For 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" indicate

For 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.