That's very interesting but I want to know more. The work described in the article only traces a likely attention circuit in the brain (... of mice, but OK). I want to know how this circuit works. How is it that we know what needs to be attended to and what to filter out? What turns the knobs of attention?
When I'm looking for my keys, I know what I'm looking for so I can see how my attention may know what to focus on and what to ignore. Perhaps, when I'm driving down the road and an animal darts across it, I know to focus on it because I have a propensity to pay attention to sudden movements. I can see how that would be very useful to have indeed.
But when there is nothing guiding my attention, like an object of interest or a motion- it's still on and it can still focus. And it can still surprise me.
Last year I had two examples of this. I was on a boat with some friends and I suddendly noticed a cruise liner far off in the distance. It was blending with its surroundings (particularly the mountaints behind it) and so even when I pointed it out to my friends they could not see it for a minute or so, until it moved closer. Another time, I noticed a military helicopter flying across a hilltop. I pointed it out to my mother and again she couldn't see it. My eyes picked both objects out and I was just gazing towards them semi-distracted not expecting anything to be there... how? And why? And how about all the other times I've missed similar information right before my eyes?
How is it that we know what to pay attention to and what to ignore? How do we know what is relevant?
This study seems way too low-level for the type of knowledge that you're trying to extract. My intuition is that you're going to learn more (about your subjective experience which you're trying to do) from AI neural networks with attention mechanisms (there is a lot of info about it like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W2rWgXJBZhU) than from this.
When I'm looking for my keys, I know what I'm looking for so I can see how my attention may know what to focus on and what to ignore. Perhaps, when I'm driving down the road and an animal darts across it, I know to focus on it because I have a propensity to pay attention to sudden movements. I can see how that would be very useful to have indeed.
But when there is nothing guiding my attention, like an object of interest or a motion- it's still on and it can still focus. And it can still surprise me.
Last year I had two examples of this. I was on a boat with some friends and I suddendly noticed a cruise liner far off in the distance. It was blending with its surroundings (particularly the mountaints behind it) and so even when I pointed it out to my friends they could not see it for a minute or so, until it moved closer. Another time, I noticed a military helicopter flying across a hilltop. I pointed it out to my mother and again she couldn't see it. My eyes picked both objects out and I was just gazing towards them semi-distracted not expecting anything to be there... how? And why? And how about all the other times I've missed similar information right before my eyes?
How is it that we know what to pay attention to and what to ignore? How do we know what is relevant?