Lesson 6: The Attention Dilemma
How the human brain manages attention--and why autism is ultimately an attention disorder.
Spoiler alert. Autism is an attention disorder.
A rather subtle attention disorder, it turns out. Autism disrupts the natural operation of consciousness activity in the human brain by altering the way the brain decides what to pay attention to next.
If we want to understand autism—if we want to understand the neural activity that embodies autism (or ADHD for that matter)—we need to first learn a few things about attention. Especially the attention dilemma, an existential challenge that every mind in the universe must confront:
What should I focus on now?
A dilemma is a problem with no perfect solution. Dilemmas always involves a trade-off. You can have more of this, but less of that. Take more of that, you’ll get less of this.
If your attention is on one object it can’t be on another object at the same time. If you’re focused on the Honda in front of you, you can’t simultaneously pay attention to the Toyota rolling up behind you. If you’re listening to the music playing on the diner’s jukebox, you can’t simultaneously listen to the music playing on your iPhone. Your brain must decide, at every moment, the most urgent object, event, person, or idea to focus on.
Attention is a precious resource. Just ask advertisers, who pay millions of dollars per second for Super Bowl ads. The attention dilemma plagues every mind on the ladder of purpose, no matter how low or high. A microscopic bacterium can swim toward a jot of food or away from a toxin. Not both at once. A fruitfly can pay attention to a potential mate or a definite predator—not both simultaneously. The visual What module in your brain can only recognize one object at a time. It can try to identify that orange ball right here or that hairy, clawed thing over there.
Every mind must choose its attention wisely. Solving the attention dilemma is one of the most vital, life-preserving activities your brain performs. If you focus on your smelly socks while someone swings a bat at your head, you’ve chosen unwisely.
Consider the full challenge of the attention dilemma in a human mind: your brain boasts 86 billion neurons. Every one of your neurons at every moment is paying attention to its own thing. Depending on how one chooses to count, there are tens of thousands of neural circuits in your brain. Each circuit enjoys its own focus. These neural circuits combine to form more than a dozen modules in your brain, like your visual What module. Each module pay attention to its own focus, too.
How do three distinct layers of mental activity, including oodles of neurons, circuits, and modules, instantly drop whatever they’re doing and pay attention to the one crucial thing your mind deems most urgent right now? And how can this mass convergence of attention happen without a centralized decider in the brain?
No “boss module” controls global attention management in your mind. No one module monitors what the other modules are attending to and chooses which module’s focus should be adopted by the entire mind. The human brain is profoundly decentralized. Your entire mind, working holistically (collectively) across all its modules simultaneously, must somehow figure out what to pay attention to next.
What decentralized mechanism solves the attention dilemma in the human brain?
Consciousness.
The solution to the attention dilemma in third-rung minds is consciousness. Consciousness is a sophisticated attention management activity with many moving parts. In autistic brains, one of these parts is broken: the Why module, which plays a central and defining role in resolving the attention dilemma in the human brain.
Previous LESSON: Lesson 5: The Ladder of Purpose
Next LESSON: Lesson 7: Autism and the Supermind Part I: Shared Attention
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