
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.
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That's just your neckbeard trying to take control of the host body.
Try reducing your corn syrup consumption and bathing frequently. Concentrated fructose tips the balance in favor of the parasite, and increased oxygenation of the skin helps to prevent it from spreading.
Shaving is also useful, but not always practicable because the neckbeard will release hormones that make the host feel unhappy when it is threatened. So it is often helpful to reduce the strength of the parasite with the above techniques befo
Well (Score:1)
Why is this a surprise? (Score:2, Informative)
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/... [wikipedia.org]
This if obvious (Score:2)
The deeper the thinker, the longer the pause.
Don't blink... (Score:2)
Can we overcome this? (Score:2)
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?
You mean .. saccade? (Score:2)
Maybe they shouldn't have skipped that lecture.
FAO: spammers (Score:1)
Your brain farts right before you start into an 'Orange Clown' / Demonrats / Repugnicans rant =D
Context switch (Score:2)
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."
Blink = Refresh (Score:1)
Related to ADHD? (Score:2)
I wonder how this is related to ADHD, and the efficacy of 'finger spinners' in addressing symptoms. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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ADHD subjects fail to suppress eye blinks and microsaccades while anticipating visual stimuli but recover with medication https://www.sciencedirect.com/... [sciencedirect.com]
Highlights
Blink and saccade rates were higher in ADHD subjects in a continuous performance task.
Medication reduced the saccade rate to control levels, and lowered the blink rate.
ADHD subjects fail to suppress saccades and blinks while anticipating stimuli.
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