{"id":53,"date":"2007-09-06T09:46:00","date_gmt":"2007-09-06T17:46:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/?p=53"},"modified":"2007-09-06T09:46:00","modified_gmt":"2007-09-06T17:46:00","slug":"do-it-yourself-zombiehood","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/?p=53","title":{"rendered":"Do-It-Yourself Zombiehood"},"content":{"rendered":"

New to me, old to the lit: a paper in Trends in Cognitive Sciences<\/i>, which came out last November (just a month after Blindsight<\/i> was released): “Attention and consciousness: two distinct brain processes<\/a>“. <\/p>\n

Let me cherry-pick a few choice excerpts: “The close relationship between attention and consciousness has led many scholars to conflate these processes.” … “This article … argu[es] that top-down attention and consciousness are distinct phenomena that need not occur together” … “events or objects can be attended to without being consciously perceived.”<\/p>\n

Yes<\/i>, part of me shouts in vindication, while the rest of me whispers Oh your god, please no.<\/i><\/p>\n

It’s a review article, not original research. As such it cites some of the same studies and examples I drew on while writing Blindsight<\/i>. But what especially interested me was the suggestion of mechanism<\/i> behind some of those results. Both Blindsight<\/i> and Blog cite studies showing that being distracted from a problem actually improves your decision-making skills, or that we are paradoxically better at detecting subtle stimuli in “noisy” environments than in “clean” ones. Koch and Tsuchiya cite a paper that describes this as a form of competition between neuron clusters<\/i>:<\/p>\n

“attention acts as a winner-takes-all, enhancing one coalition of neurons (representing the attended object) at the expense of others (non-attended stimuli). Paradoxically, reducing attention can enhance awareness and certain behaviors.” <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I like this. It’s almost ecological<\/i>. Predators increase the diversity of their own prey species by keeping the most productive ones in check; remove the starfish from a multispecies intertidal assemblage and the whole neighborhood turns to mussels inside a month. This is the same sort of thing (except it happens within a single brain and therefore tastes more of Lamarck than Darwin). Different functional clusters (the different prey species) duke it out for attention, each containing legitimate data about the environment— but only the winner (i.e., the mussels) gets to tell its tale to the pointy-haired boss. All that other data just gets lost<\/i>. And the static that paradoxically improves performance in such cases — white noise, or irrelevant anagrams that steal one’s focus — play the role of the predator, reducing the advantage of the front-runner so that subordinate subroutines can get their voices heard.<\/p>\n

I wonder. If we trained ourselves to live in a state of constant self-imposed distraction, could we desentientise<\/i> our own brains…?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

New to me, old to the lit: a paper in Trends in Cognitive Sciences, which came out last November (just a month after Blindsight was released): “Attention and consciousness: two distinct brain processes“. Let me cherry-pick a few choice excerpts: “The close relationship between attention and consciousness has led many scholars to conflate these processes.” […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[21,15,10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-53","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-biology","category-just-putting-it-out-there","category-neuro"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=53"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=53"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=53"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=53"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}