Attention Span
Attention
Q: What does attention impact?
A: Attention gives us several ways to constantly and appropriately monitor our environment. General monitoring allows us to be vigilant. Arousal attention helps us to rapidly get ready to act and prepares us to move. Attention also makes us able to determine the novelty and the potential of a given situation. At the highest level, our attention helps us make decisions.
Attention involves a number of processes including filtering out, balancing multiple perceptions, and assigning emotional importance to these perceptions. These processing decisions are determined by your interest, alertness, and apprehension.
For example, a mother concerned about a sick child will be more alert for changes in the child’s breathing than in the sounds of her spouse talking on the phone, her other children playing outside, or the dialogue from a sitcom airing on the television in the next room.
Q: What is selective attention?
A: This is the ability to select and focus on what we attend to. With it we block out or shut down input that is unnecessary or should be ignored. This capability keeps our brain from experiencing overload.
Autistic children, for example, do not have this normal capability. To keep from being overloaded, they shut down or shut out input and withdraw from a world that typically offers massive stimulation.
In a similar manner, automobile drivers can focus their visual attention more fully in heavy traffic if they reduce their auditory input (turn off the car radio).
Q: What is the CEO function in the brain?
A: The CEO function involves the highest level of attention. It’s the planning or decision-making function in our brain that tells us to take action or to react in relation to our goals. It allows you to determine whether what you see, hear, or feel is important and whether to pay attention to it or ignore it.
Attention Span – The Deficit
Q: What happens in the brain to cause ADHD?
A: The hyperactive/attention deficit response is the brain’s general inability to respond normally to its CEO function. Consequently, it ignores its own advice and decides to engage in activities that are disorderly, inappropriate, and, at times, even illegal. This happens because an individual’s inability to sustain attention causes something like an addiction to the present. An ADHD child gets hooked on immediate feedback. For that child, the long-range impact is irrelevant. Therefore, individuals contending with attention problems go for immediate pleasure in spite of the consequences.
Return To Other Cognitive Learning Topics
Excerpts of the book Unlock the Enstein Inside by Dr. Ken Gibson
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