Hi, my name is Dr. Amishi Jha, and I’m the director of Contemplative Neuroscience for the Mindfulness Research and Practice Initiative, and associate professor of psychology at the University of Miami.
I’m a neuroscientist, and what I’d love to share with you today is a little about the brain science of attention. In this series we’ll be exploring topics of attention and how they relate to mindfulness training—all useful tools for us to use in our own lives.
In my lab, which studies the brain basis of attention, we use a variety of brain-imaging techniques—functional MRI, brain-wave recordings and behavioral measures—to really test how attention works. And we’ve learned a great deal.
I’d say, most prominently, we’ve learned that attention is an incredibly powerful system. In fact, attention developed because the brain encountered a very big problem: there’s far more information in the world than the brain could possibly ever fully analyze. So, to solve for this information overload, over the course of evolution, the solution became the brain’s attention system.
Understanding Your Brain’s Attention System Watch the Video: How Attention Functions Within the BrainAttention allows us to notice and select a subset of information from all that is…
