If it lives, it ignores
A while back, I was finishing an extremely challenging BJJ roll with an enthusiastic, overly athletic 22-year-old. We talked about injuries and movies as one does in most BJJ sessions, and I've mentioned Fight Club as the original blueprint for what we were doing. The guy had a blank face. No response. I asked again. Nope, nothing. Never heard of it. I urged him to watch it as soon as he could 'cause it would definitely blow his mind. He said he would, and I basked in the soon-to-be glory that would be bestowed upon me once his mind was fully and utterly blown.
A week went by, and we met again on the mats. "So??? Did you watch it?" "yeah… most of it… once it was clear they were the same guy, I kinda lost interest, I've seen a million of these."
"In an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence, a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it."
― Herbert A. Simon
habituation is the process of being desensitized, or board of environmental cues that provide little or no information, so much so that these become transparent and fade into the overall background noise for the time being; time heals all, and those pipes of information, given enough time to heal, become sensitive again.
Why do organisms need to pay less attention? It's weird, why go through all of this effort of constructing a sensor, fitting it into a massive regulatory network with upstream control and downstream interpretation to then just, sometimes, shut it completely off, relinquishing all the information it might provide.
It's all about changes, the rate, the magnitude, the deviation. It seems that organisms care more about what is different, what is new, and what is an adaptive avenue awaiting to be explored, and less about the constant fan noise or the offputting smell in the car and more about the fire alarm going off or a flicker of gold in a steady running stream.
Habituation is an ancient thing; some of the earliest eukaryotes habituate. They effectively lose interest when they do it because the rate of change is too fast to mean anything, too fast to adapt for and it is best to give it some time to calm, the hell, down. Slime molds the natural world's artists of getting people to say, "Are you seeing this shit??" have been shown to ignore a repellent (Caffeine) to get food and forget all about it after a while. The forgetting part, as any neglected child will tell you, is as important as the ignoring part.
This "forgetting" is effectively a re-activation of the sensor, after sufficient time has passed from the overstimulation that initially caused the habituation, the sensor resets factory settings with one crucial difference: next time habituation will happen faster. In essence, the cells are learning to forget. These cycles of overstimulation, blocking, resting, and resetting are the hallmark signs of habituation, and cells and, by extension, animals become better at it with training.
A bee will modulate its behavior to maintain a comfortable flux of information
Sensors tend first to be formed erroneously and only then utilized. An enzyme senses a new substrate, a cousin of its main legend, all by a mistake, a random mutation. The cells now have an underutilized superpower! It can sense something no one else is sensing; it may know something no other cell knows. If it's useful, it will stick around, becoming more sophisticated, nuanced, and relaying more and more actionable information.
Sensors develop in a context, they are primed for the environment they need to convey. Over or under-stimulation would require a dynamic shift in attention, ignoring, or hyper-sampling to maintain a good flux of information. Bees will fly faster across a lake or a desert and will slow down through dense vegetation to maintain precisely this comfortable flux. Too little is boring too much is, well, a lot. This is to say that despite what human-made sensors have taught us to believe, sensors benefit a lot from being active creatures.
Sensory independence is not intuitive, this modulation of sensing invites the presumption of top-to-bottom control where a "brain" of sorts will decide on the allocation of attention, but this is just a feature of any living thing, ignoring is prevalent. Single cells are likely to achieve this by separating the processes of repair of the cost of sensing and the actual sensing. So, if sensing something has a cost (phosphorylation, consumption of ATP, and so on), replenishing the resource will happen in a very different time scale or in a different compartment in the cell, creating this fast-to-sense slow-to-heal process.
It’s very easy to see the power of this simple modulation of sampling rate in action. Let’s imagine a simple organism living under a leaf slightly blowing in the wind. Let’s imagine his full life of sampling, a full year 10,000 times a day. The seasons change, and the sun shines bright in summer and dims away in winter, but our organism has a much simpler good; its leaf is ever shaking in the wind, it grows in spring and shrivels as water evaporates. When too much is going on due to the leaf-god frivolous nature, our organism’s sensors modulate sampling. This is enough to accurately decipher the underlying signal well, and decipher is anticipating.
The image shows a time series plot with the x-axis labeled as Time (days) and the y-axis as Light Intensity (µmol m⁻² s⁻¹). Scattered points represent noisy radiation measurements collected throughout the year, revealing significant variability. A solid black line traces the underlying seasonal trend—a sine wave pattern simulating a typical sunny day peak around 2000 µmol m⁻² s⁻¹. A red dashed line overlays the plot, depicting a smoothed version of the data obtained via a moving average filter that reduces high-frequency fluctuations. This smoothing process mimics a simple organism's habituation, where the organism essentially ignores rapid, transient changes in the environment while still tracking the overall seasonal variation.
Habituation scales up to the turtle tower, becoming more global and robust in higher animals with the culmination of the art in humans. Still, it draws heavily from these unicellular rots. Humanity's biggest tragedy is that we get used to everything. It's also our biggest asset. Unimaginable conditions become a way of life quickly, and luxury beyond imagination gets old. Fast. You'll know what I'm talking about if you've ever tried to be mindful of a water stream, taken a walk through the forest, or been shot at for days. We just get used to it, and so does everything else.
