Dr. Catherine Fassbender discusses 3 important regions of the brain that must be connected to attend well. Without good connectivity between various regions of the brain, even simple tasks like driving can become too difficult. Mental Processing: You are driving in a car talking to your child. Soon you arrive at home and you think to yourself, "Did I stop at that stop sign?" You were driving so subconsciously that you did not even know if you had stopped at the stop sign! How do we do that, and still arrive at home safely? You used your cerebellum to drive. The cerebellum actually is VERY accurate, capable and energy efficient. Subconsciously you were attending to a task that was familiar and 'easy' for you (driving home) with little conscious thought, so little you can hardly remember it. That freed up your conscious part of your brain to engage in conversation or listening to the music.
Moving into Conscious Mental Processing: Let's look at conscious versus subconscious thought. You are driving in a car talking to your child and you see some red tail lights in front of you. Immediately you drop the conversation, mid sentence, without even completing your thought, and begin paying conscious attention to the traffic. You ended your conscious discussion abruptly and replaced it with driving information. At that moment you can feel how driving moved from a subconscious process to a conscious process. At first you were using your cerebellum, subconscious thinking, but when the red flag went up to pay attention, there's a chance for error ahead(red tail lights), your brain pushed the driving into your conscious part of the brain. Now you can no longer carry on a conversation with your conscious brain. It's busy with the body in space processing of driving.
Here's a related video. What caused the shift in Mental Processing: Dr. Catherine Fassbender discusses 3 important regions of the brain that must be well connected to attend well. Her presentation is fascinating but long. Attention takes many parts of the brain. One of them is the part of the brain that can predict the probably of error, the Anterior Cingulater Cortex (ACC.) In the case above the ACC said, "Hey, there's red lights ahead, error might occur." The ACC then sent that message to the Pre SMA which told you to pay attention, engage the conscious brain here now. Then the Left dorso lateral prefrontal cortex, DLPF intervened to tell you which way to go in the conflict, "You better brake now." And your motor cortex put on the brakes. It took all those parts of the brain simply to attend well enough to drive safely.
As you can see, without good connectivity between various regions of the brain, even simple tasks like driving can become too difficult. If even one pathway of this process isn't well connected then you become accident prone. People with ADD/ADHD, which in the neurologist world is a mild form of Autism, do indeed have more accidents statistically.Just like in Autism, connectivity just might be the issue. Each IM task works a different part of the brain so these various parts of the brain can communicate accurately with one another - connectivity. Every task is important at some level.
