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To Pay Attention, the Brain Uses Filters, Not a Spotlight
- BAReF00t 7y agoIn lab animals! Not necessarily applicable 1:1 in humans.
- 50ckpuppet 7y agoWhich is why some psychedelic drugs are too much for people because it disables the filters for a period of time. You weren't aware of the pressure of your socks on your feet until reading sentence.
- kempbellt 7y agoFor this reason, I am very selective about using THC. Unless I've also had some alcohol, it'll typically induce anxiety for me. Kudos to those who can enjoy it though.
- heroHACK17 7y agoI had the same experience during my high school and college years. THC consumption (with alcohol or without) consistently induced anxiety (sometimes so much as to induce mini panic-attacks). Fast-forward five or so years, and I gave it another shot out of curiosity. Interestingly enough, my experience was starkly different. I guess you could say I experienced the traditional side-effects that I had missed my first time around. What's most notable is the subtle after-glow I would feel days after using THC. I have since been using THC while practicing mindfulness and the benefits have been enumerable! It's quite interesting what role age, set, setting, etc. can have during these experiences.
- luckydata 7y agoKinda sounds to me you used sativa at first, then switched to indica and that's pretty much exactly how that usually works. They have significantly different "highs" and sativa can feel antsy and uncomfortable for already anxious people.
- jhedwards 7y agoNot necessarily: I always had anxiety issues with cannabis until I tried a pure sativa strain. The problem is that indica gives we weird bodily sensations which trigger my anxiety, whereas sativa only affects my mind. I think the important thing is that people can experiment in a controlled way. It wasn't until cannabis became legal that I could compare strains and figure out what exactly was causing my anxiety.
- 09bjb 7y agoAn alternative explanation is "No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river and he's not the same man." Certainly holds true for me: the experience, it turns out, depends more on where I am in that stage of life than the substance in question. Cannabis is radically different for me now (at 30-something and after several intense psychedelic experiences) than at 19 or 20 when I first tried it. And...I'm not assuming you're a man :)
- karlshea 7y agoIf you're enjoying it with mindfulness it might also be good with cardio. A tiny bit before 45 minutes on a bike along with some music really makes the time fly.
- Bootwizard 7y agoI do this myself. Cycling is much more enjoyable this way. Even better with edibles and a long distance ride.
- karlshea 7y agoVery much so! The combination with an endorphin rush is pretty nice afterwards too.
- lukifer 7y agoAnecdotally, I find it fascinating that many people find cannabis induces anxiety, while many others use cannabis as a treatment or coping mechanism for anxiety. I'm sure the strain, strength, and exact blend of cannabinoids are relevant factors (and perhaps a bit of placebo/psychosoma based on past experiences), but I suspect if one controlled for all those variables, we'd still see wildly different effects w/r/t anxiety, based on individual brain differences alone.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- kempbellt 7y agoThere are definitely a lot of variables to consider. Method of consumption - I prefer not to smoke things, so I would use edibles. Strain, strength, psychosoma, as you mention. Psychosoma can be affected by location, time of day (light out or dark out), the company you are in, legality, or potential work-related ramifications, etc. I _do not recommend_ this at all, but if you want to have an anxious episode, consuming a 10MG THC edible on an empty stomach, while alone, will likely do it. You may find yourself repeatedly Googling "Am I going to die?!", and then forgetting the answer 10 seconds later, for about 90 minutes. That said, there have been times where I've enjoyed it. Being in a familiar environment, with people I trust, having eaten food, and maybe a drink or two, tends to nullify the anxiety and allow for a relaxing experience. I find similar benefits from meditation though, so I have little reason to use THC these days.
- ozzmotik 7y agoi find it hard to believe that 10mg would do that to me, but that's mostly because I've taken a ~50mg edible (about 1/3 of a 150mg brownie) on an empty stomach and didn't particularly feel super anxious. i certainly was effected, but all in all i ended up finishing that whole brownie and just felt really nice. but i had a fairly strong tolerance at the time and i am a fairly overweight person with a slow metabolism so those things probably contributed. ill have to try again at some point in the future when I'm in better shape and have little-to-no tolerance because that genuinely sounds like a fun time to me. kinda weird but i find experiencing anxiogenic effects and then calming my mind and letting them go to be an extremely enjoyable experience with mind altering substances. huge part of why i used to abuse diphenhydramine regularly, other than seeing my friends the shadow people!
- hashberry 7y agoEspecially psilocybin. "Hero" or "ego-death" doses are fascinating. Filters/barriers break down. Each room in my house had a special vibration/energy based on how I spent my time there. Artwork had deep meanings not previously noticed. Projected families and friends onto chairs in my empty dining room and had conversations with them (with cussing & sobbing). Started to think about my ancestors and had "past life" schizophrenic experiences based on memories and impressions of history. Felt powerful daemonic energy, radiating from body out of my hands, and felt amazed by the incredible ability humans have to create & destroy. THC/cannabis is too much of a recreational drug... though it's useful for taking the edge off at the end of a psilocybin trip.
- Covzire 7y agoNot to take anything away from your experience, but I've noticed that in reading reports from various people taking larger trips, I get this impression that a big part of the experience is indistinguishable from schizophrenia. What I mean is nobody can properly define their terms in any commonly shared way, people believe and see things they can't possibly share in a relatable way. Not everything of course, but your feeling of your hands strikes me as something you certainly felt, but likely wasn't anything more than an emotional experience that your brain and consciousness imagined, rather than deduced from logic. But since it felt so real, it felt so 'true' but likely wasn't. I could be wrong though.
- mikelyons 7y agoBut notice that logic is nothing more than an emotional experience that your consciousness imagined, and so is your brain, brains don't actually exist.
- TheAdamAndChe 7y agoAccording to Wikipedia's definition , psychosis is an abnormal condition of the mind that results in difficulties determining what is real and what is not. Speaking as someone who has taken a very large dose of LSD, the boundary between alerted consciousness(or consciousness at all) and psychosis is very blurry. All of human experience is merely an interpretation of our stimuli, and one person's perception of reality is likely to be quite different from other people. A key difference between LSD-indused psychosis and schizophrenia is timespan. For most people, the psychosis fades and they just become normal people again. (some people do trigger schizophrenia that persists after their trips, though it's rare) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychosis?wprov=sfla1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychosis?wprov=sfla1
- chippy 7y agoThere was some research done on psychedelic hallucinations which revealed that there is actually less sensory input and that so filters are not disabled - they just have less work as there is less input. With less input the brain hallucinates to fill in the gaps. It may feel like the doors are being opened to allow the outside in but hallucinogens close the outside off. Your heightened perception of external things when on psychedelics are hallucinations occurring in your brain and not some objective information being transmitted from outside
- BAReF00t 7y agoWhat socks? :D Try heart beat, breathing, blood flowing through you, your intestines working, air going through hairs and across your snin, saliva being squeezed out of your mouth's glands, your teeth and tongue touching everything in there, any speck of dust under your finger and toe nails, … did I miss anything? As somebody who is way more aware of these things way too often: Not fun!
- g0bananas 7y agoi have horrible adhd (diagnosed, both as a child and as an adult) and i think i already don't have very many filters... And I liked the small amount of shrooms i've had... but I do worry if i try it more then i'll end up without any filters!
- neilobremski 7y agoThis makes sense to me and maybe I'm reading this wrong, but it explains why I can't find my keys when they're in my hand.
- jaster 7y agoFor what (little) it is worth, for a layman such as me it sounds like it make a lot of sense in hindsight. As the common saying "Tuning out the noise" indicates, focusing on something feels more like dropping irrelevant info in the background than about magnifying the interesting bits. Also, it seems to make sense to expect important functions for survival to be found in the "ancient" parts of the brain. And the attention capacity seems like a rather important function for survival. On another topic, I wonder how this finding could serve as an inspiration in regard to the current trend of attention mechanisms in Artificial Neural Networks. The analogy with transformers is obvious, but the part about "blinking spotlights" made me wonder if Nature isn't hiding a nifty trick here.
- vanderZwan 7y agoI'm more than a little surprised that this article makes no mention of ADHD. There is an entire group of people with a medical condition that causes problems with attention regulation and it is not used to test the various models for attention explained in here? (Also speaking as someone with an ADD diagnosis myself)
- nabnob 7y agoIt does: >Halassa is particularly intrigued by what the connection between attention and the basal ganglia might reveal about conditions like attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and autism, which often manifest as hypersensitivity to certain kinds of inputs.
- vanderZwan 7y agoAh, I did a quick CTRL+F for "ADHD" and found nothing. Thank you
- ilaksh 7y agoAnother article reinforcing my belief that framing AGI research as a quest for "human-level" AI is misguided. The type of intelligence we are looking for is actually animal intelligence. The higher level human abilities are mainly just higher levels of characteristics that most animals have.
- Erlich_Bachman 7y agoThe idea is to make artificual human intelligence so that it can help with tasks that humans can do. If we make rabbit AI, it's not particularly useful, and while I am sure it can be a stepping stone (but we already have plenty of those, starting a model of a neuron), the goal is a human AI (and beyond). The human AI is one of the most important steps and points on the jorney, much more so than a rabbit AI. So not misguided at all.
- ilaksh 7y agoPoint is that animal AI is the stepping stone because it has almost all of the human abilities. Where as aiming for higher level human abilities is the wrong starting point.
- mikelyons 7y agoThis is also how God forgets it is the entire fucking universe so that it can have a human experience and come to know itself. Edit: See the comments on psilocybin above and read them from a spiritual perspective, try it on. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jmBQRb5iuMg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jmBQRb5iuMg
- dang 7y agoSince this account seems to have gone single-agenda and you've ignored our request to stop posting these links, I've banned the account until we get some indication that you want to use HN as intended, i.e. for intellectual curiosity on an unpredictable range of topics. That's not to invalidate your spiritual path in any way, it's just that repetition is the mother of offtopicness on HN.
- mikelyons 7y agoThanks for handling this so well. Is there a place I can suggest features? I could have avoided a ban if I had seen your first warning.
- etage3 7y ago"If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is: Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro' narrow chinks of his cavern." Aldous Huxley had a similar intuition in his essay, The Doors of Perception: the body perceives everything, and environment (including culture, traditions etc.) teaches the man to close some doors lest he be overwhelmed. Mescaline and other entheogens are a way to open most of the doors. Artists (such as Van Gogh) are people with a different set of doors open/closed.
- jammygit 7y agoI strongly recommend reading that essay, it is wonderful
- samplatt 7y agoIf we're posting relevant quotes, Lovecraft is a favourite: “The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far."
- artsyca 7y agoThe sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age. ^^ this part is what piques me because we are finally combining our knowledge from disparate fields and the indicators are truly that it's much more insidious than anyone can possibly imagine so the red pill blue pill moment is upon us as a humanity
- ColanR 7y ago> combining our knowledge from disparate fields and the indicators are truly that it's much more insidious than anyone can possibly imagine What are you specifically referring to here? QM?
- izzydata 7y agoI would love some kind of cure or treatment for misophonia. I've suspected my problem was not being able to filter sounds properly, but I can't think of any solution other than physically filtering sounds externally.
- onemoresoop 7y agoI've recently had a misophonia experience while waiting for my wife and kid. The sound was coming from a street party and while I was quite far from it, the sub-woofer bass gave me great discomfort and anxiety, there was no way for me to get away from it as the sound was everywhere. I tried covering my ears but that was not much help. I had to sit down and forcefully relax. When my wife showed up, it was hard to communicate, but she didn't seem as bothered as I was. I usually don't have anxiety or I've learn to control it quite well but this episode was quite concerning to me. Do you get bothered by hi or low frequencies or both?
- izzydata 7y agoIt doesn't seem to be a property of the sound itself. It is more about me knowing that it is being caused by a person who has the power to stop, but doesn't. If you had the same sound being caused by nature and I knew for an absolute fact that it was outside of anyone's control it wouldn't bother me. Bass sounds from down the hall or across the street definitely falls under the category of sounds that greatly irritate me. I would inevitably call the cops if I couldn't get them to stop even though I want them to be able to play their music as it makes me irrationally upset. The kinds of sounds that annoy me on a daily basis are people eating loudly or talking too much. I bought some pretty nice sound canceling headphones so that I can avoid such sounds when I can. I would not be capable of working in an office otherwise.
- adamnemecek 7y agoFiltering is in some sense deconvolution. It makes sense it would be deconvolution.
- artsyca 7y agoThis is innate knowledge that is finally being verified by science -- eliminating distractions is as much about removing the need to filter as it is about creating the circumstances for increasing concentration For precisely this reason I am such a stickler for proper professional dress: I find printed T's and athleisure utterly annoying and the cost of filtering out my colleagues fashion choices over the long term leads to a huge cognitive load whereas if we could all work within the established paradigm we'd all attain a way better state of flow Guess we'll have to wait another century for the science to prove what everyone already knew since antiquity before anyone in the tech industry deigns to wear adult clothes - apologies for the dig but I have points to burn and a desire to be validated as counterculture
- rndmio 7y agoIf everyone else seems to be doing fine and only you have the problem maybe you should look a little closer to home to find a resolution.
- artsyca 7y agoEveryone's struggling without knowing it, look at society as a whole and the planet earth, it was the best of times and the worst of times That line of reasoning doesn't work on a 10x programmer like myself, I'm above the mere mortals. Save it for the likes of Adam Neumann
- artsyca 7y agoThis is exactly the reason why our industry suffers from gross diversity problems -- everyone who 'fits in' telling everyone else it's their fault for not fitting in -- oh sweet irony of ironies bring on the downvotes
- CardenB 7y agoYou are literally taking a recent publication about attentional mechanisms in the brain and hijacking them to explain why you're annoyed with t-shirts, then turning it into a commentary on society. I think you could use some perspective. This research is not so concrete that the application even makes sense.
- forgingahead 7y agoThis is exactly why we all need to be incredibly judicious in what we expose ourselves to -- the people we surround ourselves with with family, work, and social life, the content we read, watch or listen to, and the emotions we absorb from the communities around us. Sometimes our filters can handle it all, a lot of times it can't. And a lot of modernity, with always-connected internet devices, outrage porn "news", and sky-is-falling political hacks everywhere, can be overwhelming and frankly exhausting. I always recommend disconnecting, taking a breather, and enjoying the serenity of quiet. Not working in toxic environments with crummy colleagues, and certainly not being dragged into the daily grind of content farm media companies. It's a huge benefit to one's mental health and emotional stability.
- filoeleven 7y agoWilliam James wrote, “The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook.” He was also a proponent (later in his career anyway) of the idea that brains act as filters on an expanded field of consciousness. I don’t recall if this specific detail comes more from him or from Myers, but the gist is that consciousness exists independently from bodies, and brains evolved to filter out all but the most useful perceptions that contribute to bodily survival. The last half of that agrees nicely with this article. James did a lot of work on the nature of embodied experience and was rigorous—foundational to the field of psychology, in fact—when studying how cognition and sensation interact. And a hundred years later, we still don’t have conclusive evidence that brains produce consciousness; we assume it to be the case because physicalist interpretations have worked really well everywhere else in the sciences.
- YeGoblynQueenne 7y agoThat'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?
- Erlich_Bachman 7y agoThis 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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W2rWgXJBZhU) than from this.
- dellannaluca 7y agoYou might be interested in this paper (of mine) which predicted most of the results of the paper in the thread title. osf.io/k497u