“Reading this story requires you to willfully pay attention to the sentences and to tune out nearby conversations, the radio and other distractions. But if a fire alarm sounded, your attention would be involuntarily snatched away from the story to the blaring sound.
New research from Vanderbilt University reveals for the first time how our brains coordinate these two types of attention and why we may be temporarily blinded by surprises.
The research was published March 7, 2010, in Nature Neuroscience.
‘The simple example of having your reading interrupted by a fire alarm illustrates a fundamental aspect of attention: what ultimately reaches our awareness and guides our behavior depends on the interaction between goal-directed and stimulus-driven attention. For coherent behavior to emerge, you need these two forms of attention to be coordinated,” René Marois, associate professor of psychology and co-author of the new study, said. “We found a brain area, the inferior frontal junction, that may play a primary role in coordinating these two forms of attention.’
The researchers were also interested in what happens to us when our attention is captured by an unexpected event.”
Read more at Physorg.com (thanks, SuZi)
This might be the reason why some people don’t like surprises, no matter how positive they might be.
Which is why I hate surprises.
Very interesting study…though i think there are no nescesarily borders in the brain …concerning attention…alas the attention areas are probably highly strechable…
Perhaps this is why conspiricy theories focus on the moments just after an inciddent (or on the flip side the dark government forces take advantage of such moments). It always seems so much was happening in the five mins following JFK’s assasination or after the planes hit on 911 but peoples attention was looking the other way and blinded to the actual events taking place at that time.
Someone better tell Derren quick then!!!
Hm, does not seem a proper way to explain it .. comparing it with reading and then being surprised by an alarm. It’s a complete different thing, their research and the way we will respond to a sound from the outside as an alarm, it’s not coming from the same space or via the same senses as when you’re reading a book. And alarms do have a distinct meaning to people, people are programmed to respond to that no matter what they do. Very loud sounds all of a sudden will trigger that response too, But hey ..
The subjects probably got less distracted after a short while being interrupted by these faces. Depends on what the scientists told them about the study ofcourse as well (of major importance I’d say). How much mind control the subjects do have when starting their task. Etc.
When people are interrupted in a story with a fast movement they tend to get confused. When this particular confusion is there, that person is open to subliminal messaging and suggestions.
This is also the start of speed inductions of hypnosis therapist.
As an example we have the ‘handshake induction’ that will leave a person highly confused after a very fast arm pull after a short handshake.