> The brain wasn’t brightening the light on stimuli of interest; it was lowering the lights on everything else.<p>An outstanding demonstration of this process is Apollo Robbins' "pick-pocket" act[1]. You can clearly see how he gives his subject a bunch of things to think about - his hand movements, what he's talking about, sounds, touch, etc - until it fills up the subjects attention capacity and they suddenly stop noticing everything else going on right in front of them. He basically performs a denial-of-service attack on someone's attention system until they cannot notice him take their wristwatch off. All done with a flourish for the camera, of course, which works because he's not DOSing the <i>audience's</i> attention.<p>A particularly good example is from his talk[2] at defcon (the entire talk is worth watching). Right when he asks "When you walked past me, did you check to see where your wallet was?" you can see the volunteer suddenly put all of his attention on that question and not his wristwatch.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LoUSO_Mj1TQ" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LoUSO_Mj1TQ</a><p>[2] (demo starts at 31:22) <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1kkOKvPrdZ4&feature=youtu.be&t=1882" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1kkOKvPrdZ4&feature=youtu.be...</a>
If attention is achieved by tuning out other stimuli, could an attention deficit also come from an overeager filter tuning out also the target of the attention?<p>As a child I was a voracious reader, often reading a book a day. I remember many times when the situation would allow it turning on both the television and the radio, both with sound on, to create a 'distraction field' that let me 'cocoon' in the reading.<p>I always thought it could have been just masking distractions like 'strange noises' in the house that would cause one to have to pay attention, like some people use white noise, but could it be in this theory's model that I was putting load on the 'filters' so as to prevent them catching the desired attention target, the text I wanted to focus on?
I’ve often wondered why I can focus for a very long time when working in a coffee shop, yet when working alone at home I can easily go off on a tangent.
The interesting thing about this for me is that I've always assumed that the default state of an awake mind is a kind of inattentiveness where we take in an process no data at all. But this article makes it sound like, by default, our minds are constantly trying to process and take everything in, and the extra work goes in to filtering the input we get.<p>This seems to match with the phenomenal experience of being overwhelmed in noisy or crowded situations, and of the difficult part of meditation being teaching yourself not to suppress experiences as they arise and just take everything in.