Brain May Use Its 'Mind's Eye' to Control Chaos
FRIDAY, Aug. 28 (HealthDay News) -- When you're searching for a friend in a crowd, it appears that your "mind's eye" acts like a spotlight to scan the scene in front of you until you find the right person.
Researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology monitored the brain activity of monkeys as they searched for a specific tilted, colored bar among a field of bars on a computer screen. The results showed that the monkeys spontaneously shifted their attention in a sequence, like a spotlight that moved from location to location.
The study also found that brain waves act like a form of built-in clock that times the shifts in attention from one location to the next. The mind's eye spotlight in the monkeys shifted focus at a rate of 25 times a second.
The findings could help improve understanding and treatment of attention-deficit disorder or could lead to ways to increase the rate of cognition in the brain, according to the researchers, who were from MIT's Picower Institute for Learning and Memory.
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