That Neuroscience Guy - The Neuroscience of Attention Spans

Episode Date: February 17, 2023

Do you find yourself drifting off and daydreaming more often than your peers? Do you feel like you have trouble maintaining attention to something for a long time? In today's episode of That Neuroscience Guy, we discuss the neuroscience behind attention spans. 

Hi, my name is Olof Krogolsen and I'm a neuroscientist at the University of Victoria. And in my spare time, I'm that neuroscience guy. Welcome to the podcast. So this might have been one of the most requested topics that we got for this season. So many people have DM'd me on Twitter at that NeuroSci guy or emailed us. And the question has been attention spans. So we talked about attention in season one, but we're beginning questions like, why do different people have different amounts of time that they can stay on attention? Why can some people stay engaged and not others? Another question is the individual differences. How does that all fit into this? And we've all experienced this,

right? You know, I remember when I was a university student sitting in a class and the professors droning on and you just keep, you're just unable to pay attention. Now I find this happens in departmental meetings and we've all had this where we just can't pay attention to something so on today's podcast we're going to talk about attention spans i'm going to do a little quick review on attention point out some key features go over the neuroanatomy a little bit and then we'll get into this very key issue so what are attention spans how can we improve them and how what are the individual differences that are there how can we improve them, and what are the individual differences that are there? So in terms of the anatomy of attention, this is primarily going to be about visual attention, but it works true for auditory attention, and I'll point out the differences. Basically,

visual information, as we know, comes in through the eyes, and a key step for attention is it goes through the midbrain region. And we've talked about these nuclei before, but specifically two nuclei, the pulvinar nucleus and the superior colliculus, they both play a crucial role in attention. Now from there, from this pulvinar nucleus and the superior colliculus, visual information goes through the lateral geniculate nucleus and then on to the primary visual cortex at the back of the head.

And we've talked about that. That's the dorsal stream and the ventral stream. But from these midbrain nuclei, there is a direct pathway to the parietal cortex. And that is a crucial pathway for attention. It actually leads to an interesting phenomenon called blindsight, which I've talked about before. But basically, you can have people that are cortically blind. They can't actually see because of damage to the primary visual cortex, but they can orient to things visually because the pulvinar nucleus, the superior colliculus, and their connections to the parietal cortex are intact. So in terms of putting this together then, typically in a modern

view of attention, we sort of think of three principal networks. We first think of what's called the alerting network. And this is basically a network that lets you know that something's happening. So this involves these midbrain nuclei. In terms of the auditory system, it's a little bit different, but there is a preferential pathway from the ears to the primary auditory cortex. And basically, this is what alerts us, hey, something's happening. So that pathway, if you think about it, would be if you heard a sound that caught your attention, or you saw something that captured your visual attention, this alerts the brain that something's

going on. And what happens is it does prepare you in a bunch of different ways. The motor system actually gets prepared to engage in case it needs to. This is sort of part of the basis for the fight or flight response. The parietal cortex gets spun up, if you will, and gets ready to do something. And that leads to the second attentional network, which is the orienting network. Now, it involves a lot of the same neuroanatomy. In fact, most of the same neuroanatomy. But the big difference here is the alerting network is all about, hey, something's happening. And the orienting network actually directs your attention to something. Now, when I talked about attention back in season one,

we talked about the difference between specific and general attention. This is another way to think of attention. General attention is the attention you pay for the world around you. And specific attention, the best way to think about it is a spotlight. And this is what the orienting attentional network does. Working primarily with the parietal cortex,

it focuses that beam of attention onto something. So if you think of listening to someone speak, you would be basically focused on that speech and you would be trying not you think of listening to someone speak, you would be basically focused on that speech and you would be trying not to think of other things. If you think of vision, this is where you've got your eyes on something and you're paying attention and you're dialing other things out. And I'll actually, this is a tip for you, if you will, tomorrow I'm giving a talk at the university about how to give great presentations. And one of the tips I always give people is if you have very busy slides, then don't start speaking. Put up your slide and don't be afraid

to stand there if you're giving a presentation. Why is that? Because people read the slides. It's a form of orienting attention. Their visual system sees writing and you're pretty much, you know, you're sort of spun up to read writing. We learned that from an early age. It captures our attention. So when people are busy reading your slides, they can't hear you. And we'll come back to why that is in a second, but that's the orienting attentional system. It sort of focuses you in, all right, and you start giving preferential processing to that information. And I'll come back to that in a little bit too. Last but not least, there's the attentional, the executive attentional system. The executive attentional system is a higher level system that basically helps with working memory,

our ability to solve problems. It works in conjunction with these other systems, but this is the system that allows you to stay on task, if you will. So it's important as well. And because of that, it involves the parietal cortex and the prefrontal cortex. So we've got the alerting attentional network, the orienting attentional network, and the executive attentional network, all reliant on midbrain nuclei that send information directly to either the parietal cortex or the auditory equivalence. And to be fair, I want to be clear on this. The parietal cortex also plays a role in auditory attention. And then you've got this executive attentional network that's also

tied into the prefrontal cortex. Now, what this gets us to or what are called, and this is the last example more than anything else which is filtering accounts of attention this is more of a psychological construct but it is true at a neural level and the filtering account of attention can be explained by thinking back to my example of powerpoint if you put up visual slides and someone starts reading well they might miss what you're saying and that's because they're literally filtering that out. And that's raised two ways, or it's done two ways neurally. One, the brain is actually enhancing the signal

from the thing that's being attended to. So the fact that the parietal cortex has put the spotlight on something means that literally the neurons that are reading the visual information, so the neurons in the primary visual areas, literally respond more significantly or have a greater response to things that are in the spotlight. So exactly where you're looking and other parts of the visual field tend to be tuned down a bit. You might notice that if you

focus on something right now, you'll notice that it's very sharp and clear because it's in central vision, but everything else around it's a bit blurrier. And that's literally because of this difference in neural processing. The same is true for sound. If you have got your attentional spotlight focused on someone's specifics voice, then what happens is that auditory signal is enhanced, all right, and that neural firing for other sounds is tuned down. And this, of course, is why if we lose interest in what someone's saying, our spotlight is wandered. So when we don't pay attention, and this gets into answering those questions, don't worry, we're going to get there. When we sort of go off task, right, and our attentional span fades, this is literally what's happening is we'll put that spotlight somewhere else. All right. And the thing that they're saying, literally because at the actual individual

neuron level, some neurons are being biased. They're attending to other things. And the ones that should be attending or processing the sound of interest or the image of interest, well, they're not firing. So this gets to the questions from the listeners. After a bit of a review there, you might be able to guess some of this. So first of all, what do we mean by attention span? might be able to guess some of this. So first of all, what do we mean by attention span? Well, we basically mean the amount of time we can put attention onto something. And the research on attention spans is hilarious, I think. As someone that teaches at a university level, we know that our students can maybe pay attention for, you know, 30 to 90 seconds at a time. People go off, you know, their attention drifts that frequently.

Now, I guess what we hope is that your attention comes back. So classically, attention span has to do with the amount of time that you can put onto something. And I'll talk about why that is. Now, it'll drift for personal reasons, which I'm going to get to in a second, but it will also drift due to the outside world, for instance. Like if you hear a loud sound, you know, you're going to orient naturally because it's perceived potentially as a threat. So our attention span can drift due to the outside world. That's a bit beyond our control. Probably the only example I can encourage you to is when I was an undergraduate student, I'd go find some random corner of the

library and that's where I would study, all right, because there was nothing there to distract me. There was no outside world influence and that makes sense. This is why I don't understand people that say they can study in Starbucks. I personally can't. Some people can. I find myself given my day job always asking, you know, if you studied in a quiet space in the library, would you learn more? Now, I know that people wear earphones and all sorts of things, but in principle, in the outside world, the best thing you can do to improve your attention span, so a neuroscience-based tip here, is find a place where you're not distracted. All right, very, very crucial.

In terms of ourselves, it's a little bit trickier, and we've been over this. You're going to hear what I call the Dr. Kregolson mantra on brain health. The best way to improve your own attention span is through good brain health. Sleep. When we're rested, our attention spans are longer. So ensuring you get a good night's sleep. Diet. All right. We know that get a good night's sleep. Diet,

all right. We know that eating a healthier, well-balanced diet, it follows modern guidelines. In Canada, we have the new improved Health Canada recommendations. I'm sure there's a US equivalent, but eating a diet that supports having good brain health. Exercise is massive. People pay attention longer if they've exercised within a reasonable amount of time prior to that. So, you know, one of the things you can do if you're going to go into a meeting or a talk that's going to be long, just walk to the meeting. All right, get your heart rate up, get blood flowing, and it will improve your attention span. So all of these things can be done at the individual level to improve attention spans. And it's just classic brain health. The other thing you can do is

training. There are ways to train your attention span. And it's kind of exactly what you would think it would be, is you have to practice maintaining focus. I don't have any specific recommendations here because in my opinion, there is no universally accepted. This is the best way to train your attention span. From my point of view, if you've got good brain health, you just try to do this yourself. Classic tips like remove distractions to the outside world. You know, I, when I'm, again, when I'm teaching a lecture at the university and students have their laptops up, I'm pretty much convinced that whatever's on the laptop is a distraction as opposed to focusing on the speaker. All right. And that's something you can train,

develop good habits to help yourself through the brain health stuff, but also remove distractions. And then just pure training, literally focusing on a source and forcing yourself to stay attention. Now on that note, a big part of training for this also involves bringing yourself back to a state of attention. So if you lose attention, the worst thing you can do is beat yourself up on it. The best thing you do is to get back on task and get information into your brain. And the last thing I'll say with this is a bit of acceptance. I'm always amazed at how we can accept, you know, we just know there's so many individual differences on the outside. All right.

So we know that some of us are tall, some of us are shorter. We know that we come from different backgrounds and our skins have different colors. Well, our brains have just as much variety. Sadly, some people are hardwired better to pay attention than others. In fact, we have attention deficit syndrome, right? This is a recognized thing. So you just have to accept that a bit. Now, if you are someone where you think your attentional system isn't performing the way you want it to. Well, that gets us back to individual factors, taking care of your brain health and training. Anyway, there's another overview of attention. It's been almost two years since we talked about it,

so I thought I'd come back to it. And there's also this bit about attention spans and engagement. So I want to be very clear for the people that ask those questions, all right, why different people have different amounts of attention spans is probably individual differences in how well you're taking care of yourself. The time length of these things is ridiculously short according to the research, 30 to 90 seconds on average. If you are the person giving presentations,

how do you help people stay focused? So one more tip, vary your content. Imagine if I gave this whole podcast in a monotone where I am just going to read my slides to you and all I'm going to do is read my slides. Well, you can imagine that people are going to disappear quickly, but you can vary the tempo and tone of your voice, have stuff on your slides that captures attention and wakes people up a bit. You know, now that I've given a TEDx talk, I sort of say my advice here is try to give a TEDx talk or a TED talk, right? You know, have slides that engage people as opposed to a bunch of texts that people will read, but

it's going to help them not pay attention. So there's your answers on why people have different amounts of time and the individual differences. Hopefully that answered your questions. If you didn't, DM me on Twitter again and I'll try to give you a more personalized answer to a specific question. On that note, that's all I have to say about the neuroscience of attention, engagement, and attention spans. Remember the website, thatneuroscienceguy.com. There's the Etsy store. We have to add some new shirts. That's entirely my fault. I am working towards it.

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DM me directly. I respond, I promise. And I love to hear your ideas. We already have probably 50 ideas for next season, and we're just working our way through to finish off this season. And of course, thank you so much for listening to the podcast. I checked today and we're at 330,000 downloads, which flabbergasts me. So thank you so much. Please subscribe. It really helps and it motivates us to keep going on that note uh no i'm not about to say we're done i was just going to say matt and i have made a decision to push through and season this season will go longer than usual we're going to get through to the end of march and then we're both going to take the month of april off just to recover a bit and get ready for what would be our summer semester starting in May, and the next season of That Neuroscience Guy.

Anyway, on that note, I am Olive Craig Olson, and I am That Neuroscience Guy. Thank you so much for listening, and I'll see you soon for another neuroscience bite.