Focus: Attention Science: Focusing in on the Mechanisms Underlying Attention

My background was in signal processing and communications, a field that provides us with tools to analyze the process of information flow between communicating devices. My wife (Dr. Monika Jadi, Assistant Professor of Psychiatry and Neuroscience, Yale School of Medicine) and I began our careers at Motorola. At the time, it was the new cellular technology boom. As it happens, once you’ve developed the system, after a while it goes into maintenance mode where you’re satisfying the needs of the customers. That’s when we became disillusioned with working in the industry, so my wife and I started thinking about going back to graduate school. Initially we thought about doing a PhD in electrical engineering, but then we started reading popular science books about the brain and we found a lot of parallels between our background in electrical engineering and how one can study the brain as a system of communicating devices. We found similarities between how neurons in the brain are really communicating devices that talk to each other and how ideas that were developed in signal processing and communications can translate to neuroscience and be applied to understanding how our brains function. There are different levels at which one can study the brain, for example, the molecular and cellular levels. We were interested in studying the brain at the electrical level—how neurons talk to each other. That language is similar to how digital devices talk to each other in terms of how they send bits of information to each other, either “one”s or “zero”s. Neurons talk through electrical pulses known as spikes. We can think of a spike as a “one” and the absence of a spike as a “zero.” That’s what got us interested in neuroscience and we decided to quit our jobs and go to graduate school.school