, WIRED.
While it may seem that
you are continuously focusing on reading this … the reality is that you’re
zooming in and out of attention up to four times per second. During those periods of distraction, the brain pauses and
scans the environment to see if there is something outside the primary focus of
attention that might be more important. If there is not, it re-focus back to
what you were doing. The reason why we
are not aware of those gaps is because the brain tricks us into perceiving
reality as a continuous movie.
Why does our brain make
us go through attention pulses at such a fast rate? Researchers suggest that it
corresponds to an evolutionary advantage. “Think about when life was more
dangerous," Fiebelkorn says. "You would have to constantly be on the
lookout, you would want to always be aware if there was something around you
with bigger teeth.”
“Whether you are talking
about the hyper-focused type of ADHD or the distractible type, you can easily
draw a parallel with the two states that normal brains alternate between,” she
says. “It could be that brains affected by ADHD are unable to balance between
the two attentional spaces and instead get locked into one or the other.”
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