Emotions direct our attention

For much of the history of psychological research has considered emotions as a distraction, a kind of statistical noise in the study of cognitive processes.However, from a little over twenty years a handful of researchers decided to venture into the exciting (irritant / loving / threatening) world of emotions. "Today, the study of emotions is in, so you have to stick to get you financed," says Luis Carretié, one of the pioneers of emotion research in Spain.
Carretié, professor of neuroscience at the Autonomous University of Madrid, offers a graphic example of how emotions may influence our perception "in the field when we confuse a branch with a snake our reaction is to jump. It is more important than the accuracy rate: fast and wrong better avoid potential danger it right too late. " The excitement of the example is fear: the most primitive part of our brain identifies the serpent in milliseconds (or branch that you think) as a threat and, in milliseconds, the nervous system sends the order to escape.
The individual can quickly detect a hazard is more likely to survive and transmit to their offspring, for example, peripheral vision, where vision is more blurred and fuzzy. As a result, makes evolutionary sense that a primary emotion-in this case, the fear, but love or hunger-conditional perception.
In essence, there are two types of care-as-Carretié: endogenous (when, for example, read a book) and exogenous, which is conditioned by an external stimulus. Potentially distracting stimuli are countless but our brain has a "relevance detector" which detects whether the external stimulus deserves attention or not (we can ignore an ant but surely react if it is a spider). If they exceed a certain "threshold of attention" is "blind to the distractions," says Carretié. Therefore, we read the book, focused on endogenous attention.