I’ve been pondering lately how science reveals what we focus on frames our future. That simply, if we want to accomplish a particular goal, or experience a certain emotion, such as joy or wonder, we need to focus our brain’s attention in that direction.
In his book Transcendent Brain neuroscientist and best-selling author Alan Lightman, one of my favorites, draws our attention to a study done in 2014 by neuroscientists Robert Desimone and Daniel Baldauf. Lightman writes,
“These 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 researchers then put a helmet-like device on the subjects’ heads that could detect tiny local magnetic fields inside the brain and thus localized brain activity, a technique called magnetoencephalography (MEG).
Desimone and Baldauf found the brain cells (neurons) in the two regions behaved differently. When the subjects were told to concentrate on the faces but to disregard the houses, the neurons in the face location fired in synchrony, like a group of people singing in unison, while the neurons in the house location fired like a group of people singing out of synch, each beginning at a random part of the song. When the subjects concentrated on houses and disregarded the faces, the reverse happened.”
What does mean? Lightman explains that “evidently, what we perceive as paying attention to something originates, at the cellular level, in the synchronized firing of a group of neurons, whose rhythmic electrical activity rises above the background chatter of the vast neuronal crowd.”
Lightman explains how one theory is a coalition of neurons, for example a coalition of face or house neurons, “compete with one another for our attention. We are usually not aware of these competitions. However, when one of the coalitions dominates the others, we become conscious of its message.“
This means whatever we choose to focus our mind on – a face, house, happy or sad memory, gratitude or grievance, preferred or disappointing future, creates a coalition of neurons that will be in competition with other coalitions. What we control is the strength of that coalition by the amount of attention we grant it. And this is how, our focus can frame our future.
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