The brain's new mechanism of attention regulation: the brain's information processing status can be monitored by observing the blink.

There are many things in life that require people to keep their attention, such as listening to lectures in class, driving to pay attention to road conditions, sports competition seeking to pay attention to the opponent's actions and so on.
however, studies have shown that it is difficult for the brain to maintain a high concentration of mind over a long period of time.
, people are therefore used to process the most important information with optimal attention, such as focusing on the key content during class.
How does the brain regulate attention in real time? Ding Wei, a researcher at Zhejiang University's School of Biomedical Engineering and Instrumentation Science, found that in the process of information processing, the brain can quickly switch between attention and non-attention in less than a second.
this rapid switch of attention depends on the motor cortex of the brain, and the activation of the motor cortex can cause the movement of the eyelid muscles, so much so that you can monitor when the brain is more focused and relaxed by observing the blink of an eye.
study was published recently in the internationally renowned journal Nature Communications.
people will listen to the rhythm of the content wink "Three Kingdoms" there is a cloud: "Yu less attentive to music, although after the three, its mistakes, Yu must know, know the need to care."
the time people rumored: 'The song is wrong, Zhou Lang Gu.
's '''' song is wrong to hear, after listening to why turn around to see? This is because perception and movement are often linked, "curvy error" is perception, "Zhou Lang Gu" is movement.
push and wide, listen to other people's speech, will also trigger a synchronized movement? The study of Ding's team gives a positive answer.
study found that humans blink at the rhythm of what they hear.
if humans blink far more often than they need to wet eyeballs, they may reflect a particular feature of brain information processing.
the research of blinking and attention can be summarized by the research of the
team in the "alternative path".
in brain science, researchers tend to ignore blinking or even seeing it as a distraction.
, for example, in eGED studies, because the electrical signals generated by the blink of an eye are a powerful interference with electrical signals in the brain, in the eGd analysis process, researchers often first remove the blink interference.
and the study looks at precisely the kind of often overlooked blink ingestion.
experiment, the volunteers will hear a series of four-word short sentences, such as sheep grazing, ponies across the river, snowflakes flying, etc. , their task is to detect the first word or third word in the short sentence whether there is a specific target, the experimental process synchronized recording the volunteers when listening to the sentence eye electricity and eye movement.
team found that the experimental volunteers blinked less when they focused on listening;
listen to the same passage, the test volunteers blink edghem will be different because of the different content of concern.
in the experiment, the state of attention and inattention can be quickly switched within a word or even within a second, and the wink rate changes rapidly in a short period of time accordingly.
It's like students feeling that when the teacher is focused, they concentrate and reduce the blink of an eye.
important content has passed, the blink of an eye increases and the slightly dry eyeballs are moistened.
the "barometer" of the brain's information processing status" this attention-related eyelid activity does not depend on light conditions, the body listens to sound in dark environments or closed eyes, and the muscle movement of the eyelids is still regulated by attention.
" said the study showed that eyelid activity was closely related to advanced cognitive processing.
blinking, or even closing, doesn't directly affect our hearing, so why does the brain evolve this kind of blinking behavior that syncs with auditory? One possible explanation is that the state of the eye reflects the brain's information processing state.
Ding's team put forward a new hypothesis: for humans, vision is the most important source of information.
so, when you open your eyes, the brain prioritizes processing the outside world; instead, when it's closed, the brain prioritizes the internal affairs (thinking about life, daydreaming, resting, etc.). so
, the eyelids are like a gate: the brain opens the floodgates when it wants to process external information, collecting it in, and pulls the gate when it expects no important information from the outside to handle a moment of internal affairs.
, according to this hypothesis, the eyelids are an external reflection of the brain's information processing state - after switching to the inward state, the processing of the visual, auditory and other senses is temporarily impaired.
, the eyelids are not only the "curtains" to protect the eyes, the "towels" of wet eyeballs, but also the "barometer" of the brain processing state.
for the future application of the experiment, Ding said, this could provide new ideas for monitoring the brain's attention state through video: for example, by analyzing the blink ingenuity of the students during class, the whole class attention can be understood, and this information can be used for the objective evaluation of teaching quality can also be fed back to teachers to improve the quality of teaching.
Source: Science Daily.