The Leslie and Susan Gonda (Goldschmied) Multidisciplinary Brain Research Center
A Living Lab
To understand how we process and prioritize information in the real world, a Bar-Ilan brain science researcher transformed a high-school classroom into a living laboratory, measuring students’ brain activity while learning lessons about attention and the brain.
Noise and the Attentive Mind
The advantages of a laboratory for neuroscience research are undeniable, primary among them the power to control specific variables and study their effect on neural processes. Yet for brain scientist Prof. Elana Zion-Golumbic of the Leslie and Susan Gonda (Goldschmied) Multidisciplinary Brain Research Center, who seeks to understand how our brains encode and filter information in noisy, multi-sensory environments, a lab was too clean and controlled for the study of how attention operates in real life. So, last year, she took her research to the place that poses perhaps the greatest challenge to attention—obviously, a high-school classroom.
“The average classroom isn’t just tough for teachers,” says Zion-Golumbic. “From a noise perspective, it’s also an incredibly difficult place for students to learn.” Not surprisingly, her results showed that the presence in class of irrelevant sounds and speech in the background negatively affected fully one hundred percent of participants. For some students, however, the effect was more substantial than others. “We don’t understand why not everyone is affected in the same way and what this impact looks like neurally,” Zion-Golumbic says. If we did, she goes on to explain, we might learn what helps some people overcome noise distractions and how to create optimal conditions for attention and learning.
Above: Students in the brain-science major at Begin High School conduct research in partnership with Prof. Elana Zion-Golumbic. Banner: Prof. Elana Zion-Golumbic’s partners in research at Begin High School.
An early takeaway from the study—set to be completed in another two years—includes the impact of “attentional capture,” or the ability of environmental stimuli to affect our attention even after their cessation, and the need for regulations in school construction that address the known impact of background noise. “Insulation for walls, doors, and windows is all readily available. When decision-makers are presented with information about the impact of noise on developing young minds, they need to ensure that schools and classrooms are optimized for attention, and that means minimizing noise.” Zion-Golumbic says. “Too often, we blame kids for not paying attention in class, when in fact we’ve placed them in situations where attention is extremely difficult to maintain. Along with providing insight into how our brains work, this research can the provide backing for critical real-world action.”
