The Neurobiology of Attention: How Views, Valence, and Meditation Shape What We SeeExplore the fascinating neuroscience behind attentional selection — why your brain chooses to focus on certain things while ignoring others, driven by a hierarchical competition influenced by physical saliency, personal goals, emotions, and past experiences.In this video, we break down:

• Top-down vs. Bottom-up Attention: Goal-directed control (dorsal network: IPS, FEF) vs. automatic capture by salient stimuli (ventral network: TPJ).
• The Biased Competition Model: How attention amplifies relevant signals and suppresses distractions.
• Affective Influences: The amygdala's role in valence and "wanting," value-driven attentional capture via dopamine in the striatum, and how reward history hijacks focus.
• Predictive Processing: The brain as a prediction machine using priors and schemas to weight precision in attention.
• Modular Mind & Meditation: Competing sub-personalities in the Global Workspace, pruning counterfactual thinking, DMN suppression, dopaminergic reinforcement of stillness, and building incentive salience for present-moment awareness.

• Dorsal & Ventral Attention Networks
• Incentive Salience & Dopamine
• Default Mode Network (DMN)
• Many-to-(N)one Theory
• Hierarchical Generative Models

Vivid Analogy: Imagine your mind as a noisy marketplace full of shouting vendors (hunger, anxiety, ambition). Meditation lowers the volume, rewards silence, and eventually trains the "manager" to prefer peaceful quiet as the new default.Perfect for anyone interested in cognitive neuroscience, mindfulness, predictive coding, or rewiring habitual attention patterns. Subscribe for deep dives into mind, brain, meditation, and consciousness.Timestamps:00:00 - Introduction to Attentional Selection01:45 - Top-Down and Bottom-Up Systems04:20 - Biased Competition and Gain Control06:30 - Affective Filters: Valence, Amygdala, and Value-Driven Capture09:10 - Predictive Processing, Priors, and Precision Weighting12:00 - Modular Theory of Mind and the Global Workspace14:30 - How Meditation Recalibrates the System17:45 - Marketplace Analogy Explained19:20 - Conclusion: Cultivating Stillness as DefaultKey Concepts Covered:What pulls your attention most in daily life — goals, emotions, or habits? Share in the comments!#Neuroscience #Attention #Mindfulness #Meditation #PredictiveProcessing #DefaultModeNetwork #Amygdala #Dopamine #CognitiveScience #BrainScience #ModularMind