![]() ![]() “We can now link brain rhythms for the first time to our behavior, on a moment-to-moment basis. “But we didn’t really understand what these rhythms are for,” said Kastner, who was the senior author on both papers. You won’t necessarily shift your focus to a new subject, he said, but your brain has a chance to re-examine your priorities and decide if it wants to.īrain rhythms have been known for almost a century, since electroencephalograms - better known as EEGs - were invented in 1924. “Every 250 milliseconds, you have an opportunity to switch attention,” said Ian Fiebelkorn, an associate research scholar in PNI and the first author on the macaque-focused paper. Perception doesn’t flicker on and off, the researchers emphasized, but four times per second it cycles between periods of maximum focus and periods of a broader situational awareness. Our brains fuse our perceptions into a coherent movie - we don’t experience the gaps.” “There are only two options: Is the data wrong, or is our understanding of our perception biased? Our research shows that it’s the latter. “The question is: How can something that varies in time support our seemingly continuous perception of the world?” said Berkeley’s Randolph Helfrich, first author on the human-focused paper. ![]() 22 issue of Neuron one paper focuses on human research subjects, the other on macaque monkeys. Their work appears as a set of back-to-back papers in in the Aug. ![]() Instead of focusing on the action “onstage,” your brain takes in everything else around you, say the scientists. Four times per second - once every 250 milliseconds - the spotlight dims and the house lights come up. The researchers use different metaphors to describe this throb of attention, including a spotlight that waxes and wanes in its intensity. “Perception is discontinuous, going rhythmically through short time windows when we can perceive more or less.” “Our subjective experience of the visual world is an illusion,” said Sabine Kastner, a professor of psychology and the Princeton Neuroscience Institute (PNI). That’s the fundamental finding of a team of researchers from Princeton University and the University of California-Berkeley who studied monkeys and humans and discovered that attention pulses in and out four times per second. You don’t focus as well as you think you do. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |