Science & Technology

The brain switches back and forth between two versions of reality

By T.K. Randall
October 27, 2026

Image: AI-generated (Midjourney) What are you focusing on right now? You may think the answer is obvious, but what you think you are focusing on and what your brain is prioritizing may not be the same thing.

New research by scientists at the University of California, Berkeley has sought to understand how the brain switches back and forth between conscious and unconscious experience up to 15 times a second - filtering out some things and prioritizing others with remarkable efficiency.

On a daily basis, we are being constantly bombarded with huge amounts of information.

To function, the brain needs to decide what things we need to focus on and which we can ignore.For example, if you wear glasses, these are sitting right in front of your eyes, yet as you work on your computer or read a book, you tend not to be consciously aware of them most of the time.

"At any moment, only some of the brain's activity reaches conscious awareness, while the rest is processed without ever being experienced," the researchers wrote.

"How this division arises is among the most basic unsolved problems in neuroscience."

"Identifying the mechanisms that orchestrate these transitions, and determining why only some temporal segments become available to awareness, will be essential for understanding how temporal population dynamics give rise to conscious perception."

Source: Mail Online

Tags: Brain