Mind

Hacks 34-43 It's a busy world out there, and we take in a lot of input, continuously. Raw sense data floods in through our eyes, ears, skin, and more, supplemented by memories and associations both simple and complex. This makes for quite a bar...

What's the finest detail you can see? If you're looking at a computer screen from about 3 meters away, 2 pixels have to be separated by about a millimeter or more for them not to blur into one. That's the highest your eye's resolution goes. B...

The brain has two methods for counting, and only one is officially called counting. That's the regular waywhen you look at a set of items and check them off, one by one. You have some system of remembering which have already been countedyou count...

Concentrating, it's possible, and the brain can even track objects when they momentarily pass behind things and disappear, but only in certain circumstances. The problem with attention as a mechanism is that we use it continuouslyit's an intr...

What are you paying attention to? These words? In a minute it could switch to a friend or to making coffee or to the person on the bus who just stood up and you noticed out of the corner of your eye. We don't pay attention to everything we see or...

There are layers and layers of functions and processing in the brain. Oneattentionis a collaborative exercise between voluntary application of attention and automatic mechanisms to snap attention to where it's needed [Hack #37] . Even the volun...

A good way to think about attention is as the brain's way of paring down the sheer volume of sensory input into something more manageable. You can then concentrate your resources on what's important (or at least perceived to be so on first blush...

Instead, we use the world as its own best representationcontinually revisiting any bits we want to think about. This saves the brain time and resources, but can make us blind to changes. Both our vision [Hack 14] and attention [Hack #34] ...

Attention acts as a kind of filter, directing all resources to certain tasks and away from others. Nowhere is the impact of attention on what you actually see more evident than in the various experiments on inattention blindness. Inattention b...

This suppression persists across time, in a phenomenon called negative priming. In the story "The Boy Who Cried Wolf," the young shepherd repeatedly claims a wolf has come to attack his flock. There's no wolf there. The boy just enjoys seein...

They can be trained by playing first-person action video games. Our visual processing abilities are by no means hardwired and fixed from birth. There are limits, but the brain's nothing if not plastic. With practice, the attentional mechanism...