"Kids with ADHD are easily distracted. Barn owls are not.
So a team at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore is studying these highly focused predatory birds in an effort to understand the brain circuits that control attention.
[...]
Several years ago, Mysore and Eric Knudsen, a professor at Stanford, identified a system in the owl midbrain that appears to control which stimulus to ignore. Now, Mysore’s lab is trying to understand exactly how that system works.
“One of the coolest things has been the identification of a particular group of neurons in the midbrain that we think are the ones controlling distractor suppression,” he says.
In other words, these seem to be the precise neurons that tell a brain when to start ignoring sights and sounds that aren’t important at that moment.
That could be critical to understanding why people with attention disorders have so much trouble ignoring distractions, Mysore says."
^^^ I think what this article is trying to say . . . WAIT, is that a marmoset over there? 😵
So a team at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore is studying these highly focused predatory birds in an effort to understand the brain circuits that control attention.
[...]
Several years ago, Mysore and Eric Knudsen, a professor at Stanford, identified a system in the owl midbrain that appears to control which stimulus to ignore. Now, Mysore’s lab is trying to understand exactly how that system works.
“One of the coolest things has been the identification of a particular group of neurons in the midbrain that we think are the ones controlling distractor suppression,” he says.
In other words, these seem to be the precise neurons that tell a brain when to start ignoring sights and sounds that aren’t important at that moment.
That could be critical to understanding why people with attention disorders have so much trouble ignoring distractions, Mysore says."
^^^ I think what this article is trying to say . . . WAIT, is that a marmoset over there? 😵
