Difficulty focusing, for many of us, is a daily reality of modern life. How many times do you open your email and get sidetracked from a more important task at work, or find yourself starting to zone out while a friend is telling you a story about his day? Probably pretty often.
Scientists are starting to learn more about how the brain allocates its attentional resources — and how our attention gets away from us. New research from neuroscientists at McGill University has identified, for the first time, a network of neurons critical to our ability to control attention.
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“This suggests that we are tapping into the mechanisms responsible for the quality of the attentional focus, and might shed light into the reasons why this process fails in certain neurological diseases such as ADHD, autism and schizophrenia,” Sébastien Tremblay, a doctoral student at McGill and one of the study’s authors, said in a statement. “Being able to extract and read the neuronal code from higher-level areas of the brain could also lead to important breakthroughs in the emerging field of neural prosthetics, where people who are paralysed use their thoughts to control objects in their environment.”
The findings were recently published in the journal Neuron.
