Name: 【TED】Mehdi Ordikhani-Seyedlar: What happens in your brain when you pay attention? (What happens in your brain when you pay attention? | Mehdi Ordikhani-Seyedlar)
Uploaded: 2017-12-25T01:51:59.000Z
Duration: 6 min 33 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Tag questions

Transition words & phrases

It's because our attention is pulled in so many different directions at a time,

and it's in fact pretty impressive if you can stay focused.

Many people think that attention is all about what we are focusing on,

but it's also about what information our brain is trying to filter out.

There are two ways you direct your attention.

In overt attention, you move your eyes towards something

In covert attention, you pay attention to something,

Your overt attention, your direction of the eyes,

which is constantly scanning the surrounding area,

and I work on cognitive brain-machine interfaces,

or bringing together the brain and the computer.

because based on them we can build models for the computers,

computers can recognize how well our brain functions.

then these computers themselves can be used as assistive devices

that makes covert attention an interesting model for computers.

So I wanted to know what are the brainwave patterns

when you look overtly or when you look covertly.

In this experiment there are two flickering squares,

one of them flickering at a slower rate than the other one.

Depending on which of these flickers you are paying attention to,

certain parts of your brain will start resonating in the same rate

we can track where exactly you are watching

So to see what happens in your brain when you pay overt attention,

I asked people to look directly in one of the squares

In this case, not surprisingly, we saw that these flickering squares

which was coming from the back of their head,

which is responsible for the processing of your visual information.

to see what happens in your brain when you pay covert attention.

So this time I asked people to look in the middle of the screen

to pay attention to either of these squares.

we saw that both of these flickering rates appeared in their brain signals,

only one of them, which was paid attention to,

so that thing in the brain was basically the activation of the frontal area.

The front part of your brain is responsible

for higher cognitive functions as a human.

The frontal part, it seems that it works as a filter

trying to let information come in only from the right flicker

and trying to inhibit the information coming from the ignored one.

The filtering ability of the brain is indeed a key for attention,

So a person with ADHD cannot inhibit these distractors,

and that's why they can't focus for a long time on a single task.

with his brain connected to the computer,

We can use these cognitive brain-machine interfaces

that my grandfather had a stroke, and he lost complete ability to speak.

He could understand everybody, but there was no way to respond,

even not writing because he was illiterate.

Now, after years that I am in this field,

【TED】Mehdi Ordikhani-Seyedlar: What happens in your brain when you pay attention? (What happens in your brain when you pay attention? | Mehdi Ordikhani-Seyedlar)

Subtitles ListPlay Video

【TED】Mehdi Ordikhani-Seyedlar: What happens in your brain when you pay attention? (What happens in your brain when you pay attention? | Mehdi Ordikhani-Seyedlar)

constantly

specific

cognitive

process