By Merritt McKinney

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Sometimes anarchy is the fastest way to pay attention, US researchers report. When a person is looking for something, the brain is able to work more rapidly when it is allowed to respond freely to what the eyes see than when a person carries out a more methodical search, according to the results of a new study.

``A lot of the things you do are made up of a series of smaller acts that normally run quite automatically,'' the lead researcher, Dr. Jeremy M. Wolfe, of Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts, told Reuters Health. For instance, he explained that saying a sentence requires a number of complex steps that go unnoticed. ``If you try to think about where your tongue is going next, you may find yourself, literally, tongue-tied,'' Wolfe said.

``You can tell your attention where to go about three or four times a second,'' Wolfe said. ``In that time, left to itself, attention could have visited 20 to 40 items.''

Wolfe and his colleagues reached this conclusion after observing people perform several different tests in which they had to locate and identify particular letters of the alphabet. In one set of tests, participants focused on certain locations where they knew the correct letter would be, a set up that directed their attention to a specific spot. In another series known as the ``random anarchy'' test, the letters were located in several different places, which required a more free-wheeling search.

Observers were more than twice as fast during the random anarchy tests than during the focused searches, Wolfe's team reports in the August 17th issue of the journal Nature.

The findings do not mean that the free-form method of searching is always best, however, according to Wolfe. If you are looking for something in a small group--your favorite socks in your sock drawer, perhaps--the quickest way is probably to let your mind's natural search mechanism run its course, Wolfe said.

But if you are trying to locate something very small in a large area, such as Waldo in a ``Where's Waldo?'' book, or if the price of failure is very high, such as when military officials look for missile sites on a satellite picture, directing the mind's search is worth the extra time, he said

(From Yahoo)