Attention

Professor Bruno van Swinderen: exploring the origins of consciousness

Professor Bruno van Swinderen is studying awareness but could the real target be consciousness?

Podcast: Pay attention! How your brain decides what to focus on

Dr Anthony Harris is an ARC Discovery Early Career Researcher Award Fellow at the Queensland Brain Institute and an expert on human attention. He discusses what goes on in the brain when we are giving something our full attention, and breaks down whether or not multitasking is a myth.

Fruit flies could open new avenues to better understanding attention and sleep.

Fruit fly offers new insights into attention and sleep

Published on: 27 November 2020

The ability to study sleep and attention in fruit flies could lead to a greater understanding of these potentially related phenomena in humans.

A spotlight brings into focus the distal dendrites of a neocortical layer 5 pyramidal neuron (gold) amongst a sea of cholinergic axons (green), an allegory of the transformation of dendritic computations in the output neurons of the neocortex produced by the optogenetic activation of the cholinergic modulatory system. Artwork by Lee Fletcher.

How the brain enables us to rapidly focus attention

Published on: 27 December 2018

QBI researchers have discovered a key mechanism in the brain that may underlie our ability to rapidly focus attention.

Paying attention helps your brain process what it can't see

Published on: 2 August 2018

Paying attention to a location helps the brain to process not just what you can see there, but also what you can’t – suggesting that attention and awareness are controlled by different pathways in the brain.