Join Us for an Unforgettable Experience!

Date: 15th Aug 2026
Time: 2:00 PM
Location: Watsons, Indiranagar

THE COST INCLUDES FOOD & DRINKS

About the lecture

We have the remarkable ability to accurately perceive and minutely understand the world around us, thanks to the billions of neurons, and trillions of connections, in our brains. Yet, equally remarkably, we struggle to focus on more than one thing at a time. For example, it is virtually impossible for the average person to write an important email while also carrying on a meaningful conversation, although these acts involve very different sensory and response modalities. In this talk, I will take you on a voyage through this mysterious cognitive bottleneck: the "straits of attention". How does the brain decide what to pay attention to? How do lapses of attention occur in everyday settings? Is attention "hardwired" in the brain? Can we change an individual's innate ability to pay attention? Along the way, I will describe key circumstances and events that shaped this journey towards understanding attention in the brain.

About the speaker

Prof. Sridharan Devarajan is an Associate Professor at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bengaluru, where he studies how the brain transforms sensation into perception. His research spans cognitive neuroscience, attention, and human behaviour, combining brain imaging, behavioural experiments, and computational models to understand how we observe, interpret, and interact with the world around us.