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Attention Support System

05.12.2015

It is often difficult for us to concentrate - especially if it is noisy around, especially if the work is boring, especially if the messenger is buzzing on the smartphone, an unread message is hanging somewhere on the social network. From the point of view of psychology, everything seems to be clear here, but how to explain scattered attention from the point of view of neurobiology? What happens in the brain when we try to focus - and nothing happens?

Yale researchers tried to answer this question - Monica Rosenberg (Monica D. Rosenberg) and her colleagues describe the intracerebral network, which is just responsible for maintaining attention.

They discovered it, of course, using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI): 25 adult volunteers at the time of the MRI scan had to look at changing pictures and press a special button when an image of the city appeared in front of them. The city was in 90% of the pictures, the rest showed mountain views, so tracking the city streets and scenes was a relatively simple, but rather monotonous, boring task, during which it was quite easy to get distracted.

Although there are areas in the cerebral cortex that are predominantly engaged in some specific work (and one of the most characteristic examples here is the occipital cortex, where the visual analyzer is located), most of the areas of the cortex are multifunctional. And neuroscientists, in search of a mechanism for a particular higher nervous function, are now looking not so much for specific centers as for connections between centers - it is the network configuration, the strength of interactions between different parts of the cortex, that turns out to be specific for a particular task. For example, a certain zone can be switched on both when solving a mathematical equation and when composing a poem, but in the case of an equation, it will exchange information more strongly with some centers, and in the case of a poem, with others.

And now, analyzing the results of an MRI scan, the authors of the work were looking not for centers of attention, but for a network. The work of the brain of those who were engaged in sorting photos was compared with the work of an unoccupied brain - in this way it was possible to find exactly those intracerebral channels that are turned on to maintain attention. In addition, it was important to understand the general features of the "attention support system" that could be found in any brain, regardless of the personality of its owner. And indeed, as mentioned above, such a system was found: in the figure, schematically, orange and brown balls show the nodes of the attention network - they work most actively when we need a lot of concentration. On the other hand, when the brain is occupied with something that does not require so much attention, other centers in it (indicated in blue in the figure) are activated.

Most importantly, this pattern of nerve centers was indeed repeated from person to person, and that by the activity of the network it was possible to tell exactly how a person would cope with a task that required increased attention. Moreover, an analysis of MRI "photographs" of the brains of children with the so-called attention deficit hyperactivity disorder showed that their cortical centers of attention support are poorly connected. That is, according to the state of the described network, it is possible to assess whether the child (or his parents) should be worried that he will develop chronic inattention, whether problems at school should be expected in connection with this, etc.

True, in order for the obtained results to turn into a real clinical test, more clinical neuropsychiatric studies need to be carried out. And, of course, the question remains how to act on the "attention support network" in order to improve its work: with the help of medications, or with the help of transcranial brain stimulation, or in some other way.

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