“The findings, the result of work carried out by scientists from Princeton University and the University of California, Berkeley are published in the journal Neuron. The researchers found that in between bursts of attention, we are actually distracted. During those periods of distraction, the brain pauses and scans the environment to see if there is something outside the primary focus of attention that might be more important. If there is not, it re-focus back to what you were doing.”

“The brain can’t process everything in the environment,” explains Ian Fiebelkorn, an associate research scholar at the Princeton Neuroscience Institute (PNI) and one of the authors of the paper. “It’s developed those filtering processes that allow it to focus on some information at the expense of other information.” (Link courtesy Paulo Calcada)