Dr. Amishi Jha

Wait, what?

Yes.

And that age, 25, is because attention relies on a very important part of the brain that's quite slow to develop, the prefrontal cortex.

Okay.

So we need our attention for everything that we do and things like thinking, things like feelings,

things like connecting with other people, all of those require our attention.

Before we talk about in more detail what attention is and all of the different ways that it functions, I think it might be useful to mention something about why we even have an attention system.

Great.

Through the course of human evolution, we are benefited by the fact that we hold this thing called attention in our own brain.

Okay.

The idea that we consider is that this system developed because of a very big problem that the brain had.

And this is even before we were human beings, which is that there's far more information in the environment than the brain can fully process.

So already you have an overloaded system.

Uh-huh.

If you cannot fully understand and process everything happening, you've got to come up with a solution.

So the solution of attention is to prioritize a subset of information that's available to us and use the full computational power of our brain to interrogate it, to understand it, and then sort of sample it bit by bit to put together everything that we understand.

might be surrounded by.

And frankly, as we developed as organisms, even to understand fully what's going on within us.

So we use our attention to prioritize some information over other information and use that to benefit our understanding of what's happening in our environment, internal and external.

Yes, but it prioritizes it in multiple ways.