Optimal Inattention

and Stuff to Blow your Mind. Um, and as writers were always engaging in those, uh, those environmental situations where how am I how am I going to focus on what I'm working on here on the page and in my mind and in that sort of unreal space between the two, while also having to deal with vehicles roaring by, with people walking by, people falling down, animals, weather patterns, you name it. Yeah, it's a lot of wooing of

the mind. And Chekhov has said, if you look at anything long enough, say just that wall in front of you, it will come out of that wall. And that's the idea, right that we're going to cover today, this idea of optimal inattention and willful ignorance, This idea that you can put a spell on your mind long enough to concentrate on teasing up the things that will come out of the wall. Yeah, especially that that woman in the yellow wallpaper,

ilways got to keep her push back indeed. Um. American poet Robert Creeley, uh two thousand five Uh, he said, quote the necessary environment is that which secures the artist in the way that lets him be in the world in a most fruitful manner, which I think is an interesting way of thinking about it, because when we sit down to work on something, often we think about, um, how much we're shutting out, But there's also the attention

side of it. And and as someone who often works in a coffee shop, Um, I it's like I'm purposely going to kind of a busy, semi chaotic environment to engage with the task that require a lot of concentration, because it's kind of like the Goldilocks and the Three Bears of sound or optimal sounds, right, because you know, on the one hand, you could have something that was so silent, like or Field Labs has that quietest room in the world that shuts out sound. Too quiet, you'll

start hallucinating. Actually, you know, on the other end of the spectrum, a bar with thumping music is way too distracting. That's like a jackhammer on your brain. But yeah, coffee houses have just the right amount of ambient noises to allow your brain some effort to kind of crowd that out, but have enough left over to actually deal with the

task at hand. Indeed, now we were looking at an article titled the Importance of Place where Writers write and Whine by Alexandria Enders in the Literary Life, and she mentioned a number of different um famous authors and and where they've written and what their approach has been, and of course it's it's it's all over the board, like some of the ones that a that I found interesting. Robert Graves wrote in a room furnished only with objects

made by hand. Ben Franklin wrote in the bathtub baalzac ate an enormous meal at around five in the morning, and he slept on midnight, got up and wrote it a small desk in his room for sixteen hours straight, just drinking cup after cup of coffee to fuel the frenzy brain. We also have the example of Marcel Proust, best known for his novel Remember Remembrance of Things Past h He decided to shrug off society and all of

the clamor that came with it. In nine he installed himself in his apartment and he actually took cork, and he lined his room, his bedroom with it, and to keep out the ambient noises of Parisian streets below him. And not only that, he kind of gets a little bit o c D with his process here, and I

feel like a lot of writers do this. By the way, He installed heavy blue silk curtains to keep the light out, and he slept until late afternoon each day, at which point he would get up, smoke some opium, and then his housekeeper would bring him an elaborate coffee service for him to make his own cafe a. He'd have a croissant, he would go through his mail, read his newspaper, have a second croissant, which, by the way, this is all orchestrated.

At certain times his housekeeper knew to bring in the croissant, and it had to be from the same backery every day, and then and only then would he begin his process of writing in this sort of muffled womb like environment he had created for himself to actually finish the novel Remembrance of things past. Wow, Well, that's that's quite a

quite a cocktail, quite quite a recipe. He created friend stelf there, both both chemically and environmentally, but I think all of us can relate to that on some level, because we've all had something we had to work on, whether or not was a piece of fiction or something for work or whatever, that's just required us to get that sort of balance in our environment. And here's a bit from Alan Lightman writing for The New Yorker about attention. He says, quote, 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 must have much of it has to be ignored, but clearly not all. How do our

brains select the relevant data? Indeed, I mean to his to his point, we live in a just a chaotic storm of sensory information, but we've evolved to navigate it with relative ease, weeding out the useless information and focusing and on the crucial stuff. I mean to say nothing of of the storm within, also dealing with the with thoughts of past and future. We're able to ignore internal and external distractors, but we can also inhibit competing responses

to situations in order to accomplish tasks. So yeah, the key here is that that we're not processing everything. As we've discussed in past episodes, is a great deal of sensory computation that occurs beneath cognition, were we don't even we're not even consciously aware that we're seeing this or

hearing that, because we're rooting it out. I think we've talked before about the scenario of being at a party and being able to focus in on the conversation you're having, or tuning out of that conversation and listening to the one next to you while also ignoring all the other sounds. Um, but a lot of the sensory data that enters our sensory system remains untouched. I mean, it basically goes one end. It basically goes in one ear and out the other

as the saying goes. Typically, a neuron in the brain receives hundreds or even thousands of different inputs along its den rights, and yet it sends just one message out to the next neural area. So scientists continue to study attention to distract, and in this podcast episode, we're looking at a couple of more recent studies that look at both attention and willful inattention. Uh, and how we roll

with it. Yeah, And when we look at these studies, keep in mind that's kind of metaphor when you think about all that stimuli and the attention that you need. Um, think about a chorus. All right, You have one specific part of the brain, the interial front or cortex, that's like the conductor, and he or she is muting one section of voices while queuing another section to raise its

voice over the others until there's something that feels like cognition. Right, this one cohesive symphony of neurons, even though there's still the murmuring or murmurings of these random neurons underneath it. So that's that's this kind of symphony of cognition that we're going to explore today. Now, we'll often find ourself in in that situation where you're torn, Betwen, paying attention to two different things. It might be your math homework

versus a TV. It might be the book you're reading versus on the beach versus the person playing volleyball on the beach, or the motion on the beach. Um you want to focus on one thing, but to focus on one thing is to ignore the other. How does it work well when your face with these two different bits of stimuli, It triggers a conflict circuit in the brain's dorsal anterior singulate cortex or deck, part of a larger brain structure, the anterior cicular cortex that controls rational thought

and emotions. Uh, that's the inner workings of what's going on. But we can also tell a lot from the outside, uh, particularly looking at the eyes. In recent years, researchers have gained even more appreciation for the importance of eye movements pupil size when it comes to trying to figure out what the brain is focusing on, how much it's focusing on, how much computation power is being leveled at a particular task.

And in order to examine this conflict right when you're trying to attend to attend to one thing but you're distructed by another thing. Juke University actually had a study in which Michael Platt and his team of researchers implanted sensors into the decks of rhesis macaques. And again, the deck is the dorsal anterior singulate cortex. Now the best way to create conflict in the deck of monkeys is to introduce too things that they really love and then

just kind of square them off. So in this case, we're talking about juice, one thing they love, and other monkeys. I feel like I'm the same way, like juice and monkeys. Like really, it's a toss up. It's not juice and humans, it's juice and monkeys exactly like, show me a monkey, show me a juice box. I don't know which one I want to pay attention. All right, Well, if we were to implant a censer int your brain into this, it would be very interesting to see what the results

would be. Because the researchers took the two things that they love. They offered a juice reward if the monkey could keep their eyes trained on a visual target on a screen. But then they took the other thing that they loved, other monkeys, and they flashed images of them

on the periphery of the screen. So what was even more distracting is that some of the monkey faces that they flashed on the screen exhibited specific emotions like terror, which would be really hard for another monkey to ignore, infect another human to ignore. Right, Yeah, basic social signal something terrifying is happening. I should pay attention to what that monkey is doing. Right, And again, they had a

juice reward here. If they could keep their eyes on the price, they would get the juice, but a lot of times they failed. Now the results here. The researchers discovered a set of neurons that were active only when monkeys were completing the task and trying to override those distracting monkey faces, but not when faced with either of the stimuli alone, just the juice box or just the

monkey faces. And the more active the DAK neurons were, the better the monkeys were at tuning out the distracting faces in later trials, and the pupils seemed to change in size to compensate for how difficult the task was constricting when the faces were hard to ignore, such as those terrorized faces we were talking about, And the smaller they got the pupils, the better the monkeys performed in subsequent trial. So the key here is fight or flight.

The fight or flight response causes the release of the stress hormone noor adrenaline, widening the pupils so as to take in more sensory information for the challenge at hand. I feel like we've talked about that in memory before. You know, those like really stressful situations, it may at least seem like you're taking in more sensory information well, especially in fear as well. So Key findings that DACK doesn't directly control pupils size, but it connects to other

regions of the brain that do. The researchers think that DAC might play a role in keeping us calm in the face in face of the demands for our attention

that might otherwise make us confused or stressed out. Now, in a follow up study in two thousand and thirteen, platfound that the cats performing the same I gaze task did a better job of concentrating if they had inhaled oxytocin, And the idea is that the hormone may have contributed to better task attention because of its calming effects and its role as a social bonding agent, Which makes you wonder if one day classrooms will have oxytocin piped in there.

We're more likely this is just going to give us, uh, these studies are just going to give us better insight into how something like say driving while texting or even talking on the phone while we're driving means that we're seriously impairing the neuronal symphony that's been set forth by the brain right to try to get us where we're going. UM. These studies could also give us insight into attention deficit

hyperactivities disorder a d h D as well. And I do love that term optimal inattention because it really it really makes you think twice about any kind of task you're doing, about what you're focusing on, but also what you're shutting out. That the the optimal inattention level that you're reaching in order to get things done. It's just something that I want to put on my next assessment

I was demonstrating optimal inattention. Well, there's a two thousand, fifteen study from Brown University that that really digs into this that UM neuroscientists they're scanned the brain waves of twelve volunteers while they were told that they would feel a brief tap either on the left middle finger or on their left big toe. Now, some were told to ignore stimuli on the foot and some were told to

ignore stimuli on the hand. The researchers measured the power and timing of different brainwave frequencies in various brain regions. While this was going on, UH and a particular interest in the brain wave synchronization between the part of the somatosensory cortex that processes touch in the hand and the right inferior frontal cortex tied to suppression of attention and end action. Now, I wanted to mention that the researchers

used magneto and cephalography to scan subjects. And this is significant because I'm like f M R I, which has a pretty decent delay when scanning the brain. MEG is more precise because it can really reveal the timing of neural activity down to the middleseconds, so you can see

that neuronal symphony at play here. And the researchers anticipated that they would see a greater synchrony between the somatosensory cortex, that part of the brain again that processes touch, and the right inferioral frontal cortex, which is again governing suppression.

And they wanted to control though right because I wanted to make sure that this right inferial frontal cortex was in fact governing, So they looked out at the frontal cortex to make sure there wasn't a lot of activity going on there, and they found indeed that there was not, that it was the r I f C that was tamping down their urges to become distracted, and they did indeed find that correlation of synchrony between the sematosensory cortex and the r I f C. Moreover, when volunteers were

simply told what was about to happen just a fraction fraction of a second later, they saw the alpha wave synchrony increase between those two brain regions already gearing up to partner in this sort of shared process of stimuli and reporting. And researchers found a similar spike in synchrony

when volunteers were about to report a sensation. This time though, it was beta wave synchrony between the somati sensory cortex and the r I f C, which is painting this picture of these two brain processes really trying to tether

themselves together and create that willful ignoring. Now at this point you might be wondering, well, what are what are some of the possible applications of this, because you know, we've we've been talking about you know, taps on the hand and the foot ignoring slight sensory information like that UH. But one application here gets into possible UH use as

a as a means of treating chronic pain. UM study co authors Stephanie Jones and Katherine Kerr are actually working with the Dr Breen Brent Dr Ben Greenberg, a professor of psychiatry and human behavior, to explore the possible use of non invasive transcranial altering current electrical stimulation or TAX,

to take advantage of this willful and attention process. Now, TAX has previously been explored for possible applications tackling diseases where abnormal oscillatory patterns in the brain player roles, such as Parkinson's disease or schizophrenia, as well as in therapy

for optic nerve injuries. In this case, however, Kieren Jones are curious as to whether TAX could be used to manipulate alpha and beta waves between parts of the brain such as the somount of sensory cortex and the right inferior frontal the right inferior frontal cortex to suppress attention to or even the detection of pain. So again that the possibilities here in the treatment of chronic pain especially

are pretty significant well. And also pain is probably the most distracting thing that you could throw out their rights in some sort of environment your internal state um to try to tamp down. So what's interesting is that researchers also looked at pain through meditation. So if you want to test out how well meditation works and blocking pain, well, here's the study by wake Forest Baptist Medical Center which was published in the April six and eleven edition of

the Journal of Neuroscience. And what they did is they recruited fifteen healthy volunteers who had never ever meditated before. They attended for twenty minute us is to learn a meditation technique known as focused attention. This is a kind of mindfulness in which people are taught to attend to the breath and then let go of distracting thoughts and emotions. And in fact, the meditation app that I use does

this um to great effect. It really teaches you how to not force these thoughts away but let them just recede into the background. So they learned how to do this, and both before and after meditation training, their brain was examined.

They used something called a s l m R I which actually captures longer duration brain processes than just regular f M R I. And during these scans, this is the great part, a pain inducing heat device was placed on the participant's right legs and this device heated in an area of their skin to one and twenty degrees fahrenheit, a temperature that most people would find, you know, uncomfortable and even painful in just like a cigar, because that's what I know. Now, this was not like run by

the mafia or anything. This experiment um and they endured this for over a five minute period. Now here are the cool findings. The scams taken after meditation training showed that every participant's pain rating was reduced, with decreases ranging from eleven to and moreover, activity in the smuto sensory cortex, which was processing the intensity of the heat, was really high when scans were taken before the participants underwent meditation

training and while they were experiencing the heat. But when participants were meditating during the scans and having the heat applied to them, activity in this region, this pain processing processing region could not be detected at all. So Fidel Zaidon, who is a lead author of the study, wrote, we found a big effect about a four what do you percent reduction and pain intensity in a fifty seven percent

reduction and pain unpleasantness. Now compare that to something like morphine or other pain relieving drugs, and they typically only reduced pain ratings by about And this is even more telling when you again realize that these are just normal people that were essentially given a crash course in meditation, not yogis, not Tibetan monks, just normal folks, right, not zen level. You know, I'm gonna endure this pain and suffering from my entire life, right, people who are just like, Okay,

I'll participate in this study. All right, it's okay, we're gonna get in our time machine. And you are in serious need of some sort of isolation so that you can really concentrate. And uh, by the way, you're this guy who happens to be named Hugo Gernsback. You're an editor of Science and Invention magazine, and you're a pioneer

and sci fi. What do you do when you need a little respite from the world and you need to concentrate, Well, you cook up a little sci fi essentially a space helmet to escape from the environment that you're working in, which I imagine is filled with cigarette smoke as well.

Uh yeah, because this is again so it's probably one of those When I was in newspapers, I would I would hear about old environments where someone would would have to say cigarette me while they were working on a story, you know, where someone comes up and actually just puts the cigarette in your mouth and lights it for you. So I think it's very much a cigarette me world that Hugo was the suffering through, that's right. And he

didn't come up with a solution, which he called the isolator. Yeah, basically just a big sort of Darth Vadery looking contraption, a big helmet that he would put over his head, uh soundproof headcage essentially with its own oxygenainst oxygen supply again, so you don't have to you're not distracted by all that cigaret at smoke or what have you that you're

breathing in in your in your office. Yeah, it has just those two round eye holes in a sort of protruding mouth hohole area where the hose for the oxygen comes in. And it really is just an example of artful terror. Yeah, it kind of has a man in the iron mask look to it, or some sort of like face shackle that you would put on a suspected warlock in a medieval setting. But hey, I mean, you gotta do what you gotta do, and you need to

get down to business. And the hugo Grim's back was just taking the reins there and if you want to see a picture of it, uh the landing page for this episode, I'll make sure to include a link at the bottom. All Right, you know we've got a few minutes here. Let's call over the robot and get through a little listener mail. This is from Brian. He says, Hello, Julie and Robert. I'm seventeen years old and have been listening to your podcast since you guys were stuff from

the Science Lab, which is a pretty long time. But I never bothered to write you, as I'm sure you have enough emails and junk to go through. I love the podcast and it inspired me to learn oodles. Is this a word of creativity? But one problem I have, and I hate to be a party pooper, is how you guys seem to be almost purposely avoiding the concept of race. While race should be unimportant in society. It no doubt has an effect on how we treat each

other in modern day society. Plenty of topics you've done could have mentioned race, but I feel like you guys are just avoiding it. There's plenty of science, interesting science about race and discrimination that can be talked about in a completely objective way, the same way you talk about homosexuality or religion. There's no need to feel like you can't talk about the subject. People are just different colors

and there's nothing to feel awkward about. But I still love the podcast and really enjoy Roberts really obscure metaphors. My two favorite are sharks being like movie producers and mortality being like the bubble scene from Charlie in the Chocolate Factory. Yes, I'm not sure how to end an e mail. I haven't sent an email in years. I'm going to assume to end it like a letter. Brian, your oldest fan who still happens to be very young.

Uh so, Brian, besides being one of our youngest and most precocious fans, by the way, he's planning on studying neuroscience in college. He is an excellent observer. We have not covered race in earnest. Though it's not intentional by any means. We've lit on it a few times with studies that have come up from time to time. But

you know that's not enough. So we will be recording a podcast called The Gordian Knot of Race that will deal with this erroneous line of logic, like Sino color, this idea that sometimes can gloss over the more deep seated issues that exist today. And we'll discuss how the unconscious and the conscious uh play out in terms of racial biases that shape socio economics. And we'll also see how that can lead to something called the school to

prison pipeline. Yeah, and if I remember correctly, we did go We discussed in the seven S of Memory Um episode how false memories work. We discussed a little about racial bias in terms of how we remember things. But but yeah, I'm looking forward to diving into it in earnest. Yeah, so thank you Brian for writing that. That was really helpful and great to hear from you. All Right, this

one comes to us from Rico. Rico says, Hi, guys, been listening to the podcast for a while now, and no matter the topic, I have been thoroughly enthralled until the recent episode about babies. It wasn't the thought of both of you eating a small child that might have been better. It was the constant and repetitive reference to babies and their features. They gave me a physical feeling of nausea and disgust. I don't know why it affected me in a way that the triple phobia episode never did.

This is not a complaint, just an amusing anecdote. Further, I have a UV tattoo. A few points. Number one, finding an artist who is willing to tattoo you in UV inc has been difficult, even here in Los Angeles. Number two, tattooing the UV inc is difficult. It has a run any texture that my artists suggested was quote akin to tattooing someone with lemonade. Number three, the UV property of the ink fades. I have the clear UV ink and after a short time it will no longer glow.

And number four, because of the above, I have gotten the tattoo redone a few times, and now the appearance is closer to scarification appreciations Rico so that, Indeed, it's always interesting to hear about people's responses to outright disturbing content or um unexpectedly deserving content and really great to hear some uh, some actual firsthand experience on uvy tattoos. Yeah, and we certain certainly didn't mean to, uh to scare

you away there with our descriptions of juicy babies. Um, but you know, each of us has a tender spot and you never know how or when it's going to be revealed. Alright. Our last bit of listener mail here comes from Jason says, Hi, I'm Jason. I just listen to your podcast about the weight of the soul. I've always on subjects like this interesting because I happened to

work in the health care field, specifically respiratory therapy. I have currently worked in a major I currently work in a major hospital, and I'm constantly exposed to the dead, dying, the very ill. My job is literally to improve the breathing of or breath for my patients. Early on in my career, I noticed that I could tell whether a person was alive or dead by looking at their eyes. I'm not exactly sure where this phrase came from, but

the eyes of the window into the soul. I believe that is how it goes, and it feels like a very literal translation. On one hand, when we look in to each other's eyes, we see a life force that I still have no words to describe. On the other hand, I never see any activity, just emptiness. Their eyes always changed right before the code occurs. Example, a patient of mine was having issues breathing. He was un a ventilator with the trichyostomy and had been getting a continually anxious

over the last hour or so. I had been in and out of his room that night, doing various things to attempt to help him calm down. Although his vital signs were fairly stable and his oxygenation status looked perfect, I was still concerned. While waiting in his room, I started to notice and acute change in his appearance and told one of the nurses to get a doctor. As soon as the words came out of my mouth, I looked into his eyes, saw them glaze over, lose their light, energy,

life force, focus, and he was gone. When I say go dark, I always feel that there is a light in those eyes that goes away, such as a candle being blown out. This was one of those cases where at the moment of death, you could see his eyes go dark while still talking to him. It's at this point that I should mention that I've seen this light, energy, focus, whatever you want to call it, come back into someone's eyes.

This is usually This usually occurs in patients with injuries or illnesses that are serious enough to kill someone, but can also be fixed if they if they do die. It's incredibly hard to explain, but watching someone's eyes, you can see them go from empty and glazed over to lit up and active. I can't explain this phenomenon, but I know this is something that not everyone talks about or even notices, not that I know of. I thought you might find this interesting, so I figured I would share.

If you have any questions, please feel free to contact me. Well. Indeed, thank you for sharing that that firsthand account indeed of of something that most of us never get to witness. I mean, we're so far removed from from death in our culture that that's certainly the moment of death is

often lost to us. Indeed, at Harkenspect when we were talking about end of life robots, at one point there was an artist who was creating a bit of AI to help people at the end of their lives, and we were debating about the really the necessity and the helpfulness of that when pales in comparison to having that human connection and the other person with you. Indeed, so, Jason,

thanks again for sharing. Thanks to the others as well, and Hey, in the meantime, if you want to check out stuff to Blow your Mind dot com, that's where you'll find all of our podcast episodes. That's where you'll find all of our videos, our blog post as most links out to social media accounts, and you can send us your thoughts on this and any other podcast by emailing us at blur the Mind how stuff works dot com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit how stuff Works dot com.