Brain Health Blog

Elizabeth Buchen, neuroscientist, science writer and advisor to Lumos Labs, explains human attention in engrossing eloquence. Visit Madam Fathom to read more about the biological basis of mind.

The world offers an awesome, indescribably magnificent profusion of sensory riches. For our meager mortal brains, however, trying to process this deluge of information is akin to taking a drink from Iguaçu Falls: it’s tremendously inefficient, and you will likely be violently ripped from your precipice and vanish in a ferocious torrent of natural wonder.

Because the world is too rich for our brains to process at once (or even in a lifetime), we are equipped with mechanisms that restrict the avalanche of information to a manageable trickle…

At the level of the brain, this restrictive bottleneck is referred to as attention; when we attend to a certain stimulus, we select it for more comprehensive processing, while relegating the rest to a relatively superficial survey. Because of these limitations on our perceptual capabilities, we can only focus on one input at a time, making it difficult to, for example, have a conversation on the phone while reading an unrelated magazine article.

Importantly, attention endows a capacity limitation onto our brains, not our sensory organs, which detect a remarkable embarrassment of sensory details. For a tangible example, the sensory neurons on the bottom of your feet are well aware of the pressure exerted by the floor, but you were probably not actively thinking about it until this sentence directed your attention to the sensation. To curtail the confusion bestowed by a cornucopia of sensory inputs, we allocate our attentional resources to the most relevant stimuli, thus coordinating our mental processing with our internal goals. This allows us to focus on an engaging novel while ignoring ambient street noise, and follow a
conversation amidst the clamor of a party.

As we age, our attentional capabilities begin to decline, and the allocation of our limited brain resources becomes suboptimal. Consequently, situations with great potential for interference and confusion, such as those mentioned above, become difficult and confusing. The plastic nature of our brains, however, endows our mental processes with the capacity for improvement, which may potentially be achieved by engaging in demanding activities such as cognitive training. Lumosity offers several games that challenge our attentional capabilities, particularly Birdwatching, Color Match, and Lost in Migration; these games, if played regularly, may thus produce lasting changes in cognitive function.