To Pay Attention, the Brain Uses Filters, Not a Spotlight | Quanta Magazine

Even with massive amounts of information drowning our senses, we can focus on what is important and take action.

The brain’s ability to focus on a particular signal while filtering out the rest is now being studied by neuroscientists in detail, and the decades-old studies of the brain cortex being responsible for the same are now proving to be incomplete.

• While the prefrontal cortex region of the brain had long been studied by neuroscientists, a separate region of the brain, called thalamus came in the picture in 1984, by a new theory that suggested that the region acts as a gatekeeper of the senses, apart from being a relay centre.
• The region has a thin layer of inhibitory neurons wrapped around it, called the thalamic reticular nucleus(TRN), which acted as ‘gates’ and hid or removed some of the data that is not required at a given time, to establish a level of focus for the individual.
• The study found that the brain was lowering the unwanted signals to help us focus on the stimuli of interest.