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ELEMENTS
OCTOBER 1, 2014
Attention
BY ALAN LIGHTMAN
Magnetoencephalography detects variations in the brains magnetic field during various types of cerebral activity.
PHOTOGRAPH BY BSIP / UIG VIA GETTY
Every moment, our brains are bombarded with information, from without and
Every moment, our brains are bombarded with information, from without and
within. The eyes alone convey more than a hundred billion signals to the brain
every second. The ears receive another avalanche of sounds. Then there are the
fragments of thoughts, conscious and unconscious, that race from one neuron to the
next. Much of this data seems random and meaningless. Indeed, for us to function,
much of it must be ignored. But clearly not all. How do our brains select the relevant
data? How do we decide to pay attention to the turn of a doorknob and ignore the
drip of a leaky faucet? How do we become conscious of a certain stimulus, or indeed
conscious at all?
For decades, philosophers and scientists have debated the process by which we pay
attention to things, based on cognitive models of the mind. But, in the view of many
modern psychologists and neurobiologists, the mind is not some nonmaterial and
exotic essence separate from the body. All questions about the mind must ultimately
be answered by studies of physical cells, explained in terms of the detailed workings
of the more than eighty billion neurons in the brain. At this level, the question is:
How do neurons signal to one another and to a cognitive command center that they
have something important to say?
Years ago, we were satisfied to know which areas of the brain light up under various
stimuli, the neuroscientist Robert Desimone told me during a recent visit to his
office. Now we want to know mechanisms. Desimone directs the McGovern
Institute for Brain Research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; youthful
and trim at the age of sixty-two, he was dressed casually, in a blue pinstripe shirt, and
had only the slightest gray in his hair. On the bookshelf of his tidy office were
photographs of his two young children; on the wall was a large watercolor titled
Neural Gardens, depicting a forest of tangled neurons, their spindly axons and
dendrites wending downward like roots in rich soil.
Earlier this year, in an article published in the journal Science
(http://www.sciencemag.org/content/344/6182/424.full.pdf?
keytype=ref&siteid=sci&ijkey=2DxueLcWE%2FGs6), Desimone and his colleague
Daniel Baldauf reported on an experiment that shed light on the physical
mechanism of paying attention. The researchers presented a series of two kinds of
imagesfaces and housesto their subjects in rapid succession, like passing frames
of a movie, and asked them to concentrate on the faces but disregard the houses (or
vice versa). The images were tagged by being presented at two frequenciesa new
face every two-thirds of a second, a new house every half second. By monitoring the
frequencies of the electrical activity of the subjects brains with
magnetoencephalography (MEG) and functional magnetic resonance imaging
(fMRI), Desimone and Baldauf could determine where in the brain the images were
being directed.
The scientists found that, even though the two sets of images were presented to the
eye almost on top of each other, they were processed by different places in the brain
the face images by a particular region on the surface of the temporal lobe that is
known to specialize in facial recognition, and the house images by a neighboring but
separate group of neurons specializing in place recognition.
Most importantly, the neurons in the two regions behaved differently. When the
Most importantly, the neurons in the two regions behaved differently. When the
subjects were told to concentrate on the faces and to disregard the houses, the
neurons in the face location fired in synchrony, like a group of people singing in
unison, while the neurons in the house location fired like a group of people singing
out of synch, each beginning at a random point in the score. When the subjects
concentrated instead on houses, the reverse happened. Furthermore, another part of
the brain, called the inferior frontal junction, a marble-size region in the frontal
lobe, seemed to conduct the chorus of the synchronized neurons, firing slightly
ahead of them. Evidently, what we perceive as paying attention to something
originates, at the cellular level, in the synchronized firing of a group of neurons,
whose rhythmic electrical activity rises above the background chatter of the vast
neuronal crowd. Or, as Desimone once put it, This synchronized chanting allows
the relevant information to be heard more efficiently by other brain regions.
A connection between attention and neural synchrony was hypothesized by Ernst
Niebur and Chrisof Koch twenty years ago. Desimone was one of the first scientists
to prove it for particular cases, in 2001. A pioneer in the field, he is quick to mention
other leaders, such as John Reynolds of the Salk Institute, in La Jolla, California,
who uses a combination of physics, neurophysiology, and computational neural
modelling to study how objects in the visual field, such as separate highlighted areas
in an illuminated grid, compete with each other for attention. Meanwhile, Sabine
Kastner of Princeton has recently begun comparing humans with monkeys in their
attention to visual tasks; and Columbias Michael Goldberg has recently shown that,
in the process of attention, a particular area of the brain called the lateral parietal
area sums up visual signals and cognitive signals. In this growing field of
neuroscience, Desimone has personally trained more than thirty-five people.
I asked Desimone how the conductor of the neuronal chorusin this case, the
inferior frontal junctionknows when a particular stimulus should be attended to.
In his experiment, the subjects were told to focus their attention on either faces or
houses, but what about an unexpected stimulussay, a charging lion, or the sudden
entrance of an attractive celebrity? We dont understand the answer to that yet,
Desimone said. And how do disparate voices come into synchrony? Can they do so
merely by exchanging information among themselves, or do they need an outside
director? At the second question, Desimone broke out in a boyish grin and took six
small metronomes from his briefcase. He placed them side by side on a wooden
board, balanced on two empty lemon-soda cans. Then he set the metronomes
ticking, out of synch with one another. After a couple of minutes, they were all
ticking in synchrony. They had communicated with one another and come into
synch solely through the side-to-side movement of the board, without any outside
agency. Neurons, of course, use a different method of communication: passing
chemical messengers between the hundreds of filaments radiating from each
neuron. Desimones pendulums suggest that some neurons could come into synch
on their own, without a conductor. But neuroscientists dont yet know which
neuronal processes are self-organizing and which require a higher-level cognitive
director.
As my visit came to an end, I asked Desimone about the strange experience of
As my visit came to an end, I asked Desimone about the strange experience of
consciousness, to me the most profound and troubling aspect of human existence.
How does a gooey mass of blood, bones, and gelatinous tissue become a sentient
being? How does it become aware of itself as a thing separate from its surroundings?
How does it develop a self, an ego, an I? Without hesitation, Desimone replied
that the mystery of consciousness was overrated. As we learn more about the
detailed mechanisms in the brain, the question of What is consciousness? will fade
away into irrelevancy and abstraction, he said. As Desimone sees it, consciousness is
just a vague word for the mental experience of attending, which we are slowly
dissecting in terms of the electrical and chemical activity of individual neurons. As an
analogy, he said, consider a careering automobile. A person might ask: Where inside
that thing is its motion? But the viewer would no longer ask that question after he
understood the engine of the car, the manner in which gasoline is ignited by spark
plugs, the movement of piston and crankshaft.
I am a scientist and a materialist myself, but I left Desimones office feeling bereft.
Although I cannot say exactly why, I do not want my thoughts, my emotions, and
my sense of self reduced to the electrical tinglings of neurons.
I prefer that at least some parts of my being remain in the shadows of mystery. I
think of a comment by Einstein: The most beautiful experience we can have is the
mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and
true science.
To read more about the mind and the brain, visit our collection of archive selections and
new stories on the subject (http://www.newyorker.com/topics/on-the-brain).
ALAN LIGHTMAN
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