NEURAL HIJACKS
Walk into someone's office, and what's the first thing you notice? That's a clue to what's driving your bottom-up focus in that mo ment. If you're set on a financial goal, you might immediately take in an earnings graph on the computer screen. If you have arachno phobia, you'll fixate on that dusty web in the corner of the window.
These are subconscious choices in attention. Such attention capture occurs when the amygdala circuitry, the brain's sentinel for emotional meaning, spots something it finds significant; an over size insect, wrathful look, or cute toddler gives you an idea of the brain's settings for such instinctual interest.15 This midbrain fixture of the bottom-up system reacts far more quickly in neural time than does the top-down prefrontal area; it sends signals upward to activate higher cortical pathways that alert the (relatively) sluggish executive centers to wake up and pay attention.
Our brain's attention mechanisms evolved over hundreds of thousands of years to survive in a fang-and-claw jungle where threats approached our ancestors within a specific visual range and set of rates-somewhere around the lunge of a snake and the speed of a leaping tiger. Those of our ancestors whose amygdala was quick enough to help us dodge that snake and evade that tiger passed on their neural design to us.
Snakes and spiders, two animals that the human brain seems primed to notice with alarm, capture attention even when their images are flashed so fast we have no conscious awareness of having seen them. The bottom-up circuits spot them more quickly than neutral objects, and send an alarm (flash those images by an expert on snakes or spiders and she will still have attention capture-but no alarm signal).
NEURAL HIJACKS
Walk into someone's office, and what's the first thing you notice? That's a clue to what's driving your bottom-up focus in that mo ment. If you're set on a financial goal, you might immediately take in an earnings graph on the computer screen. If you have arachno phobia, you'll fixate on that dusty web in the corner of the window.
These are subconscious choices in attention. Such attention capture occurs when the amygdala circuitry, the brain's sentinel for emotional meaning, spots something it finds significant; an over size insect, wrathful look, or cute toddler gives you an idea of the brain's settings for such instinctual interest.15 This midbrain fixture of the bottom-up system reacts far more quickly in neural time than does the top-down prefrontal area; it sends signals upward to activate higher cortical pathways that alert the (relatively) sluggish executive centers to wake up and pay attention.
Our brain's attention mechanisms evolved over hundreds of thousands of years to survive in a fang-and-claw jungle where threats approached our ancestors within a specific visual range and set of rates-somewhere around the lunge of a snake and the speed of a leaping tiger. Those of our ancestors whose amygdala was quick enough to help us dodge that snake and evade that tiger passed on their neural design to us.
Snakes and spiders, two animals that the human brain seems primed to notice with alarm, capture attention even when their images are flashed so fast we have no conscious awareness of having seen them. The bottom-up circuits spot them more quickly than neutral objects, and send an alarm (flash those images by an expert on snakes or spiders and she will still have attention capture-but no alarm signal).
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