Is "who" controlling our attention? The new PNAS study challenges the classic theory of neurology 30 years ago.

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The newly discovered attention control area is closely linked to two previously known attention areas in the brain.Image Source: Rockefeller University when you read this line of text, you will make each word appear clearly in front of you, while blurring other words, you may even ignore the noise outside.it seems to be a trivial skill, but it is actually the basis for everything we do.if the brain can't pick which parts of the influx of sensory information should be prioritized, the world will be a mess, and our brains will be full of distracting sounds and scenes.decades of research have found that this important ability, known as selective attention, is controlled by the parietal and prefrontal regions of the brain.a new study published in the proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAs) on December 20, Beijing time, shows that the temporal lobe, which is not likely to affect attention, also directs attention.this unexpected discovery has brought new problems to the field of science, which has long been regarded as a dead end.winrich freiwald, co-author of the new study and head of the nervous system laboratory at Rockefeller University in the United States, said: "attention control regions were last identified 30 years ago.this is a fundamental finding and we may need to rethink the old ideas about attention control."an accidental discovery, freiwald and his colleague Heiko Stemmann at the University of Bremen in Germany, first discovered this brain region in an experiment a few years ago.they were studying the brain activity of monkeys who, when performing a task, needed to focus on small dots that moved quickly on the screen.as expected, brain scans showed that both visual areas dedicated to motor detection and areas associated with "selective attention" were lit up.however, there is also a subtemporal temporal cortex (pitd) activated, which is named for its dorsal location in the posterior inferior temporal cortex, which scientists cannot fully explain.freiwald said: "in this task, all the brain regions we found had a role, except this pitd."pitd not only does not contain any motor sensitive neurons, but also does not seem to be particularly sensitive to other types of visual information, indicating that it is not a sensory processing area.so in this new study, scientists wanted to determine whether this mysterious brain region might control attention.freiwald said: "this seems unlikely because pitd is far away from the classic attention related areas, but we decided to try."attention related brain regions map the external world to the internal world. This control mechanism ensures that we use data processing resources at all times for a small part of the information in the external world related to our goals.an obvious feature of the attention control area is that its neurons don't care what we're looking at, whether it's a bird, a ball, or a word on a page full of words, they only care about where that thing is.its neurons encode a specific area in our field of vision, which is activated only when the area is concerned.so scientists decided to test pitd for such neurons.they randomly selected about 200 neurons in the hope that at least some of them were related to specific locations and only responded to the part of the monkey watching the screen with moving dots.Image Source: PNAs freiwald recalls walking nervously around during the first recording, staring at monitors that track neuronal electrical activity and play them in the form of sound.but his anxiety soon turned to doubt.he said: "the results are exciting! The first randomly selected neuron showed a strong preference for a particular location, as did the second, and then the third.this is absolutely unbelievable. We found that we can all close our eyes and listen to the response of neurons to determine whether the animal is paying attention to the left or right of the screen.this is the strength of the signal."this signal can even predict when monkeys will go wrong because they don't notice the right location.just as these pitd neurons closely track attention trajectories, they ignore what's actually happening on the screen - another feature of that attention area.unlike typical sensory neurons, the activity of moving dots remains unchanged even if they change direction or color.video source: PNAs finally, scientists stimulated the pitd region to artificially activate it.freiwald said: "we can improve animal performance.for me, this is the key evidence that this region controls attention. "image source: the new prospect of PNAs, the pitd region, may have been overlooked because most of the research work has focused on the first discovered attention control region. freiwald said: "if you move a little bit to the right, you may find more interesting things. "however, why this area exists is still an open question, which has its unique mystery. neuroscientists have long believed that we focus on the world through two distinct networks: one focusing on what we see and the other focusing on where we see it. when something suddenly appears in the environment, such as a red light, it attracts our attention through the "what" network. on the contrary, when something needs our careful attention, "where" network will intervene. pitd seems to contribute to the second type of attention, but it is located in the "what" network area. in other words, it does not belong entirely to either of the two networks. on the contrary, it seems to be in between. freiwald said the oddity of pitd may be a clue that our classic description of attention is not entirely accurate. this study is not only discovering another area of attention control, it may actually prompt scientists to rethink how some aspects of our brain are organized. related reading: nature sub: discovering the key role of brain "first responder" in plasticity, how does the brain change when learning new skills? 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