In fact, I have been going to the series for over a dozen
years now. The first talk I attended was on “Free Will, Neuroscience and Personal Responsibility” by Michael Gazzaniga. There were a couple of Quinn Memorial Lectures I had to miss
due to work scheduling conflicts, and then, there was the pandemic, which
crossed out and canceled entire lectures and events across the board, including
a beloved concert series celebrating my then-favorite composer Ludwig Van. (In
case, you’re curious, my post-pandemic go-to composer has been Mozart, so in
either case, I find myself in excellent and capable hands.)
Back to our sheep, as the French would say. Incidentally,
today’s topic was selective attention and for someone whose mind tends to
wander, not so much because of a lack of focus but rather on focusing on too
many things at once, I was curious to learn more about this tendency of mine. Digression
is my middle name as you may note and witness in this post of mine, heck, who
am I kidding, the whole blog is all about digressing!
But I digress. Yet I must confess that from the get-go, my
attention was split. I was there to listen and take notes because it is
something I do at these lectures with the aim of reproducing the content as
faithfully as I am able, alongside my own thoughts and reflections. But the
split existed since the Winnipeg Jets were fighting for their survival at the
Stanley Cup series, so I would glance or could not help peeking at
the scoreboard, which updated the score on an infrequent basis.
The title of this talk was, as you may have already noted in
the image, “Focusing attention on sensory x memory contents to guide behavior”
by Dr. Anna C. Nobre, who was inexplicably nicknamed and addressed by everyone
as Kia. So, I shall permit myself to continue with the same trend.
Kia’s talk was about the outward and inward arrows of
attention, their influence and interplay in relation to memory, both stored and
incoming. As she stated in one of her slides (I’m not making this up nor
reciting from memory here): “Memory and attention work together linking past
and future to guide adaptive behavior.”
So, what does this mean? Well, on one hand, we have
stimulation, which could be objects or events that lead - or at least have the
potential to lead - to perception and action. At the same time, this interacts and
is in flux with our internal attention, which is comprised of memories, either
in our working memory or as part of our long-term memory. This then works as a
way of anticipating, prioritizing, and selecting information, data, and stimuli,
and would then potentially trigger or prime our reactions and actions upon
them.
In other words, we have not only a perception and action
loop, but we are dealing with our own cognition and objects in space versus objects
in time (basically moments in space) as well as the inner world, thoughts,
reflections, feelings, emotions, distractions, what-have-you. That includes and
involves stimulation and processes that have been stored in the past leaving
trails and traces in the present moment.
Hence, selective attention is not a state but a function.
Put differently, goals and objectives from the inside are guiding the process
of attention, whether we acknowledge this or not, and they all interact with
the outside world. These “memory traces” then aid us with picking up signals
and relevant cues from the world.
In these cases, voluntary and involuntary attention are
happening together, and this is a highly dynamic system, which can also be
flexible and reversible as we are actively engaging with the world. This is
occurring because the brain is shifting and moving constantly between intangible
memories and concrete sensory objects.
To illustrate this, we can look at two different examples.
Imagine you are sitting cross-legged and meditating. Your focus is on your
breath. Now as you are predominantly switched to our inner world, the outer
world may be tugging on your attention strings. At this point, we are ignoring
the inner distractions, such as random thoughts seeping into your focus, and we
will also ignore and disregard the pain or discomfort in your legs as you are
not new to this meditation practice, at least in this scenario.
But what about the car alarm sounding on your street? You
may immediately switch back to your meditation because it is not yours. As a
matter of fact, you don’t even have a car, so you’re all good. The situation
would be different if it was your building’s fire alarm. At that point, you
would most likely - and hopefully - stop the meditation and quickly get yourself
to a safe place.
Here we see how the inner and outer world is vying for your
attention, but you are selecting and prioritizing which one to attend to. In my
next example, the situation is more complex as you are about to fulfil a task:
making coffee.
Now as I have written previously on “How the Brain makes Coffee and dislikes Multitasking,” according to
cognitive psychologist David Badre, a seemingly simple task is much more complicated
than we think; making coffee involves a number of processes that are previously
stored in our memory and this is being retrieved and held in our working memory as we
are going about the given task. In this case, we are also dealing with
sequencing as you need to put in the coffee before running the water, or else, you just end up with hot water.
But what happens when the unexpected intrudes and disrupts
your whole procedure? What if the filter is not in its usual place, or worse,
you have actually run out of filters? In such situations, your focus would
shift toward the outer world where it is not about making coffee but finding a
way of procuring the necessary bits and pieces to make it happen. Coffee,
especially in the morning, is the tangible object we want to physically drink
not to just imagine or think about.
In such situations, you may resort to creative thinking or
even use your intuition to solve problems. In fact, that was the question I
asked Kia. She told me it was a good one but at this point, she was looking at
simpler tasks and experiments so that she could provide the facts and hard data
on them.
Once these were fully established, the goal would be to do
more complex sets of experiments to test such fascinating and more juicy (my
word not hers) concepts and notions like creativity and intuition. Although
inherently interesting, it is also admittedly much tougher to study.
It is great, however, that the groundwork is being set. In
her lecture, she gave a number of experiments they had done, including some
that involved retrocue tests and other studies that measured and studied tiny movements
of the eye, and those ended up being moments where my selective attention zoned
out and focused on other matters, so my memory and knowledge are hazy regarding
these points.
The simple fact is that I did not find them interesting
enough to warrant my attention. This is perhaps the main reason that I’m not a
psychologist. The most interesting aspects of human nature are hard to pinpoint
and prove in a matter-of-fact scientific way, especially since each individual
is different and their inner world is inherently unique and not comparable to
others. This has also been a failing, in my view, of Freud’s overall attempt to turn psychoanalysis
into a science. But guess what? Oops, I did it again! I digressed.
Nonetheless, there are a few takeaways that I found most
interesting in the 2025 Quinn Memorial Lecture that I would like to flesh out
here. First off, as previously mentioned, it is not either/or, or one or the
other but these shifts of attention can occur very quickly and even simultaneously.
When crossing domains, it will have an effect on reaction time and there may be
accuracy costs, and there are studies to prove that.
Furthermore, there is no “domain police” (Kia’s words) whereas
other control functions and parameters may be at play. It may even be a battle
or an interplay between external and internal domains. In other words, at times,
they may be at odds, and at other odds, they may be working together
hand-in-hand.
In the end, our brain wants to help us and help us figure
things out. Another interesting bit about the brain that Kia mentioned is that
the brain is frugal and super lazy. I shared that observation with my teenage
son, and he agreed whole-heartedly with the finding from personal experience.
In fact, the brain does not want to waste energy and tries
to do as little as possible to get things done. This is not necessarily a bad
thing as there are a lot of things on the brain’s plate, so it tries to cut
corners as much as possible. Yet, in certain situations, this may complicate
things or lead towards actions that are not in our best interest.
For instance, when we need quick information, we may rely on
experiences that may be too general, and in some cases, they may be inaccurate
or not offer a whole story. We may pounce upon or hold onto salient images or perceptions in our mind
that are not based on rigorous analysis but on vague feelings or impressions. In
those cases, we may be vulnerable and susceptible to hear-say, gossip, or prejudices instead of taking
the time and effort to look at the situation in a more objective, balanced, and reasonable
manner.
A final thing that Kia mentioned in this talk is that essentially everything is in our head. This is because we perceive the world through our eyes, thoughts, and experiences. In fact, she admitted that there is nothing but inner world and that everything is essentially thought or experienced through and by each of us. Yet such essentially mystic musings would preclude any kind of scientific study, so we need to accept, confirm and reaffirm the outer world as a separate entity, which interacts with us in the same way that we interact with it.
And in that process, we learn and grow and gain knowledge
and wisdom. But to do so, we ought to first overcome our inherent neuroscientific
laziness, we need to accept that we do not already have all the knowledge and information at hand – that we do not know it all - and then, choose and select to be open and
flexible to incoming information, stimulation, and experiences, these objects and
moments in space and time.
