Subliminal Messages Drive the Mind to Distraction: Scientific American

Subliminal Messages Drive the Mind to Distraction
What you don't "see" may distract you anyway
ByCiara Curtin
TROUBLE FOCUSING?Could be subliminal messages playing with your mind. A new study showsthat images people don't even realize they're seeing can break theirconcentration.
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A new study shows that subconscious signals interfere withconcentration, causing people to become easily distracted and falter oneven the simplest of tasks.
When people concentrate, they focus on the task at hand andfilter out information irrelevant to what they are doing. A new report,however, published in this week's Science, says that sometimesunrelated info slips through, even if it is not consciously processed."Our results contradict the general view," says lead author YoshiakiTsushima, a graduate student in psychology at Boston University.
Tsushima and his colleagues performed a series of experimentsthat show how bits of irrelevant information sneak past people'sattention-focusing mechanism. Study participants were told to report thepair of numbers in a string of six letters and two numerals that theysaw on a computer screen, and to ignore the dots bouncing around them.Some of the dots moved about randomly and others traveled in fixeddirections.
Sounds simple. However, ignoring the dancing dots turned out tobe easier said than done. The participants did well on their task whenless or more than 5 percent of the dots moved in specific patterns, buttheir success rate dropped off at around 5 percent. This is because,researchers say, at 5 percent the pattern was apparently below thethreshold of conscious awareness, but the subjects still picked it upsubconsciously. "Invisible signals distract," Tsushima explains.The subjects did not pick up on any pattern in movement below 5 percent.In one fixed-direction pattern above 5 percent, they noticed the dotsbut were able to ignore them.
In one of the experiments, the researchers measured participants'brain activity during the computer test. They primarily focused on thevisual cortex and the lateral prefrontal cortex, because those are theareas of the brain that filter irrelevant stimuli. Their goal: todetermine how subliminal signals, which can be distracting, areprocessed. When 5 percent of the dots moved coherently, the visualcortex was activated, though the signal was computed onlysubconsciously: the lateral prefrontal cortex was not activated. Thereason, researchers say, is that the signal was able to sneak by thatattention-focusing part of the brain, thus allowing subjects to bedistracted; the subliminal signal was too weak for the lateralprefrontal cortex to pick up and block.
When people are distracted, they have fewer resources to allocateto what they are doing and, as a result, their performance suffers, thescientists say. They speculate that stronger messages prompt thelateral prefrontal cortex to jump into action, batting back thepotentially distracting signals.
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imtired88 at 04:44 PM on 04/10/09
I am struggling with this, I can be sitting on a computer next to other computers next to me with others sitting next to me and I will not be able to control my eyes from looking at them, there movements distract me and I am not able to focus on what I need to focus on! If anyone has ever heard of this and can help me in ANY way please send me an email at joahladder88@yahoo.com Thanks