How We Pay Attention Changes the Very Shape of Our Brains

making you forget which check-in counter you were supposed to go to.In the space of a few minutes, your brain went through most of the key states of attention: vigilance and alertness, selection and distraction, orientation and filtering. This is utterly different from the extraordinary amplification that occurs in our brain whenever we pay attention to an object and become aware of it. With conscious attention, the discharges of the sensory and conceptual neurons that code for an object are massively amplified and prolonged, and their messages propagate into the prefrontal cortex, where whole populations of neurons ignite and fire for a long time, well beyond the original duration of the image.Such a strong surge of neural firing is exactly what synapses need in order to change their strength—what neuroscientists call “long-term potentiation.” When a pupil pays conscious attention to, say, a foreign-language word that the teacher has just introduced, she allows that word to deeply propagate into her cortical circuits, all the way into the prefrontal cortex. Unconscious or unattended words remain largely confined to the brain’s sensory circuits, never getting a chance to reach the deeper lexical and conceptual representations that support comprehension and semantic memory.This is why every student should learn to pay attention—and also why teachers should pay more attention to attention! A teacher’s greatest talent consists of constantly channeling and capturing children’s attention in order to properly guide them.Attention plays such a fundamental role in the selection of relevant information that it is present in many different circuits in the brain. 3. Executive attention, which decides how to process the attended information, selects the processes that are relevant to a given task, and controls their execution.These systems massively modulate brain activity and can therefore facilitate learning, but also point it in the wrong direction. Teachers who captivate their students, books that draw in their readers, and films and plays that transport their audiences and immerse them in real-life experiences probably provide equally powerful alerting signals that stimulate our brain plasticity.*The second attention system in the brain determines what we should attend to. However, experiments show that even without moving our eyes, we can still pay attention to any place or any object, wherever it is, and amplify its features. The impact is twofold: attention makes the attended neurons more sensitive to the information that we consider relevant, but, above all, it increases their influence on the rest of the brain. The mechanism relies on interfering waves of electrical activity: to suppress a brain area, the brain swamps it with slow waves in the alpha frequency band (between eight and twelve hertz), which inhibit a circuit by preventing it from developing coherent neural activity.Paying attention, therefore, consists of suppressing the unwanted information—and in doing so, our brain runs the risk of becoming blind to what it chooses not to see. Busy with the counting task, your mental workspace was unable to become aware of this incongruous creature.The invisible gorilla experiment is a landmark study in cognitive science, and one which is easily replicated: in a great variety of settings, the mere act of focusing our attention blinds us to unattended stimuli.