How does the brain decide what to focus on?

Scientists at Johns Hopkins University have made a breakthrough in how the brain decides what to watch for. The experts made this discovery by studying Barn Owls and believe that this discovery applies to all animals, including humans.
Co-author of the study and neuroscientist, Shreesh Mysore is an Assistant Professor in Psychological and Cerebral Sciences.
"There are a million things in the world that bombard our eyes, our ears, our skin and other sensory organs. Of all these things, to which element of information do we most need to pay attention at every moment to drive our behavior? Said Professor Mysore. "Our work provides a very beautiful answer to how the brain solves a key part of this problem."
For decades, animal studies in the forebrain have failed to better understand how the brain chooses the subjects to focus on. In the present study, researchers decided to examine the middle brain, an evolutionarily old brain part.
"All animals need to pay attention to what might affect our survival, but we do not all have a highly developed forebrain," said Professor Mysore.
The researchers chose to focus their study on owls because their central brain is organized so as to make it relatively easy to track the activity of specific neurons.
When the researchers showed on a monitor visual stimuli of 15 owls while measuring the activity of individual neurons in their midbrain, they found something unexpected. Individual neurons generally encode the visual space topographically, which means that neighboring neurons encode the spaces of neighboring parts of the world. But now, experts have observed unique neurons responding to various places sometimes very far apart.
Using a model developed by lead author Nagaraj Mahajan, Ph.D. candidate in Electrical and Computer Engineering, the team found that neurons had to signal the most important location in the world regardless of the from the visual information. The only possible way to encode space while controlling the costs of metabolism and cabling was to have fewer neurons than places in the world, with each neuron coding for multiple locations. The brains of the owls corresponded almost exactly to these computer forecasts.
"This gives us for the first time an answer on how the brain really solves the problem of selection in all possible places," said Professor Mysore. "We now have a satisfactory answer to a problem that is both fundamental and universal. It is promised that the findings of this study could very well be generalized to humans. "
The team hopes the results will ultimately help experts understand what is wrong with disorders such as attention deficit disorder.
"We believe that these average brain neurons could be an important key to the problem of this inability to concentrate," said Professor Mysore. "It's basic research, but it builds ideas that can potentially be tested in patients and, if we're lucky, can help us provide treatments."
The study is published in the journal Cell Reports.
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By Chrissy Sexton, editor of Earth.com
Image Credit: Nagaraj Mahajan / Johns Hopkins University

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