Who hasn’t spilled a cup of coffee or stubbed a toe or miscalculated the approach trajectory of a hundred-thousand-pound airliner? We don’t mean to do these things. They just happen in that millisecond when we take our minds off what we’re doing.
And it turns out that in the millisecond before our minds wander, our brain does something funny: The occipital lobe and the sensorimotor cortex light up. This same pattern occurs when we close our eyes—without visual information to process, we turn inward for stimulus.
Now that we’ve mapped the pattern of inattention, we could (theoretically, according to researchers at the University of California–Davis) take corrective action before the blunder occurs. Perhaps air traffic controllers could wear helmets that monitor brain activity and deliver an electrical shock when attention lags?
Imagine a classroom full of kids with these helmets. In kids with ADHD or others prone to wandering minds, the electrical shocks could be especially strong. Wouldn’t this be a brave new world?
Horror Film PTSD
Are you traumatized by terror flicks? Maybe more than you know. Scary movies actually create a light version of post-traumatic stress disorder. This is what causes bad dreams and irrational fears of kids riding Big Wheels in hotel hallways.
And by exploring how people stop these dreams and fears, researchers are learning how we might combat more serious PTSD. For instance, researchers find that talking about a horror movie afterward reduces the occurrence of bad dreams.
