
To Pay Attention, the Brain Uses Filters, Not a Spotlight - theafh
https://www.quantamagazine.org/to-pay-attention-the-brain-uses-filters-not-a-spotlight-20190924/
======
etage3
"If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as
it is: Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro'
narrow chinks of his cavern."

Aldous Huxley had a similar intuition in his essay, _The Doors of Perception_
: the body perceives everything, and environment (including culture,
traditions etc.) teaches the man to close some doors lest he be overwhelmed.
Mescaline and other entheogens are a way to open most of the doors. Artists
(such as Van Gogh) are people with a different set of doors open/closed.

~~~
samplatt
If we're posting relevant quotes, Lovecraft is a favourite: “The most merciful
thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate
all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of
black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far."

~~~
artsyca
The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us
little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open
up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein,
that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light
into the peace and safety of a new dark age.

^^ this part is what piques me because we are finally combining our knowledge
from disparate fields and the indicators are truly that it's much more
insidious than anyone can possibly imagine so the red pill blue pill moment is
upon us as a humanity

~~~
ColanR
> combining our knowledge from disparate fields and the indicators are truly
> that it's much more insidious than anyone can possibly imagine

What are you specifically referring to here? QM?

~~~
freeflight
The Internet and the www?

It's given humanity somewhat of a global consciousness, but not everything
that comes out of that is benign or benevolent.

~~~
artsyca
It's turning into the abyss that gazes back at us --

------
jaster
For what (little) it is worth, for a layman such as me it sounds like it make
a lot of sense in hindsight.

As the common saying "Tuning out the noise" indicates, focusing on something
feels more like dropping irrelevant info in the background than about
magnifying the interesting bits.

Also, it seems to make sense to expect important functions for survival to be
found in the "ancient" parts of the brain. And the attention capacity seems
like a rather important function for survival.

On another topic, I wonder how this finding could serve as an inspiration in
regard to the current trend of attention mechanisms in Artificial Neural
Networks. The analogy with transformers is obvious, but the part about
"blinking spotlights" made me wonder if Nature isn't hiding a nifty trick
here.

------
50ckpuppet
Which is why some psychedelic drugs are too much for people because it
disables the filters for a period of time. You weren't aware of the pressure
of your socks on your feet until reading sentence.

~~~
hashberry
Especially psilocybin. "Hero" or "ego-death" doses are fascinating.
Filters/barriers break down. Each room in my house had a special
vibration/energy based on how I spent my time there. Artwork had deep meanings
not previously noticed. Projected families and friends onto chairs in my empty
dining room and had conversations with them (with cussing & sobbing). Started
to think about my ancestors and had "past life" schizophrenic experiences
based on memories and impressions of history. Felt powerful daemonic energy,
radiating from body out of my hands, and felt amazed by the incredible ability
humans have to create & destroy.

THC/cannabis is too much of a recreational drug... though it's useful for
taking the edge off at the end of a psilocybin trip.

~~~
Covzire
Not to take anything away from your experience, but I've noticed that in
reading reports from various people taking larger trips, I get this impression
that a big part of the experience is indistinguishable from schizophrenia.
What I mean is nobody can properly define their terms in any commonly shared
way, people believe and see things they can't possibly share in a relatable
way. Not everything of course, but your feeling of your hands strikes me as
something you certainly felt, but likely wasn't anything more than an
emotional experience that your brain and consciousness imagined, rather than
deduced from logic. But since it felt so real, it felt so 'true' but likely
wasn't. I could be wrong though.

~~~
BAReF00t
That’s the thing with your brain: Everything is kinda like that! All the time.

Most of your brain literally cannot distinguish between fantasy, dream,
stories, and actual experiences.

And the parts that do, will never be able to tell if it’s all just made up.

Philosophically, there is no ”reality“ but that what you perceive. Which, due
to relativity, is, well, highly relative too. There is no absolute reality
either. You can literally have conflicting facts about even simple things,
that _both_ are true, and scientifically verifiably so. (Like ”Who shot
first?“. Or ”What particle came first?“.)

So be very wary whenever you are confident about such things. Because that is
only possible with enough convenient ignorance.

~~~
kleer001
Let's not confuse what's in our heads and what's outside of them.

Philosophy doesn't get us out of the gravity well, cure diseases, build
computers, or feed the hungry. However, it does motivate people to prioritize
those things.

~~~
heavenlyblue
>> Let's not confuse what's in our heads and what's outside of them.

Well, everything that is at the boundary of our knowledge is also on the
boundary between our heads and outside of them.

Let's say you think your partner loves you. How well do you know that? Do you
think you know them well? What's the difference between them realising that
they should move on in life later on and having planned it all along (getting
rid of you in a few years)?

Do you believe in marriage? Is it something enforced upon us by the culture or
is it emergent from each one of us individually? What if I only speak about
you yourself? Is happy marriage a 5, 10, 20 year long thing? If your partner
dies, how long do you wait before your marry someone else?

I would even go as far as saying that "curing diseases, building computers and
feeding the hungry" is something that people with a certain slave mentality
tend to think about. They need a rational purpose to live because otherwise
they would need to admit they are not rational players - but in the end it's
them you lose in the game of life by blaming everybody else for being so
_irrational_.

~~~
kleer001
What?

------
filoeleven
William James wrote, “The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to
overlook.”

He was also a proponent (later in his career anyway) of the idea that brains
act as filters on an expanded field of consciousness. I don’t recall if this
specific detail comes more from him or from Myers, but the gist is that
consciousness exists independently from bodies, and brains evolved to filter
out all but the most useful perceptions that contribute to bodily survival.
The last half of that agrees nicely with this article.

James did a lot of work on the nature of embodied experience and was
rigorous—foundational to the field of psychology, in fact—when studying how
cognition and sensation interact. And a hundred years later, we still don’t
have conclusive evidence that brains produce consciousness; we assume it to be
the case because physicalist interpretations have worked really well
everywhere else in the sciences.

------
vanderZwan
I'm more than a little surprised that this article makes no mention of ADHD.
There is an entire group of people with a medical condition that causes
problems with attention regulation and it is not used to test the various
models for attention explained in here?

(Also speaking as someone with an ADD diagnosis myself)

~~~
nabnob
It does:

>Halassa is particularly intrigued by what the connection between attention
and the basal ganglia might reveal about conditions like attention deficit
hyperactivity disorder and autism, which often manifest as hypersensitivity to
certain kinds of inputs.

~~~
vanderZwan
Ah, I did a quick CTRL+F for "ADHD" and found nothing. Thank you

------
neilobremski
This makes sense to me and maybe I'm reading this wrong, but it explains why I
can't find my keys when they're in my hand.

------
izzydata
I would love some kind of cure or treatment for misophonia. I've suspected my
problem was not being able to filter sounds properly, but I can't think of any
solution other than physically filtering sounds externally.

~~~
onemoresoop
I've recently had a misophonia experience while waiting for my wife and kid.
The sound was coming from a street party and while I was quite far from it,
the sub-woofer bass gave me great discomfort and anxiety, there was no way for
me to get away from it as the sound was everywhere. I tried covering my ears
but that was not much help. I had to sit down and forcefully relax. When my
wife showed up, it was hard to communicate, but she didn't seem as bothered as
I was. I usually don't have anxiety or I've learn to control it quite well but
this episode was quite concerning to me. Do you get bothered by hi or low
frequencies or both?

~~~
izzydata
It doesn't seem to be a property of the sound itself. It is more about me
knowing that it is being caused by a person who has the power to stop, but
doesn't. If you had the same sound being caused by nature and I knew for an
absolute fact that it was outside of anyone's control it wouldn't bother me.

Bass sounds from down the hall or across the street definitely falls under the
category of sounds that greatly irritate me. I would inevitably call the cops
if I couldn't get them to stop even though I want them to be able to play
their music as it makes me irrationally upset.

The kinds of sounds that annoy me on a daily basis are people eating loudly or
talking too much. I bought some pretty nice sound canceling headphones so that
I can avoid such sounds when I can. I would not be capable of working in an
office otherwise.

------
YeGoblynQueenne
That's very interesting but I want to know more. The work described in the
article only traces a likely attention circuit in the brain (... of mice, but
OK). I want to know _how_ this circuit works. How is it that we know what
needs to be attended to and what to filter out? What turns the knobs of
attention?

When I'm looking for my keys, I know what I'm looking for so I can see how my
attention may know what to focus on and what to ignore. Perhaps, when I'm
driving down the road and an animal darts across it, I know to focus on it
because I have a propensity to pay attention to sudden movements. I can see
how that would be very useful to have indeed.

But when there is nothing guiding my attention, like an object of interest or
a motion- it's still on and it can still focus. And it can still surprise me.

Last year I had two examples of this. I was on a boat with some friends and I
suddendly noticed a cruise liner far off in the distance. It was blending with
its surroundings (particularly the mountaints behind it) and so even when I
pointed it out to my friends they could not see it for a minute or so, until
it moved closer. Another time, I noticed a military helicopter flying across a
hilltop. I pointed it out to my mother and again she couldn't see it. My eyes
picked both objects out and I was just gazing towards them semi-distracted not
expecting anything to be there... how? And why? And how about all the other
times I've missed similar information right before my eyes?

How is it that we know what to pay attention to and what to ignore? How do we
know what is _relevant_?

~~~
Erlich_Bachman
This study seems way too low-level for the type of knowledge that you're
trying to extract. My intuition is that you're going to learn more (about your
subjective experience which you're trying to do) from AI neural networks with
attention mechanisms (there is a lot of info about it like
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W2rWgXJBZhU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W2rWgXJBZhU))
than from this.

------
forgingahead
This is exactly why we all need to be incredibly judicious in what we expose
ourselves to -- the people we surround ourselves with with family, work, and
social life, the content we read, watch or listen to, and the emotions we
absorb from the communities around us.

Sometimes our filters can handle it all, a lot of times it can't. And a lot of
modernity, with always-connected internet devices, outrage porn "news", and
sky-is-falling political hacks everywhere, can be overwhelming and frankly
exhausting.

I always recommend disconnecting, taking a breather, and enjoying the serenity
of quiet. Not working in toxic environments with crummy colleagues, and
certainly not being dragged into the daily grind of content farm media
companies. It's a huge benefit to one's mental health and emotional stability.

------
dellannaluca
You might be interested in this paper (of mine) which predicted most of the
results of the paper in the thread title.

osf.io/k497u

------
ilaksh
Another article reinforcing my belief that framing AGI research as a quest for
"human-level" AI is misguided. The type of intelligence we are looking for is
actually animal intelligence. The higher level human abilities are mainly just
higher levels of characteristics that most animals have.

~~~
Erlich_Bachman
The idea is to make artificual human intelligence so that it can help with
tasks that humans can do. If we make rabbit AI, it's not particularly useful,
and while I am sure it can be a stepping stone (but we already have plenty of
those, starting a model of a neuron), the goal is a human AI (and beyond). The
human AI is one of the most important steps and points on the jorney, much
more so than a rabbit AI. So not misguided at all.

~~~
ilaksh
Point is that animal AI is the stepping stone because it has almost all of the
human abilities. Where as aiming for higher level human abilities is the wrong
starting point.

------
adamnemecek
Filtering is in some sense deconvolution. It makes sense it would be
deconvolution.

------
artsyca
This is innate knowledge that is finally being verified by science --
eliminating distractions is as much about removing the need to filter as it is
about creating the circumstances for increasing concentration

For precisely this reason I am such a stickler for proper professional dress:
I find printed T's and athleisure utterly annoying and the cost of filtering
out my colleagues fashion choices over the long term leads to a huge cognitive
load whereas if we could all work within the established paradigm we'd all
attain a way better state of flow

Guess we'll have to wait another century for the science to prove what
everyone already knew since antiquity before anyone in the tech industry
deigns to wear adult clothes - apologies for the dig but I have points to burn
and a desire to be validated as counterculture

~~~
rndmio
If everyone else seems to be doing fine and only you have the problem maybe
you should look a little closer to home to find a resolution.

~~~
artsyca
This is exactly the reason why our industry suffers from gross diversity
problems -- everyone who 'fits in' telling everyone else it's their fault for
not fitting in -- oh sweet irony of ironies bring on the downvotes

~~~
CardenB
You are literally taking a recent publication about attentional mechanisms in
the brain and hijacking them to explain why you're annoyed with t-shirts, then
turning it into a commentary on society.

I think you could use some perspective. This research is not so concrete that
the application even makes sense.

~~~
artsyca
Confirmation Bias! Tell me you never make the evidence fit the facts and not
the other way around?

~~~
ozzmotik
i do that sometimes, but i do my best to acknowledge that im going to be doing
so before doing it, rather than after :)

~~~
artsyca
My theory is that we've thrown out a large part of our humanity along with the
bath water and technology of today is akin to the fire granted us by the
mythical Prometheus. We're so busy dancing amongst the flames in our rags we
don't notice that it's our humanity burning

~~~
ozzmotik
i am not entirely disinclined to agree with that statement, at least as far as
the uneducated masses go. but there are certainly those that know how to
properly wield the fire and work towards the progression of humanity and i
think it's somewhat silly to entirely discount them as they are the ones who
have gotten us this far.

~~~
artsyca
Yea, they're the ones wearing the puffy vests ->
[https://www.businessoffashion.com/articles/intelligence/monc...](https://www.businessoffashion.com/articles/intelligence/moncler-
canada-goose-patagonia-puffer-vest)

------
BAReF00t
In lab animals!

Not necessarily applicable 1:1 in humans.

------
mikelyons
This is also how God forgets it is the entire fucking universe so that it can
have a human experience and come to know itself.

Edit: See the comments on psilocybin above and read them from a spiritual
perspective, try it on.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jmBQRb5iuMg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jmBQRb5iuMg)

~~~
dang
Since this account seems to have gone single-agenda and you've ignored our
request to stop posting these links, I've banned the account until we get some
indication that you want to use HN as intended, i.e. for intellectual
curiosity on an unpredictable range of topics. That's not to invalidate your
spiritual path in any way, it's just that repetition is the mother of
offtopicness on HN.

~~~
mikelyons
Thanks for handling this so well.

Is there a place I can suggest features? I could have avoided a ban if I had
seen your first warning.

