The Biological Spotlight: Posner's Attention Study

Your brain is lying to you about what you're actually seeing right now.

I discovered this reading Posner's groundbreaking 1980 study on attention, and it completely

changed how I understand my own mind. When you look at something,

your eyes don't just passively receive information. Your brain actively decides what deserves

attention before you're even conscious of it. Posner proved this with a simple

experiment. He showed people a cue on one side of a screen,

then flashed a target. When the cue correctly predicted where the target would

appear, people responded 50 milliseconds faster. Fifty milliseconds. That's how long