Some people are able to concentrate no matter their surroundings, while others are easily sidetracked by the slightest thing. A new US study tells us more about the brain mechanisms that enable individuals to stay focused, despite the many distractions that surround them.
This research, published in the journal Human Nature Behavior, builds on the conclusions of a previous study, which revealed that some people are able to separately control how much they focus and how much they filter. This enables them to enhance what’s relevant and tune out distraction.
But, until now, the brain process by which these two functions work together has been relatively poorly understood.
Researchers Harrison Ritz and Amitai Shenhav from Brown University, Rhode Island, asked volunteers to perform a cognitive task while they analysed their neural activity using a functional MRI scanner. For example, participants had to determine which colour was dominant within a swirling mass of green and purple dots, which moved from left to right.
The scientists observed that the intraparietal sulcus, a region of the brain located in the parietal lobe, plays a fundamental role in the concentration process.
Ritz explained: “You can think about the intraparietal sulcus as having two knobs on a radio dial: one that adjusts focusing and one that adjusts filtering. In our study, the anterior cingulate cortex tracks what’s going on with the dots.
“When it recognises that, for instance, motion is making the task more difficult, it directs the intraparietal sulcus to adjust the filtering knob in order to reduce the sensitivity to motion.”
In other words, concentration is, above all, a question of cerebral flexibility: our brain adapts its functioning so we can concentrate on a precise thing, despite the distractions that surround us.
This explains, for example, why some people are able to hold a conversation in a noisy bar. “In the same way that we bring together more than 50 muscles to perform a physical task like using chopsticks, our study found that we can coordinate multiple different forms of attention to perform acts of mental dexterity,” Ritz continued.
The findings highlight the importance of mental coordination. “When people talk about the limitations of the mind, they often put it in terms of ‘humans just don’t have the mental capacity’, or ‘humans lack computing power’,” Ritz pointed out.
“These findings support a different perspective on why we’re not focused all the time. It’s not that our brains are too simple, but instead that our brains are really complicated, and it’s the coordination that’s hard.”
This research could provide scientists with a better understanding of certain attention-related disorders, such as attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). All too often, this neurodevelopmental disorder is still perceived as the consequence of educational failures, which greatly complicates its diagnosis and treatment.
It is estimated that ADHD affects 5.9% of young people and 2.5% of adults.