By: David Dobbs, MInd Matters, and Trey Hedden & John Gabrieli, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Wednesday, March 28, 2007

Daniel Weissman's research in the Scientific American Blog

March 20, 2007

From the introduction:

Isaac Newton attributed his genius to his "patient attention," and Yale economist Robert J. Shiller, seconding that thought 300 years later (in 2000), declared that "the ability to focus attention on important things is a defining characteristic of intelligence." If attention accounts for much of what we accomplish, it accounts too for our consciousness, since it largely controls what dominates our thoughts and awareness.

Not surprisingly, neuroscientists and psychologists these days give attention plenty of, um, study, trying to figure out everything from how stubbornly attention is tied to gaze to what part of the brain directs covert attention.

Amid all this, the authors of the study discussed below -- "The Neural Bases of Momentary Lapses in Attention," by D.H. Weissman, K.C. Roberts, K.J. Visscher, and M.G. Woldorff, from Nature Neuroscience, 11 June 2006 -- took an admirably simple and direct tack: They tried to find out what the brain is doing when attention fails. As our commenters this week explain, the study reveals some intriguing dynamics underlying lapses of attention, confirming things we already know and showing us some new brain tricks as well. Compelling stuff -- which is to say, easy to attend to.

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To read the blog post in its entirety, please visit SciAm Blog on the Scientific American website at http://blog.sciam.com/index.php?title=attention_must_be_paid&more=1&c=1&tb=1&pb=1.