Sorry, could you repeat the question?
Filtering out distractions is something your Back Page correspondent struggles with.
Sucks at, frankly.
An ardent work-from-homer (a pre-pandemic early adopter) with previously documented misophonia and misokinesia, I’m writing this from my local library to escape loud and relentless roadworks near my house and the even louder and relentlesser pinging of colleagues’ devices at the office.
I learn from this new paper in the Journal of Neuroscience that we can learn to suppress distractions but that the mechanism is unclear. I read on in hope.
To find out more, this team from Leipzig and Amsterdam took 24 participants and hooked them up to EEGs with a task involving visual distractions to see in what circumstances and at which point the brain sends a stimulus straight to voicemail.
Participants had to find a particular object on a screen in a field of similar objects in which a distractor would pop up, sometimes in a frequent and therefore “learned” (high probability) position and sometimes more randomly (low probability). Eye tracking was used to measure how much the distractor distracted the participant from the task at hand.
They found a clear signal of reduced distraction and better performance when the annoying thing appeared at high-probability locations. Thanks to the incredibly fine timing of their instruments, they could see the brain acting to suppress the distracting stimulus within the very earliest moments of its appearing.
“We found consistent evidence that learning alters the early responses of the visual system to these stimuli,” co-author Dr Norman Forschack told media.
“These findings show that our brain doesn’t just react automatically to striking stimuli, but can also learn through experience to filter out distractions efficiently. Interestingly, we also observed reduced visual processing for target stimuli when they appeared in the position where the distractor had been frequently shown.”
Unfortunately, none of this really helps with my specific problems.
The pattern of laptop and phone notifications or bursts of concrete-cutting cannot be learned, and today I’ve traded in those distractions for equally unpredictable eating noises, loud whispering of study buddies, joyous scampering of toddlers and the hiss of music from someone’s earbuds.
The next Back Page from this scribe will be written from solitary confinement in a padded cell.
Send highly concentrated story tips to penny@medicalrepublic.com.au.
