full transcript

From the Ted Talk by Amishi Jha: How to tame your wandering mind

Unscramble the Blue Letters

So what we wanted to do is look at this brain-wave component of face detection, the N170, and see if it changed at all as a function of where our participants were paying attention — to the scene or the face. And here's what we found. We found that when they paid attention to the face, the N170 was larger. And when they paid aetoittnn to the scene, as you can see in red, it was smaller. And that gap you see between the blue and red lines is petrty pweforul. What it tells us is that attention, which is really the only thing that changed, since the igmeas they viewed were identical in both cases — attention changes ptepciroen. And it does so very fast. Within 170 milliseconds of actually seeing a face. In our follow-up seiduts, we wanted to see what would happen, how could we pturreb or diminish this eecfft. And our hunch was that if you put people in a very stressful environment, if you distract them with disturbing, negative images, images of suffering and violence — sort of like what you might see on the news, unfortunately — that doing this might actually affect their attention. And that's indeed what we found.

Open Cloze

So what we wanted to do is look at this brain-wave component of face detection, the N170, and see if it changed at all as a function of where our participants were paying attention — to the scene or the face. And here's what we found. We found that when they paid attention to the face, the N170 was larger. And when they paid _________ to the scene, as you can see in red, it was smaller. And that gap you see between the blue and red lines is ______ ________. What it tells us is that attention, which is really the only thing that changed, since the ______ they viewed were identical in both cases — attention changes __________. And it does so very fast. Within 170 milliseconds of actually seeing a face. In our follow-up _______, we wanted to see what would happen, how could we _______ or diminish this ______. And our hunch was that if you put people in a very stressful environment, if you distract them with disturbing, negative images, images of suffering and violence — sort of like what you might see on the news, unfortunately — that doing this might actually affect their attention. And that's indeed what we found.

Solution

  1. images
  2. studies
  3. pretty
  4. effect
  5. perturb
  6. attention
  7. perception
  8. powerful

Original Text

So what we wanted to do is look at this brain-wave component of face detection, the N170, and see if it changed at all as a function of where our participants were paying attention — to the scene or the face. And here's what we found. We found that when they paid attention to the face, the N170 was larger. And when they paid attention to the scene, as you can see in red, it was smaller. And that gap you see between the blue and red lines is pretty powerful. What it tells us is that attention, which is really the only thing that changed, since the images they viewed were identical in both cases — attention changes perception. And it does so very fast. Within 170 milliseconds of actually seeing a face. In our follow-up studies, we wanted to see what would happen, how could we perturb or diminish this effect. And our hunch was that if you put people in a very stressful environment, if you distract them with disturbing, negative images, images of suffering and violence — sort of like what you might see on the news, unfortunately — that doing this might actually affect their attention. And that's indeed what we found.

Frequently Occurring Word Combinations

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ngrams of length 3

collocation frequency
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Important Words

  1. affect
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  30. perception
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  41. suffering
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  44. violence
  45. wanted