Attention Span and Brain Buffers
Why do people have a limited attention span? Some recent research offers me a basis for speculating. The study was done by Philippe Peigneux and colleagues at the University of Liege. It was published in the open access journal PLoS Biology.
They used fMRI to observe brain activity. The test activity was a ten-minute auditory attention task. This task was done three times, separated by half-hour periods. During the first separation period, the participants performed other tasks. The second separation period was simple rest. The intervening tasks were selected to place demands on different brain modules.
The results showed that the brain activity in the second and third occasions of the test task was systematically changed by the intervening task. The evidence is interpreted as showing that the brain was actively processing the stored results of the test task, even while it was handling the intervening task.
Behavioral research has long used this kind of study to asses the effects of intervening tasks on learning. The intervening task can interfere with consolidation (the theoretical equivalent to the processing results described above).
Speculation: When you meet something new to your brain, it stores the input in “raw” form. This storage is somewhat analogous to connecting a video camera to your computer. This raw storage takes a lot of space and is not readily available for access. Later, you will take the video offline and let the computer process the raw into compressed form with annotation (tags).
The tags I would expect out of my computer would be things like date and time. If I believed the tech media, of course, I would expect it to recognize faces and familiar terrain. It would then have tags that would let it answer questions like “Who did I get on video at the meeting yesterday?”
I won’t get that out of my computer (yet). But everybody gets that kind of work out of their brains. So follow that analogy to attention span. My computer’s attention span in this task is fixed by the size of its storage buffer. Fill that buffer and it gets a bad case of ADD.
Brain overload leads to graceful degradation. But when you fill up your brain buffer, you probably need to take that system offline and shift to another task. How long does it take to fill a brain buffer? My guess is that you can tell from the length of the attention span. And how long is that?
That depends. (I had to say that. I am a psychologist.) But I will offer a rough estimate for unfamiliar things that take a lot of cognitive processing, memory, and attention. Ten minutes.
I’ll go on about this on a later blog. But I have to stop now. I am over my ten minutes.
They used fMRI to observe brain activity. The test activity was a ten-minute auditory attention task. This task was done three times, separated by half-hour periods. During the first separation period, the participants performed other tasks. The second separation period was simple rest. The intervening tasks were selected to place demands on different brain modules.
The results showed that the brain activity in the second and third occasions of the test task was systematically changed by the intervening task. The evidence is interpreted as showing that the brain was actively processing the stored results of the test task, even while it was handling the intervening task.
Behavioral research has long used this kind of study to asses the effects of intervening tasks on learning. The intervening task can interfere with consolidation (the theoretical equivalent to the processing results described above).
Speculation: When you meet something new to your brain, it stores the input in “raw” form. This storage is somewhat analogous to connecting a video camera to your computer. This raw storage takes a lot of space and is not readily available for access. Later, you will take the video offline and let the computer process the raw into compressed form with annotation (tags).
The tags I would expect out of my computer would be things like date and time. If I believed the tech media, of course, I would expect it to recognize faces and familiar terrain. It would then have tags that would let it answer questions like “Who did I get on video at the meeting yesterday?”
I won’t get that out of my computer (yet). But everybody gets that kind of work out of their brains. So follow that analogy to attention span. My computer’s attention span in this task is fixed by the size of its storage buffer. Fill that buffer and it gets a bad case of ADD.
Brain overload leads to graceful degradation. But when you fill up your brain buffer, you probably need to take that system offline and shift to another task. How long does it take to fill a brain buffer? My guess is that you can tell from the length of the attention span. And how long is that?
That depends. (I had to say that. I am a psychologist.) But I will offer a rough estimate for unfamiliar things that take a lot of cognitive processing, memory, and attention. Ten minutes.
I’ll go on about this on a later blog. But I have to stop now. I am over my ten minutes.
posted by Selby Evans at 9:51 AM
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