PROVIDENCE, R.I. — Having trouble focusing has no impact on one’s intelligence, a new study explains. Researchers at Brown University have made significant strides in understanding how the brain manages to concentrate in noisy, distracting environments, such as a bustling restaurant. Their findings shed light on the complex brain mechanisms that enable us to focus on relevant information while ignoring irrelevant noise.
Imagine trying to have a conversation in a crowded place where dishes are clattering, music is blaring, and people are speaking loudly. It seems almost miraculous that one can pay attention under such circumstances. The team’s research delves into this phenomenon, providing intricate details about the brain’s ability to juggle focusing on important aspects and filtering out distractions.
Study lead author Harrison Ritz, a neuroscientist who undertook this study as a doctoral student at Brown and is now a postdoctoral fellow at the Princeton Neuroscience Institute, uses an interesting analogy to explain their findings.
“In the same way that we bring together more than 50 muscles to perform a physical task like using chopsticks, our study found that we can coordinate multiple different forms of attention in order to perform acts of mental dexterity,” says Ritz in a media release.
Brown researchers utilized a focus-and-filter test, involving a cognitive task where participants observed a mass of moving dots in different colors and were asked to identify certain patterns or colors among them. This task was designed to vary in difficulty, challenging the participants’ ability to concentrate amidst a sea of visual “noise.”
Through this experiment, researchers discovered that two specific brain regions, the intraparietal sulcus and the anterior cingulate cortex, play pivotal roles in managing our focus and filtering abilities. These regions work in tandem, adjusting our sensitivity to relevant and irrelevant stimuli based on the task at hand. For instance, if distinguishing color becomes crucial due to the task’s requirements, these brain regions help increase sensitivity to color, aiding in the successful completion of the task.
“When people talk about the limitations of the mind, they often put it in terms of, ‘humans just don’t have the mental capacity’ or ‘humans lack computing power,’” explains Ritz. “These findings support a different perspective on why we’re not focused all the time. It’s not that our brains are too simple, but instead that our brains are really complicated, and it’s the coordination that’s hard.”
This insight is particularly relevant for understanding the limitations of human attention and the challenges faced by individuals with attention-related disorders such as ADHD.
“These findings can help us to understand how we as humans are able to exhibit such tremendous cognitive flexibility — to pay attention to what we want, when we want to,” notes study co-author Amitai Shenhav, an associate professor in Brown’s Department of Cognitive, Linguistic and Psychological Sciences.
Furthermore, the study opens doors for exploring how focus-and-filter strategies can be applied in clinical settings, with ongoing projects investigating their potential in treating conditions like treatment-resistant depression. Additionally, Ritz and his colleagues are examining how motivation, such as financial incentives, influences our ability to focus and filter information.
Funded by the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, and the C.V. Starr Foundation, the study is published in the journal Nature Human Behaviour.