People who pay attention tend to leapfrog over their peers who half notice practical knowledge focused people learn daily.
Paying attention awakens your brain through arousing a symphony of cell synchronization. The grass grows greener, birds harmonize their well wishes and skills integrate to create high performance minds.
In contrast, unfocused workers miss important cues that could move them forward. 
Interestingly, researchers at Northwestern University have unlocked mysteries about how attention improves the perception of incoming sensory stimulation.
An alert mind lays out the red carpet so that neurons produce stronger brain activity, as if the stimulus itself was stronger.
The Northwestern study, measured of brain activity through EEGs which showed how attention actually alters brain activity.
They found that attention acts like a skilled facilitator who orchestrates a large set of unruly voices at a roundtable so that ideas flow together toward one shared goal.
Did you know that brain cells – in an attentive mode -- synchronize more precisely to the facilitator’s cues.
Check out the Dec 17th article, "Attention Induces Synchronization-Based Response Gain in Steady-State Visual Evoked Potentials," which will be published in Nature Neuroscience.
Participants wore a cap with 64 electrodes to record their brain waves. The brain waves fluctuated in sync with flickering stimuli that appeared on a computer screen. Two focused patterns were projected, while subjects were asked to pay attention to one and ignore the other. Sometimes the focus patterns were quite dim. At other times they were clearly bright.
EEG responses from the participants showed more brain activity for brighter stimuli, as expected, but responses also varied depending on attention. The patterns of these brain waves allowed the investigators to obtain a thorough description of how attention altered neural function.
The study affirmed that attention can make a stimulus stand out by making brain responses to the stimulus more effective as attention guides our behavior. Paying attention?
Ellen, I find this interesting. Though the researchers have a good start on this issue I sense there are still components which they have not yet considered, such as length of roundtable and amount of new information to be processed, the affects of sitting and listening [as in lectures] and the opportunities available to interact. In a sense, you would have to have a plan to process so much information because as you've posted here before, our working memory can only absorb so much before spilling it out. I might make a quick graphic organizer which includes participants, new ideas introduced, others' reactions, and my take-aways. In this way I would process in few words the main components presented during the session. Since I am a spatial person, I can process ideas best by graphically organizing. Thoughts?
Posted by: Robyn McMaster | December 27, 2006 9:14 AM | Permalink to Comment