Science Monday: Football fixtures filter, aka 'irrelevance filter' found in the brain

Proving that occasionally scientific studies which have actual relevance and use to everyday life are performed, scientists from Sweden have found that there's an area in the brain used to filter relevant from irrelevant information. Presumably, what's deemed as relevant and irrelevant changes from person to person - I suspect I've got some kind of mis-wiring which has led my brain to always filter the answers to "Hi, what's your name?" question into irrelevant information. It's the same mis-wiring that leads directions to places to be immediately filtered into the same section. Very tiresome.

Subjects with superior filters had more activity recorded in their basal ganglia when they were asked to target an image on a computer, when they were warned there would also be distracting and irrelevant pictures simultaneously displayed.

The study has shed some light into conditions like ADHD, which causes people to have difficulty with attention, possibly because everything is being sent to their 'working memory' area, and it becomes overloaded as a result. Conversely, it was shown that people with exceptional memories had an exceptional filter.

[via BBC News]