Try to focus your attention on the exact center of your visual field right now. Notice how the seemingly straightforward task reveals systematic insta

On Attention as the Management of Electromagnetic Field Lines

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2024-12-14 01:30:05

Try to focus your attention on the exact center of your visual field right now. Notice how the seemingly straightforward task reveals systematic instabilities: wavering, drifting, and transforming in characteristic ways. These effects aren’t random noise; they suggest an underlying physical mechanism that shapes how attention behaves more broadly.

I’ve been developing a model at QRI that conceptualizes attention through electromagnetic field dynamics. To visualize this, I created a simulation showing how electric field lines emerge from weighted combinations of resonant modes in a square plate. In this video, I manipulate the relative weight, temporal frequency, and phase of these resonant modes:

The story of harmonic waves in the brain is getting more interesting by the day. Building on Lehar’s early insights, Atasoy’s work on connectome-specific harmonic waves (2016), Johnson’s explorations of the implications (2018), Luppi’s contrast between anesthetics and psychedelics (2022), and more, we’ve now seen stunning confirmation of these ideas in Joana Cabral’s recent work with single-slice rodent recordings. The evidence keeps pointing to harmonic resonance as a fundamental organizing principle of neural activity. So let’s take this seriously and see what it tells us about the strangeness of attention.

Think of the “control parameters” for attention as the precise timing, weighting, and phase relationships between different electric resonant modes. We seem to have some degree of volitional control over these parameters, though this control is inherently indirect.

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