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I know your brain uses selective attention to focus on certain stimuli. There have been studies that localized this selective attention ability to a certain part of the brain by looking at brain lesions in patients who lacked selective attention. I don't really know how your brain selects what to give attention to, but your current thoughts and interests probably drive your brain to focus on only what you want to or need to focus on. Thus, I don't think your brain sorts through all the information that it is given in a certain environment. I think a lot of the information may be unconsciously picked up, but the brain can quickly scan over and pick out what it will focus on and actually process.

This also suggests that there is a mechanism for inhibition in the brain since the brain is not processing all the information it receives. There are a lot of cognitive processes that require inhibition, such as being bilingual. People who speak two languages have to inhibit one language while using the other. I am debating between whether inhibition is a consciousness effort or if it happens unconciously. I guess it depends on what you are inhibiting. You could consciously inhibit certain behaviors, but you also unconsciously inhibit the external stimuli you are picking up but are not necessarily aware of. The question of what inhibition actually is in terms of brain chemical behavior remains. Does inhibition simply involve the ending of the propogation of excitatory signals or does it send separate inhibitory signal that releases chemicals that undo the work of excitatory signals, resulting in no output?