Last week the journal Science published research out of MIT looking at activation of brain regions in attention. “This ability to willfully focus your attention is physically separate in the brain from distracting things grabbing your attention,” said Earl Miller, a neuroscientist who led the study at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. There are two main ways the brain pays attention: “top down” or willful, goal-oriented attention, such as when you focus to read, and “bottom-up” or reflexive attention to sensory information — loud noises or bright colors or threatening animals.Likewise, there are different degrees of attention disorders. Some people have a harder time focusing, while others have a harder time filtering out distractions. Research with monkeys demonstrated that when the monkeys voluntarily concentrated, the so-called executive center in the front of the brain — the prefrontal cortex — was in charge. But when something distracting grabbed the monkeys’ attention, that signal originated in the parietal cortex, toward the back of the brain.

Sustaining concentration involved lower-frequency neuron activity. Distraction occurred at higher frequencies. So, Miller concluded, scientists one day might find a treatment that essentially turns up or down the volume to boost attention. It makes evolutionary sense that these two types of attention would originate in different areas. Reflexive attention is a more primitive survival tool, while concentration is more advanced.“If something leaps out of the bush at me, that’s going to be really important and I have to react to it right away. Your brain is equipped to notice things salient in the environment,” Miller said. “It takes a truly intelligent creature to know what’s important and focus.” The government-funded work raises some logical next questions. For example, once the parietal lobe recognizes an attention-grabber, how does it evaluate what’s important enough to focus on — and thus signal other brain regions to join in — and what was just a distraction that can be ignored?  It is the snap judgment that determines if a loud beeping is a fire alarm you should heed or just another car alarm down the street — or if that bear down the trail is going to be a threat or is already ambling away.  “It’s how your brain decides when it can just do a quick … analysis and decides when it really needs to focus down,” Babcock said. “We have a lot more to learn.”