Spoiler: It's not very often (and that's a good thing).
Two papers released Wednesday in Neuron
delve deep into the way we perceive the world, revealing that we don’t
actually register much of it. Our attention systems, the authors show,
are extremely ill-equipped for modern society. Rather than take in the
world in a constant stream of information, consciousness oscillates in
and out of focus, meaning that what we think we know about the world has
actually just been pieced together from limited information. Their
estimates of how often we are actually focused suggest we don’t know
much about the world at all.
The findings are as
much philosophical as they are scientific — enough to call into
question our most basic understanding of reality into question. Both studies
— one on humans by a team at the University of California Berkeley, and
another on macaques done by scientists at Princeton University — sought
to pin down how many times the human brain oscillates in and out of
focus per minute. Four times every second, explains Princeton
Neuroscience Institute Ian Fiebelkorn, Ph.D., to Inverse, the brain stops focusing on the task at hand. That’s about 240 times a minute.
“The brain is wired to be somewhat distractible.”
“The
brain is wired to be somewhat distractible,” he says. “We focus in
bursts, and between those bursts we have these periods of
distractibility, that’s when the brain seems to check in on the rest of
the environment outside to see if there’s something important going on
elsewhere. These rhythms are affecting our behavior all the time.”
To
understand these “rhythms of attention,” Fiebelkorn suggests imagining
standing in Times Square on New Years’ Eve, surrounded by people, cars,
and music. The scene presents far more sensory information than one
human brain is capable of sorting through, and so, the brain deals with
all of the information in two ways. First, it focuses on a single point
of interest: the street corner where you might meet a friend, or Ryan
Seacrest combing the crowd for interviews. Like a filmstrip, the brain
takes snapshots of these moments and pieces them together into a
cohesive narrative, or “perceptual cycle.”
We experience
that moment as continuous, but in reality, we’ve only sampled certain
elements of the environment around us. It feels continuous because our
brains have filled in the gaps for us, explains Berkeley’s Knight Lab researcher and first author Randolph Helfrich, Ph.D. to Inverse.
“I think it’s more a philosophical problem that it is a scientific problem,” he says. “Because when we look at brain data we see a pattern that waxes and wanes, they’re never constant and stable. Everyone perceives the world as continuous and coherent, but the real tricky part is, how does the brain do that?”
The teams behind both studies analyzed data from both human and macaque brains during a series of tasks to understand how the brain stitches together a coherent narrative when it’s only got snapshots to work with. The reason why we experience reality as a movie when it’s only a collection of pictures can be at least partially explained by our rhythms of attention. About four times every second, the brain stops taking snapshots of individual points of focus — like your friend on the corner in Times Square — and collects background information about the environment. Without you knowing it, the brain absorbs the sound of the crowd, the feeling of the freezing December air — which it later uses to stitch together a narrative of the complete Times Square Experience.
“I think it’s more a philosophical problem that it is a scientific problem.”
The Advantage of a Distractible Brain
Modern
society tends to think of distractibility as a bad thing, Fiebelkorn
says, but it might have offered early humans and our distant ancestors a
huge evolutionary advantage. The brain’s natural tendency to “zoom out”
and become distracted by the environment, even for just a few
milliseconds, could have allowed them the time to detect the presence of
a threat and react accordingly.
“Say you spot a
shiny red apple in a tree and you focus on that,” Fiebelkorn says.
“You’re going to go and pick that apple, but you’ll want to know if
there’s any larger animal with bigger teeth going after the same apple.
So, having these windows of distractibility helps you to detect these
stimuli you might otherwise miss.”
The
findings of these two papers in conjunction are powerful evidence that
these rhythms are highly adaptive and have been preserved in humans and
their relative species for millions of years. This hypothesis is based
on the fact that the teams noticed nearly identical neural patterns of
attention (the “rhythms of distractability”) in both the humans and
macaques. For a trait to still be so similar in species that diverged
from a common ancestor billions of years ago, it very likely must
provide a useful evolutionary advantage that has been preserved by
natural selection.
Ancient Brains Meet Modern Multi-Tasking
But
modern society, Randolph adds, has thrown a wrench into our ancient
rhythms, because modern life demands that we perform all sorts of
hyper-focused tasks. We perform cutting-edge scientific research, we
write articles, we drive cars at high speeds on the freeway. All of
these things requite intense focus, and in these cases, our distractible
brains become a liability.
“Think about trying to do three things at a time. You’re trying to drive, you have coffee, you’re on the phone, and all of the sudden this means that you’re the constant switching between those things. If you drop your attention, that is enough to cause an accident,” says Randolph. “Everyone is running on an attentional system that was established way before we were even the human race, so we have this really old school system that’s not as adaptive as we’d like it to be.”
“Think about trying to do three things at a time. You’re trying to drive, you have coffee, you’re on the phone, and all of the sudden this means that you’re the constant switching between those things. If you drop your attention, that is enough to cause an accident,” says Randolph. “Everyone is running on an attentional system that was established way before we were even the human race, so we have this really old school system that’s not as adaptive as we’d like it to be.”
Gaming Consciousness
Human
attention is a precious commodity. Companies shell thousands of dollars
for a billboard ad commuters speed by at 80 miles per hour or pay to
have their name plastered on the side of a sports area in hopes that
fans will catch a glimpse of their logo during a free throw. Given the
neural data produced by these studies, this is actually a wise move. No
matter how much you love the New York Knicks, the brain takes note of
that Geico sign behind the bench in the lulls between its more focused
moments.
“It’s the core of what makes us human somehow.”
“It’s
certainly something you could see advertisers taking advantage of,”
Fiebelkorn says. “Four times a second, there’s a window where you’re
open to stimuli outside your initial focus. It doesn’t mean you’re going
to shift your attention but if there’s something there: something very
bright or blinking then in that case you would shift your attention. So
it is possible, if you’re on the internet and there are ads popping up,
that’s something they could take advantage of.”
Advertising
aside, this research makes it clear that while humans spend so much
time in search of hyper-focus, it’s likely an unachievable goal.
Thousands of years of the struggle for survival have wired us to be
distracted. Maybe it’s time to embrace it as a fundamental part of life.
Helfrich certainly thinks it is: “It’s the core of what makes us human
somehow.”
