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Paying close attention to something:
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Not that easy, is it?
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It's because our attention is pulled
in so many different directions at a time,
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and it's in fact pretty impressive
if you can stay focused.
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Many people think that attention
is all about what we are focusing on,
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but it's also about what information
our brain is trying to filter out.
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There are two ways
you direct your attention.
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First, there's overt attention.
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In overt attention,
you move your eyes towards something
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in order to pay attention to it.
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Then there's covert attention.
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In covert attention,
you pay attention to something,
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but without moving your eyes.
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Think of driving for a second.
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Your overt attention,
your direction of the eyes,
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are in front,
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but that's your covert attention
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which is constantly scanning
the surrounding area,
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where you don't actually look at them.
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I'm a computational neuroscientist,
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and I work on cognitive
brain machine interfaces,
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or bringing together
the brain and the computer.
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I love brain patterns.
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Brain patterns are important for us
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because based on them
we can build models for the computers,
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and based on these models
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computers can recognize
how well our brain functions.
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And if it doesn't function well,
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then these computers themselves
can be used as assistive devices
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for therapies.
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But that also means something,
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because choosing the wrong patterns
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will give us the wrong models
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and therefore the wrong therapies.
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Right?
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In case of attention,
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the fact that we can
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shift our attention not only by our eyes
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but also by thinking --
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that makes covert attention
an interesting model for computers.
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So I wanted to know
what are the brainwave patterns
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when you look overtly
or when you look covertly.
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I set up an experiment for that.
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In this experiment
there are two flickering squares,
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one of them flickering
at a slower rate than the other one.
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Depending on which of these flickers
you are paying attention to,
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certain parts of your brain
will start resonating in the same rate
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as that flickering rate.
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So by analyzing your brain signals,
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we can track where exactly
you are watching
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or you are paying attention to.
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So to see what happens in your brain
when you pay overt attention,
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I asked people to look directly
in one of the squares
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and pay attention to it.
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In this case, not surprisingly,
we saw that these flickering squares
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appeared in their brain signals
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which was coming
from the back of their head,
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which is responsible for the processing
of your visual information.
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But I was really interested
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to see what happens in your brain
when you pay covert attention.
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So this time I asked people
to look in the middle of the screen
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and without moving their eyes,
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to pay attention
to either of these squares.
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When we did that,
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we saw that both of these flickering rates
appeared in their brain signals,
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but interestingly,
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only one of them,
which was paid attention to,
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had stronger signals,
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so there was something in the brain
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which was handling this information
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so that thing in the brain was basically
the activation of the frontal area.
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The front part of your brain
is responsible
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for higher cognitive functions as a human.
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The frontal part,
it seems that it works as a filter
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trying to let information come in
only from the right flicker
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that you are paying attention to
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and trying to inhibit the information
coming from the ignored one.
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The filtering ability of the brain
is indeed a key for attention,
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which is missing in some people,
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for example in people with ADHD.
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So a person with ADHD
cannot inhibit these distractors,
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and that's why they can't focus
for a long time on a single task.
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But what if this person
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could play a specific computer game
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with his brain connected to the computer,
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and then train his own brain
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to inhibit these distractors?
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Well, ADHD is just one example.
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We can use these cognitive
brain machine interfaces
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for many other cognitive fields.
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It was just a few years ago
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that my grandfather had a stroke,
and he lost complete ability to speak.
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He could understand everybody,
but there was no way to respond,
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even not writing
because he was illiterate.
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So he passed away in silence.
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I remember thinking at that time:
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What if we could have a computer
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which could speak for him?
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Now, after years that I am in this field,
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I can see that this might be possible.
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Imagine if we can find brainwave patterns
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when people think
about images or even letters,
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like the letter A generates
a different brainwave pattern
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than the letter B, and so on.
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Could a computer one day
communicate for people who can't speak?
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What if a computer
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can help us understand
the thoughts of a person in a coma?
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We are not there yet,
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but pay close attention.
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We will be there soon.
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Thank you.
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(Applause)