Their findings were published on the journal Science Signaling's front page.Continue reading
Hungarian researchers have figured out why our brains do not see what bothers us. HUN-REN researchers and their American colleagues have published a paper in the scientific journal Nature Communications, the HUN-REN Hungarian Research Network announced on Thursday.
“Our brain tends to ignore even the most obvious things when observing our environment, if the given thing is not relevant to our current goals,” reads the information.
This phenomenon is known as attentional blindness, which is caused by the nervous system’s need to select the relevant elements from a large number of items while filtering out distractions.
According to the briefing, it is similar to having a desk to do your work, but you only put things on it that are relevant to you. Our brain creates such a “desk” when we observe our environment. However, from time to time, from task to task, what we put on the desk may change.
Gergő Orbán’s research group at the HUN-REN Wigner Research Center for Physics investigated this in mouse experiments, in close collaboration with Peyman Golshani‘s lab at the University of California, Los Angeles. The results of the experiment were published in Nature Communications, with Márton Hajnal as lead author.
HUN-REN researchers and their U.S. partners analyzed neural activity in mice. The animals performed a task in which they had to make a decision based sometimes on what they heard and sometimes on what they saw, i.e. the relevance of the information they experienced changed during the experiment.
The analysis showed that in a network of neurons, the “desk” is a subspace in which different types of information (heard or seen) are represented by the same cells, yet independently of each other. This solution, called multiplexing, creates a special “working table”:
looking at the table from one direction allows us to identify visual information from the environment, and from the other direction, auditory information.
The research shows that while information about relevant and irrelevant elements is available “intact” in the visual system, a network of neurons in a higher area responsible for choosing a behavioral strategy, called the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), can suppress a stimulus depending on whether it is relevant or not in a given situation.
By teaching an artificial neural network, it has also been shown that when the right solution has to be found among varying degrees of relevance, the brain is able to exclude unnecessary information, to darken a distracting scene, i.e. to suppress the information presented. This special function has been identified in a specific area of the brain, the ACC, which not only provides insight into the decision-making processes of mice.
The similarity between the human and rodent brain also gives a better understanding of how to filter out the really important information from the many distractions,
the release concludes.
Via MTI; Featured image via Facebook/Hun-Ren Központ