Thalamus: Our Thalamus is like a cook.  It takes in info from all the senses and then blends it with our autobiographical memory. Breakdown of the thalamus explains why trauma is primarily remembered not as a story with a beginning, middle, or end, but as isolated sensory imprints: images, sounds, physical sensations that are accompanied by intense emotions usually terror and helplessness. In normal circumstances, the thalamus also acts as a filter or gatekeeper. This makes it a central component of attention, concentration, and new learning—all of which are compromised by trauma. People with PTSD have their floodgates wide open. Lacking a filter, they are on constant sensory overload. In order to cope, they try to shut themselves down and develop tunnel vision and hyperfocus. If they can’t shut down naturally, they may enlist drugs or alcohol to block out the world. The tragedy is that the price of closing down includes filtering out sources of pleasure and joy as well.

“Under normal conditions people react to a threat with a temporary increase in their stress hormones. As soon as the threat is over, the hormones dissipate and the body returns to normal. The stress hormones of traumatized people, in contrast, take much longer to return to baseline and spike quickly and disproportionately in response to mildly stressful stimuli. The insidious effects of constantly elevated stress hormones include memory and attention problems, irritability, and sleep disorders. They also contribute to many long-term health issues, depending on which body system is most vulnerable in a particular individual.”

Securely attached kids learn the difference between situations they can control and situations where they need help. They learn that they can play an active role when faced with difficult situations. In contrast, children with histories of abuse and neglect learn that their terror, pleading, and crying do not register with their caregiver. Nothing they can do or say stops the beating or brings attention and help. In effect they’re being conditioned to give up when they face challenges later in life.

BACKGROUND: ATTENTIONNETWORKS

To the best of our knowl-edge, there has not been any other work exploringthe use of attention-based architectures for NMT

See Better Before Looking Closer: Weakly Supervised Data Augmentation Network for Fine-Grained Visual Classification

The formal definition of gymnastics, according to Oxford Dictionaries, is "Exercises developing or displaying physical agility and coordination.

Attitudes towards looking like you’re working when you aren’t are akin to school policies that require students to perform attention, as though the performance of attention may be linked to actual attention, or even learning. The pretending takes precedence over the actual doing.

One of the most exciting recent research fields in neuroscience and experimental psychology is mind-wandering – the study of spontaneous or task-unrelated thoughts. Its results have radical implications for politics, education and morality.

Stochasticity

Cities

Paying Attention

How white engineers built racist code – and why it's dangerous for black people

The Death of the Cyberflâneur

Distracted by Attention

All Technology Is Assistive

The White Cane as Technology

Electronically signed by

Cloud and Field

Infrastructural Tourism

Ferguson Documents: Officer Darren Wilson's Testimony

Thinking Clearly With Alan Jacobs

READING THE SIGNS

The Crisis of Attention Theft

Fidget Spinners

The centrality of that deal in our lives makes it outrageous that there are companies who seize our time and attention for absolutely nothing in exchange, and indeed, without consent at all—otherwise known as “attention theft.” 

The second, you have to live with for a while, before you can hear where it wants you to go. But for that, you need time and attention and effort, resources that are deeply endangered, in the era when all music is available to anyone from anywhere all the time.

Is the internet killing our brains?

"If they're looking there," he said, "we've lost them."

"Blind Orion Searching for the Rising Sun"

“Almost any experience is improved by paying full attention to it,” Ms. McGonigal said. “Attention is one way your brain decides, ‘Is this interesting? Is this worthwhile? Is this fun?’ ”It’s the reason television shows we tweet through feel tiresome and books we pick up and put down and pick up again never seem to end. The more we allow ourselves to be distracted from a particular activity, the more we feel the need to be distracted. Paying attention pays dividends

Once a story has sustained our attention long enough, we may begin to emotionally resonate with story’s characters. Narratologists call this “transportation,” and you experience this when your palms sweat as James Bond trades blows with a villain on top of a speeding train.

Any Hollywood writer will tell you that attention is a scarce resource. Movies, TV shows, and books always include “hooks” that make you turn the page, stay on the channel through the commercial, or keep you in a theater seat. Scientists liken attention to a spotlight. We are only able to shine it on a narrow area. If that area seems less interesting than some other area, our attention wanders.

The problem, of course, is that most people don’t have very good control over their attention. Part of this is due to human nature, shaped by evolution: Our forbearers who just focused on the reflection of sunlight in the water—they got chomped by predators. But those who were constantly vigilant—they lived. And today we are constantly bombarded with stimuli that the brain has not evolved to handle. So gaining more control over attention one way or another is really crucial, whether it’s through the practice of mindfulness, for instance, or through gratitude practices, where we count our blessings.

Another region is the frontal regions of the prefrontal cortex—areas involved in controlling attention. Again, this should be no surprise: They’re focusing their attention in their meditation, so they’re getting more control over it, and they’re strengthening its neural basis.

You can use the mind to change the brain to change the mind for the better. This is known as “self-directed neuroplasticity.” Neuroplasticity refers to the malleable nature of the brain, and it’s constant, ongoing. Self-directed neuroplasticity means doing it with clarity and skillfulness and intention. The key to it is a controlled use of attention. Attention is like a spotlight, to be sure, shining on things within our awareness. But it’s also like vacuum cleaner, sucking whatever it rests upon into the brain, for better or worse.

Attention: According to psychologist and philosopher William James, attention "is the taking possession of the mind, in clear and vivid form, of one out of what may seem several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thoughts…It implies withdrawal from some things in order to deal effectively with others." Many compare attention to a spotlight, which makes certain information from the inside or outside world more available to conscious awareness, while filtering out less useful information. Attention is limited, in that it can only hold a finite quantity of information in mind for a limited period of time, and selective, in that it orients to information that is deemed important in a given moment.

why may we not divide the hours of the day among different kinds of study, especially as variety itself refreshes and recruits the mind, while on the contrary, nothing is more annoying than to continue at one uniform labor? Accordingly writing is relieved by reading, and the tedium of reading itself is relieved by changes of subject.