Your brain also blinks

Right now you are reading these words first of all because your eyes are open, if you blink or close your eyes, obviously you will not be able to see the information.

But do you know that your brain also blinks? That is, you have your eyes open but your brain does not see. This concept is known as attentional blink, this phenomenon was named for the first time in this article

Do you want to check it? In the following exercise letters will appear one after another and in between 1 or 2 numbers. At the end of the entire sequence you have to put those numbers you have seen.

How did it go? Out of 10 times, how many did you get right?

In this article they did a similar exercise, to 40 participants. And then they divided them into 2 groups:

• 17 went to a 3-month retreat and meditated between 10-12 hours a day
• 23 meditated 20 minutes each day, 1 week before the test

What did they see after 3 months in each participant?

• 17 / 17 improved in the attentional blink test
• 16 / 23 improved in the attentional blink test

The paper talks about an improvement of 19% (out of every 100 times, they only failed the exercise 19 times), but of course those are average improvements of the group, it also comments that 3 did not guess almost ever.

Regardless of the improvement in the exercise, there is something very interesting to highlight and that is the neuronal voltage graph.

The EEG measures the electrical activity of the brain through electrodes that detect the voltages generated by neurons. It is measured in microVolts.

When the meditators repeated the test after the retreat, it was seen that their brain generated less electrical activity when seeing the first number. This does not mean that they processed the stimulus worse, but quite the opposite: they processed it more efficiently, using fewer mental resources, which left them more capacity to detect the second number.

With meditation their mind had become "stronger".

Because faced with the same stimulus, they use fewer resources, that is, neurons coordinate better. You can try meditating and see if you have improved your attentional blink in a few months.

At attention-read we have observed something similar to this drop in neuronal response, when you train under this idea:

A lot of information in a short time

The following happens, at first memorizing 4-5 words in a second seems like an impossible task, and you notice that your brain is making a lot of effort. In fact you feel how quickly the words vanish from your memory. We haven't measured this yet, but we have the hypothesis that that effort you feel, would show an increase in neuronal voltage.

The interesting thing happens when you have been training for several weeks, and it is no effort for you to memorize 4-5 words in 1 second. That decrease in effort is that your neurons are coordinating better. Thanks to that adaptation now you can make it more difficult for your brain, and increase the number of words to memorize or lower the exposure time. You are literally holding information with your brain, and your neurons adapt like your muscles.

With these exercises your mind becomes "stronger".

And it not only happens with words, but with any type of information such as numbers, day-to-day facts, etc. If you run sprints every week, then it will cost you less to climb the stairs. The same thing happens to your brain.

These are hypotheses, but the truth is that training with these exercises is an experience that hooks. First because you are overcoming your limits and second because you cannot think about anything else during the exercise and that relaxes a lot.

You can do the course attention-read.com where you will put your mind to the limit. Equally if you do not want to enter, let that not be an excuse not to start training your brain or meditate, you are going to feel much better.

Train your mind.