Elements

Attention
By Alan Lightman October 1, 2014

Every moment, our brains are bombarded with information, from without and within.
The eyes alone convey more than a hundred billion signals to the brain every second.
The ears receive another avalanche of sounds. Then there are the fragments of
thoughts, conscious and unconscious, that race from one neuron to the next. Much of
this data seems random and meaningless. Indeed, for us to function, much of it must be
ignored. But clearly not all. How do our brains select the relevant data? How do we
decide to pay attention to the turn of a doorknob and ignore the drip of a leaky faucet?
How do we become conscious of a certain stimulus, or indeed “conscious” at all?

For decades, philosophers and scientists have debated the process by which we pay
attention to things, based on cognitive models of the mind. But, in the view of many
modern psychologists and neurobiologists, the “mind” is not some nonmaterial and
exotic essence separate from the body. All questions about the mind must ultimately be
answered by studies of physical cells, explained in terms of the detailed workings of the
more than eighty billion neurons in the brain. At this level, the question is: How do
neurons signal to one another and to a cognitive command center that they have
something important to say?

“Years ago, we were satis ed to know which areas of the brain light up under various
stimuli,” the neuroscientist Robert Desimone told me during a recent visit to his office.
"Now we want to know mechanisms." Desimone directs the McGovern Institute for
Brain Research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; youthful and trim at the
age of sixty-two, he was dressed casually, in a blue pinstripe shirt, and had only the
slightest gray in his hair. On the bookshelf of his tidy office were photographs of his
two young children; on the wall was a large watercolor titled “Neural Gardens,”
depicting a forest of tangled neurons, their spindly axons and dendrites wending
downward like roots in rich soil.

Earlier this year, in an article published in the journal Science , Desimone and his
colleague Daniel Baldauf reported on an experiment that shed light on the physical
mechanism of paying attention. The researchers presented a series of two kinds of
images—faces and houses—to their subjects in rapid succession, like passing frames of
a movie, and asked them to concentrate on the faces but disregard the houses (or vice
versa). The images were “tagged” by being presented at two frequencies—a new face
every two-thirds of a second, a new house every half second. By monitoring the
frequencies of the electrical activity of the subjects’ brains with
magnetoencephalography (MEG) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI),
Desimone and Baldauf could determine where in the brain the images were being
directed.

The scientists found that, even though the two sets of images were presented to the eye
almost on top of each other, they were processed by different places in the brain—the
face images by a particular region on the surface of the temporal lobe that is known to
specialize in facial recognition, and the house images by a neighboring but separate
group of neurons specializing in place recognition.

Most importantly, the neurons in the two regions behaved differently. When the
subjects were told to concentrate on the faces and to disregard the houses, the neurons
in the face location red in synchrony, like a group of people singing in unison, while
the neurons in the house location red like a group of people singing out of synch, each
beginning at a random point in the score. When the subjects concentrated instead on
houses, the reverse happened. Furthermore, another part of the brain, called the inferior
frontal junction, a marble-size region in the frontal lobe, seemed to conduct the chorus
of the synchronized neurons, ring slightly ahead of them. Evidently, what we perceive
as “paying attention” to something originates, at the cellular level, in the synchronized
ring of a group of neurons, whose rhythmic electrical activity rises above the
background chatter of the vast neuronal crowd. Or, as Desimone once put it, “This
synchronized chanting allows the relevant information to be ‘heard’ more efficiently by
other brain regions.”
A connection between attention and neural synchrony was hypothesized by Ernst
Niebur and Chrisof Koch twenty years ago. Desimone was one of the rst scientists to
prove it for particular cases, in 2001. A pioneer in the eld, he is quick to mention other
leaders, such as John Reynolds of the Salk Institute, in La Jolla, California, who uses a
combination of physics, neurophysiology, and computational neural modelling to study
how objects in the visual eld, such as separate highlighted areas in an illuminated grid,
compete with each other for attention. Meanwhile, Sabine Kastner of Princeton has
recently begun comparing humans with monkeys in their attention to visual tasks; and
Columbia’s Michael Goldberg has recently shown that, in the process of attention, a
particular area of the brain called the lateral parietal area “sums up” visual signals and
cognitive signals. In this growing eld of neuroscience, Desimone has
personally trained more than thirty- ve people.

I asked Desimone how the conductor of the neuronal chorus—in this case, the inferior
frontal junction—knows when a particular stimulus should be attended to. In his
experiment, the subjects were told to focus their attention on either faces or houses, but
what about an unexpected stimulus—say, a charging lion, or the sudden entrance of an
attractive celebrity? “We don’t understand the answer to that yet,” Desimone said. And
how do disparate voices come into synchrony? Can they do so merely by exchanging
information among themselves, or do they need an outside director? At the second
question, Desimone broke out in a boyish grin and took six small metronomes from his
briefcase. He placed them side by side on a wooden board, balanced on two empty
lemon-soda cans. Then he set the metronomes ticking, out of synch with one another.
After a couple of minutes, they were all ticking in synchrony. They had communicated
with one another and come into synch solely through the side-to-side movement of the
board, without any outside agency. Neurons, of course, use a different method of
communication: passing chemical messengers between the hundreds of laments
radiating from each neuron. Desimone’s pendulums suggest that some neurons could
come into synch on their own, without a conductor. But neuroscientists don't yet
know which neuronal processes are self-organizing and which require a higher-level
cognitive director.

As my visit came to an end, I asked Desimone about the strange experience of

consciousness, to me the most profound and troubling aspect of human existence. How
does a gooey mass of blood, bones, and gelatinous tissue become a sentient being? How
does it become aware of itself as a thing separate from its surroundings? How does it
develop a self, an ego, an “I”? Without hesitation, Desimone replied that the mystery of
consciousness was overrated. “As we learn more about the detailed mechanisms in the
brain, the question of ‘What is consciousness?’ will fade away into irrelevancy and
abstraction,” he said. As Desimone sees it, consciousness is just a vague word for the
mental experience of attending, which we are slowly dissecting in terms of the electrical
and chemical activity of individual neurons. As an analogy, he said, consider a careering
automobile. A person might ask: Where inside that thing is its motion? But the viewer
would no longer ask that question after he understood the engine of the car, the
manner in which gasoline is ignited by spark plugs, the movement of piston and
crankshaft.

I am a scientist and a materialist myself, but I left Desimone’s office feeling bereft.
Although I cannot say exactly why, I do not want my thoughts, my emotions, and my
sense of self reduced to the electrical tinglings of neurons.

I prefer that at least some parts of my being remain in the shadows of mystery. I think
of a comment by Einstein: “The most beautiful experience we can have is the
mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and
true science.”

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