This seems incredibly important for our doctors to be able to fix in stroke survivors. Everyone I know complains about not being able to concentrate on tasks due to distractions.
http://www.alphagalileo.org/ViewItem.aspx?ItemId=143385&CultureCode=en
Tübingen neuroscientists: brain uses varying strategies to prevent the notepad of working memory from being wiped clean
You know the feeling? You are trying to dial a phone number from
memory… you have to concentrate…. then someone starts shouting out other
numbers nearby. In a situation like that, your brain must ignore the
distraction as best it can so as not to lose vital information from its
working memory. A new paper published in Neuron by a team of
neurobiologists led by Professor Andreas Nieder at the University of
Tübingen gives insight into just how the brain manages this problem.
The
researchers put rhesus monkey in a similar situation. The monkeys had
to remember the number of dots in an image and reproduce the knowledge a
moment later. While they were taking in the information, a distraction
was introduced, showing a different number of dots. And even though the
monkeys were mostly able to ignore the distraction, their concentration
was disturbed and their memory performance suffered.
Measurements
of the electrical activity of nerve cells in two key areas of the brain
showed a surprising result: nerve cells in the prefrontal cortex
signaled the distraction while it was being presented, but immediately
restored the remembered information (the number of dots) once the
distraction was switched off. In contrast, nerve cells in the parietal
cortex were unimpressed by the distraction and reliably transmitted the
information about the correct number of dots.
These findings
provide important clues about the strategies and division of labor among
different parts of the brain when it comes to using the working memory.
“Different parts of the brain appear to use different strategies to
filter out distractions,” says Dr. Simon Jacob, who carried out research
in Tübingen before switching to the Psychiatric Clinic at the Charité
hospitals in Berlin. “Nerve cells in the parietal cortex simply suppress
the distraction, while nerve cells in the prefrontal cortex allow
themselves to be momentarily distracted – only to return immediately to
the truly important memory content.”
The researchers were
surprised by the two brain areas’ difference in sensitivity to
distraction. “We had assumed that the prefrontal cortex is able to
filter out all kinds of distractions, while the parietal cortex was
considered more vulnerable to disturbances,” says Professor Nieder. “We
will have to rethink that. The memory-storage tasks and the strategies
of each brain area are distributed differently from what we expected.”
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