{"id":171796,"date":"2023-09-11T15:22:59","date_gmt":"2023-09-11T20:22:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2023\/09\/neuroscientists-identify-brain-mechanism-that-drives-focus"},"modified":"2023-09-11T15:22:59","modified_gmt":"2023-09-11T20:22:59","slug":"neuroscientists-identify-brain-mechanism-that-drives-focus","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2023\/09\/neuroscientists-identify-brain-mechanism-that-drives-focus","title":{"rendered":"Neuroscientists Identify Brain Mechanism that Drives Focus"},"content":{"rendered":"

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PHILADELPHIA\u2014Trying to finish your homework while the big game is on TV? \u201cVisual-movement\u201d neurons in the front of your brain can help you stay focused, according to a new study from neuroscientists in the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania.<\/p>\n

In the study, published recently in Neuron<\/em><\/a>, the scientists sought to illuminate the neural mechanism that helps the brain decide whether to focus visual attention on a rewarding task or an alluring distraction. By analyzing neuron activity in animal models as they faced this kind of attentional conflict, the researchers discovered that a pattern of coordinated activity called \u201cbeta bursts\u201d in a set of neurons in the lateral prefrontal cortex (LPFC)\u2014a section in the front of the brain responsible for motivation and rewards\u2014appears to have a major role in keeping attention task-focused, essentially by suppressing the influence of the distracting stimulus.<\/p>\n

\u201cOur research suggests that while all brains have the ability to focus on a rewarding task and filter out distractions, some are better at it than others,\u201d said senior author Bijan Pesaran PhD<\/strong><\/a>, the Robert A Groff II Professor of Neurosurgery at Penn Medicine. \u201cBy understanding how our brains process rewarding stimuli, we hope to be able to also understand failures to do so in a variety of cognitive and psychiatric disorders, including attention deficit disorder, schizophrenia, and obsessive-compulsive disorder.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

PHILADELPHIA\u2014Trying to finish your homework while the big game is on TV? \u201cVisual-movement\u201d neurons in the front of your brain can help you stay focused, according to a new study from neuroscientists in the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. In the study, published recently in Neuron, the scientists sought to illuminate [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":534,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,47],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-171796","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-biotech-medical","category-neuroscience"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/171796","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/534"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=171796"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/171796\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=171796"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=171796"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=171796"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}