LOSING YOUR TRAIN OF THOUGHT
In a blog post by blogger Christopher Bergland, he explored the neuroscience behind what happens when you are distracted and lose your train of thought. With his father being a nueroscientist, Bergland expressed in interest the pathways of the brain and what connections can be made between the cerebellum, midbrain, and the cerebrum. Through his research, he found a study done by researchers at the University of California San Diego that speculated that there is a structure in the brain called the subthalamic nucleus that controls the sudden stoppage of movement and disrupts normal motor functioning. What was found was that the same structure is involved when one is engaged in active thought and is then distracted by a phone, a person, a threat, or anything unexpected. To test this theory, the researchers took 20 healthy participants and 7 participants with Parkinson's Disease and monitored their brain activity via EEG. The participants were asked to remember as many letters of a string of letters as they could and then recall them when prompted. While they were holding the letters in their working memory, a single frequency tone was played in the background. In selected trials however, instead of the tone which is what they were used to, a bird song was played which caught the participants by surprise even though it was not loud or obnoxious. What the results yielded was that the subthalamic nucleus also is engaged when thought is suddenly stopped, not just movement. In greater detail, the more the subthalamic nucleus is involved, the more affected the working memory was which is what is most engaged when we are heavily concentrated on a task.
So what implications does this research have on society. Well, with this preliminary research, the doors of intrusive thought may have been opened to help find a way to control intrusive thought and flush your brain of unwanted material at will. The author of this blog also suggests that this research may help to develop new insight into ADHD and other attention related disorders.
After reading this blog post, I thought about my own life as I typically do when learning new information and attempted to apply it to my own life. In doing so, this information makes perfect sense to me. I have always been a scattered brain person that gets easily distracted by things that catch me off guard. Interestingly enough, I can text while I study and watch television as well and keep my focus most of the time unless I am watching basketball. I think I can do so because subconsciously am expecting the messages to continue to come and i habituate to the sound of the television so they are not surprising to me. However, if someone walks into my room or my phone rings and I have to carry a conversation, my attention is shot and it takes me at least 10-15 minutes to focused again. I think this research will be valuable in the near future for analyzing the neural networks of the brain and seeing what structures work with each other to help us function in memory and attention. In class today we actually spoke of memory and how it works so perhaps this information can be applied to course information even though it is new.
LINK: https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-athletes-way/201604/the-neuroscience-losing-your-focus-and-train-thought
In a blog post by blogger Christopher Bergland, he explored the neuroscience behind what happens when you are distracted and lose your train of thought. With his father being a nueroscientist, Bergland expressed in interest the pathways of the brain and what connections can be made between the cerebellum, midbrain, and the cerebrum. Through his research, he found a study done by researchers at the University of California San Diego that speculated that there is a structure in the brain called the subthalamic nucleus that controls the sudden stoppage of movement and disrupts normal motor functioning. What was found was that the same structure is involved when one is engaged in active thought and is then distracted by a phone, a person, a threat, or anything unexpected. To test this theory, the researchers took 20 healthy participants and 7 participants with Parkinson's Disease and monitored their brain activity via EEG. The participants were asked to remember as many letters of a string of letters as they could and then recall them when prompted. While they were holding the letters in their working memory, a single frequency tone was played in the background. In selected trials however, instead of the tone which is what they were used to, a bird song was played which caught the participants by surprise even though it was not loud or obnoxious. What the results yielded was that the subthalamic nucleus also is engaged when thought is suddenly stopped, not just movement. In greater detail, the more the subthalamic nucleus is involved, the more affected the working memory was which is what is most engaged when we are heavily concentrated on a task.
So what implications does this research have on society. Well, with this preliminary research, the doors of intrusive thought may have been opened to help find a way to control intrusive thought and flush your brain of unwanted material at will. The author of this blog also suggests that this research may help to develop new insight into ADHD and other attention related disorders.
After reading this blog post, I thought about my own life as I typically do when learning new information and attempted to apply it to my own life. In doing so, this information makes perfect sense to me. I have always been a scattered brain person that gets easily distracted by things that catch me off guard. Interestingly enough, I can text while I study and watch television as well and keep my focus most of the time unless I am watching basketball. I think I can do so because subconsciously am expecting the messages to continue to come and i habituate to the sound of the television so they are not surprising to me. However, if someone walks into my room or my phone rings and I have to carry a conversation, my attention is shot and it takes me at least 10-15 minutes to focused again. I think this research will be valuable in the near future for analyzing the neural networks of the brain and seeing what structures work with each other to help us function in memory and attention. In class today we actually spoke of memory and how it works so perhaps this information can be applied to course information even though it is new.
LINK: https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-athletes-way/201604/the-neuroscience-losing-your-focus-and-train-thought
Everybody has experienced a loss in concentration at some point in their lives which causes a difficulty in recalling thoughts or important information. Due to suffering from a severe attention disorder, I have an enormous amount of experience concerning being distracted by many sources, often leading to a complete loss of thought, which in turn causes a long time to recover the fluidity of the work being performed for the cognitive task. In the blog post, the writer talks about the brain structure, sub-thalamic nucleus which is involved in the control of the sudden stopping of physical movement and the disruption of normal motor functioning. The sub-thalamic nucleus was also discovered through a research study to be involved in the sudden stopping of the thought process (losing train of thought) leading to a complete disturbance of working memory that affects the completion of a task. In my experience, I consistently feel that my thought process comes to a complete halt when I am trying to complete a task such as studying, writing a paper, taking notes, and reading a textbook chapter due to being distracted by multiple thoughts rumbling around in my head, or being interrupted by background noise or other environmental stimuli.
ReplyDeleteAs someone else who considers herself to be rather scatterbrained, I found this article to be really interesting. To think that just one of many structures in the brain could make or break someone's train of thought. I think the subthalamic nucleus is one of the few structures we didn't directly talk about in class but it definitely seems like something I'd like to learn more about. After looking up a bit more about the structure, I found out that the subthalamic nucleus is a part of the basal ganglia system, which we have talked about several times in class. This is the structure responsible for motor movements, procedural learning, cognition, and even emotion. Based on what we know about the functions of the basal ganglia, it makes sense that the subthalamic nucleus would be involved when thoughts processes are started or stopped. One of the most interesting findings of this study is that the subthalalmic nucleus is involved in the starting and stopping of thought processes and that the activation of the subthalamic nucleus would influence the functioning of working memory. One of the things I like most about this course is learning about how the phenomena individuals go through in everyday life work at a physiological or neurological level.
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