Attention

Attention is the process by which consciousness focuses on something. It means to restrict what one thinks, perceives, or does, to one thing of the many that can be thought, perceived, or done. Listening to a person in a social gathering where there are many people talking is a kind of attention. Other kinds are, for example, thinking only in a problem that needs to be solved, or keeping busy in some type of manual activity.

Attention can be voluntary or involuntary. In the latter case, it is generally drawn by external stimulation of the senses: a sound, a light, can bring attention to bear. The stimulus needs to be new or experiment a sudden variation in intensity. No attention is given involuntarily to a stimulus that is intermittent or continuous, but with the same intensity. Some types of activity can be carried out without needing the person's attention, as driving or knitting.

The need for attention arises from the fact that the human mind has a limited ability to take care of more than one activity simultaneously. Research has been done on the subject of which and how many activities can be done simultaneously. For example, a person was asked to listen at the same time to two messages, one of them having to be repeated while listening. The conclusion was that the person could not pick up the content of the other message. Experiments like this led to the theory that, while senses can gather a great amount of information, the brain can process only a limited quantity at a time.

It seems that different parts of the brain can work in parallel because it is more easy to combine tasks when they are of dissimilar kinds as, for example, listening to a verbal message and reading. Complexity of the task has also a part to play--if the reading is of difficult comprehension, the person will pay heed to nothing else.

Recent experiments suggest that a filter may be applied to sensory input before the brain process it. This filter may be related with the relevance of the input. A person listening consciously to a verbal message may comprehend a second message if it is relevant to the person. Theorists differ, however, on the importance that they assign to the analysis previous to conscious attention. Some theorists think that a full analysis occurs before attention, while others think that attention is involved from the beginning of the perceptual process.

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