Interviews: Understanding Attention

As part of our ongoing research we have been conducting a series of interviews and drawing insights from diverse fields such as anthropology, neuroscience and environmental sustainability. Here are some reflections from Zoi's interview with neuroscientist Nahid Zokaei, a research fellow at the Oxford Centre for Human Brain Activity, whose research focuses on understanding memory and attention.

A lot of my work in dance and education focuses on how we train and work with attention, and my discussion with Nahid proved a rich resource for understanding deeper what I may be instinctively tapping into. It also added a layer to my articulation and methodological development of tools for training attention.

Attention is about selecting and prioritizing the place of focus within templates of encrypted memories that are non-directional. The passage of attention remains a very interesting field of experimentation within dance. Since the capacity of our attention is limited, how can dancers learn to train and track attention?

And how does training attention consequently affect the perception of both movers and viewers/audience?

Short- and long-term memories serve as a scaffold to our cognition. Therefore, if we train the interactions between attention, memory and cognition with a different, heightened quality, perhaps the templates might evolve and guide our actions in a new way.

Brain oscillations follow a certain rhythm and each person has his/her optimal frequency according to which the tracking of attention might be made more accessible. Interesting correlations can therefore be drawn between certain effects of sound environments with functions of our nervous systems and perceptual apparatuses.