6. Conclusions:

The author's strongly supports further neuroscience related research of attention. They feel that from a neuroscience point of view, attention has been thought of as fairly vague. It has not been looked at as a set of distinct brain areas interacting with other brain systems. As a result, this has impeded the study of attention despite the benefits with which it may provide. Knowledge of the brain areas responsible for attention will bring together several other studies and experiments which have already been conducted. For example, the author's suggest that this knowledge will allow for "closer coordination" between brain imaging studies of human subjects and single cell recordings made with animal subjects. More importantly, this knowledge may also lead to new approaches in dealing with and treating several psychological disorder which may be related to the attention system. Such disorders include neglect (neglect sufferers will "forget" one side of the human body, usually the left side, see example illustrated in figure 6),, schizophrenia, closed-head injury and attention-defecit disorder. For example, it has recently been proposed that the anterior attentions system in the left brain hemisphere is functioning incorrectly in schizophrenics.

Figure 6. Neglect example. Reprinted from [ ]. Person with neglect will "forget" one side of the human body (usually the left). As a result, when told to copy a diagram ("model" in the diagram), they will copy only part of it ("patient's copy" in the diagram).