You could be talking to someone at a party and paying attention to them, some music comes on, and now the part of the brain that’s involved in processing speech turns off, the part of the brain that’s involved in processing music turns on. How that works is not understood.

Cracking that code in vision, audition, memory, attention is the quest for the neural code, and it’s one of the key questions in science these days.

How attention is allocated is a gigantic mystery. We try to understand the neural mechanisms — how the brain actually remembers, how the brain actually perceives.

You can gain a lot by studying simple animals.

Now, why electric fish? It’s simple: if it’s interested in something, it’s paying attention, it will emit electric pulses. That made it a very nice system for studying the core mechanisms of attention.

When we’re focusing on something, we devote the resources of our brain to the task at hand. So we focus on the sensory inputs relevant to that task, and we try to quiet down the other ones.

We also discovered that the responses of the brain depended on the animal’s learning. If it’s highly practiced, minimal attention. And somehow our brains know when it’s highly practiced and can pretty much attend to something else.

We know there are problems with attention deficits and memory deficits, and we know attention is required for learning. So if we’re able to elucidate some aspect of this attention switching, then maybe we can figure out how it’s dysfunctional and repair it.